Dontshootrude

I'm listening to this podcast right now and I read the book. Given this is how I make a living it is really hitting home to me. CSB warning: Around 2014 Theranos sent a couple of representatives to our lab to "evaluate" their technology. They met us in one of our conference rooms, made us sign NDAs and passed around notebooks supposedly outlining their technology. We flipped through it and listened to their spiel. Afterwards we said "That all sounds great, but where is your data? I don't see anything in your presentation materials that remotely supports the claims you are making. You are welcome to come back with data, or more ideally loan us one of your machines for us to evaluate ourselves then we can talk endorsement and sales." We never heard from them again. She deserves to do real jail time.

I'm curious to give this a try too. Next time I pick up a couple of flank/flatiron/hanger steaks I'll reserve one for this and report back.

Give clarified butter a try as a comparison. That's my go to.

An interesting MMWR was published Friday looking more specifically at the efficacy at the big three vaccines against hospitalization/severe disease against Delta and stratified the results by age. TL;DR: Efficacy against severe disease for all three vaccines is holding up well for those under 75, but there is increasing evidence that those 75 and older will benefit from getting a booster. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7037e2.htm?s_cid=mm7037e2_w#T1_down

https://twitter.com/FTBVids_YT/status/1436901258116288512?s=20

https://twitter.com/FTBVids_YT/status/1436901258116288512?s=20

LMAO FSU

Thompson showing some heart there!

Jesus Christ. They don't call a targeting and now we can't even punch it in from the one.

Fuck you refs.

No question he earned it tonight.

2016 is going to be hard to top.

Well fuck

Sums it up. Move him to #1 on the depth chart.

This is the subject of multiple studies right now. Preliminary evidence out of the UK suggests that mixing and matching the different technologies (mRNA [Pfizer, Moderna], adenovirus vector [J&J, Astrazeneca], and subunit vaccines [Novavax]) might drive a better and longer lasting immune response compared to sticking with one company. This makes a lot of sense because the different technologies are going to stimulate different cell signaling pathways. For example, mRNA mechanisms are better at stimulating the B-cell driven antibody response whereas the adenovirus vector vaccines are going to do a better job at building cellular (T cell) immunity. It probably won't hurt you (we don't have large controlled trials to be sure), but I don't think you will really benefit much. Right, I'm not against boosters, but breakthrough cases are not the metric I'm looking at. The outcome of those cases is the key metric. As long as the vaccine is preventing severe disease (which it is) I don't see much reason to get a booster. And as I've outlined in prior posts there might be advantages to waiting and see how more experiments and trials play out before deciding when to get boosted and which shot to take. There is precedent for using infection outcomes rather than infections themselves in our recommended vaccine schedule. Pertussis (whooping cough) used to kill thousands of infants. In the 1930's a vaccine was developed by killing whole pertussis cells and injecting them into people. It worked well, but because of toxins normally found in the bacteria that were not affected by the inactivation, a small number of people had significant side effects after vaccination. This lead to the development of the modern day Pertussis vaccine, the acellular Pertussis vaccine (aP), which is found in the combination TDaP and DTaP vaccines. This vaccine injects a small amount of the actual protein responsible for all the horrible symptoms of whooping cough, thereby programming your immune system to essentially convert Pertussis from whooping cough into an asymptomatic bacteria that can live in your respiratory tract. Recent studies have shown that people (and monkeys) can transmit Pertussis, and might even be able to transmit it more easily than an unvaccinated person because they have no idea they are sick. This is why the Pertussis vaccine schedule is so aggressive, particularly in infants. They get shots at 2, 4, 6, 15 months, another one at age 4, and then intermittently from then on out and in pregnant women. This aggressive schedule, combined with antibiotics, are the reasons whooping cough deaths have remained incredibly low.

Good post. To add to this, you need to look at the data on a more granular level. Those that get vaccinated and die are usually older and have significantly more risk factors than their unvaccinated counterparts. This isn't happening in healthy populations. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971221006391 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X21003670?casa_token=QHZFcwIxbkoAAAAA:H-3DziM-WVQ15B8vmvnh880fhYJIndOQBVihSs1NmJKqH40oQ05asC7s6Tn6AjhF-rzqaXK2tw

You can have memory B and T cells. There hopefully will also be these things called long lived plasma cells generated after vaccination. These are B cells that hang out in your bone marrow and secret antibodies continuously. If we are still detecting antibodies in vaccinated individuals years from now that will indicate that they are present, and will be a very good sign for long term immunity post vaccination. We have encouraging preliminary data that this may be occurring.

Crush the pandemic = widespread immunity such that our healthcare system is no longer in danger of being swamped with cases and COVID becomes the next cold virus. You are right that it will be here forever, but once it isn't able to cause a significant amount of severe disease it is no longer an emergency.

In some cases. But it would convert a lot of people. Money talks. I have a buddy who owns a business that works with high risk people. He wanted his entire staff fully vaccinated for multiple reasons. There were a lot of hold outs and some very heated exchanges when he announced that he was considering making vaccination a condition of employment. He later offered everyone in the company $200 in their next paycheck after they could prove they were fully vaccinated. His entire staff was vaccinated 5 weeks later.

I don't typically frequent the cloak room, even when I was much more active in this community back when it was on the old scat board. My personal opinion is that in order to get our vaccination rates jacked up while avoiding a lot of violence we need another round of stimulus that is tied to your vaccination status. If everyone got $500+ for every household member that can prove vaccination I think you'd see a lot of hesitancy disappear overnight. We've spent so much money, what's another couple hundred billion to fully crush the pandemic and get our economy back on track?

I anticipate the vaccination rates in young kids will be remarkably low unfortunately. Check out the rates in the 12-18 age group.....it is depressing.

Ultimately the "vaccine violent" (great term!) are all going to get it and develop immunity via the high risk route. Eventually this will end, and COVID won't be a danger to our healthcare system. It is what it is. I'm not really concerned about these people on an individual level, particularly once the danger to our overall healthcare system has passed. It is a classic example of "play stupid games win stupid prizes."

Unfortunately there are plenty of other countries where people are hesitant. A couple of studies: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/2/160 https://www.mdpi.com/2076-393X/9/1/42 I largely agree with this, but it becomes an everyone problem when your healthcare system is stretched to its limit and anyone seeking care will have a harder time receiving care for all the other problems normally present. I think a good start would be to communicate quality information and avoid the perception that you are always trying to spin the audience. Too much of the messaging from the public health officials and the media has been overly negative, an attempt to boost ratings/clicks, or contained half truths. As a result a lot of credibility has been lost. There will always be a subset of the population that is not going to get it no matter what, but I do think there is a decent number of people that are genuinely confused and don't know who or what to believe. If we stopped treating people like children, presented higher quality information that would help people understand the risks of the vaccine versus the risks of getting COVID, and have recommendations that are more grounded in science, it might help bump our numbers up. Take the ivermectin debate.....there is no concrete evidence that it is working. We do have really good evidence that monoclonal antibody therapy can reduce the risk of severe disease. It would probably score more credibility points by highlighting this fact and encouraging newly diagnosed people to seek out monoclonal antibody therapy instead of ivermectin. Instead there have been a lot of people in prominent positions making fun of people with the horse dewormer argument, even going so far as to falsely report the number of people being hospitalized with negative side effects. This cannot be helping! And going back to the vaccine, imagine if you are someone who is completely uneducated on this stuff. We have a very polarized echo chamber that is just screaming at each other. One on side you have a politically driven media and public health system that is screaming GET VACCINATED, and then on social media you hear all about these horrible side effects. There has been no widespread informational campaign to explain why the side effects they see on social media are probably not caused by the vaccine, and help understand the true risks of vaccination versus getting COVID. Dr. Derek Lowe gave a great explanation on these false side effects. Unfortunately his blog has been overhauled and the link to the post isn't working. I'll quote the relevant section here: This is incredibly convincing, and yet nothing like this has been explained to the masses in any clear manner. Unfortunately, our society has become so polarized and the echo chambers so loud that our messaging will become less and less effective, but we've done nothing to help it. Bill Maher gave a great rant that captured my feelings well:

She should be stripped of her degree. That is up there for the most aggy thing I've heard in a while.

On any given day I read between 2 and 6 newly released peer reviewed COVID manuscripts in the high impact journals. I really question how many papers Fauci sits down, reads, and digests on a daily basis. I know where I work at lot of the people in middle management and higher are inundated with so many meetings and bureaucratic obligations few of them get more than a summary from staff. I see other other high level scientists publicly stating the same thing, so I know I'm not alone in questioning this. For example, the way Fauci has addressed the question of vaccinated persons spreading the disease and the lack of guidance for those who have recovered from COVID indicates there is a disconnect between him and the actual literature. The data CDC used to make the claim that vaccinated people can spread it just like an unvaccinated person was garbage, and there have been multiple studies demonstrating that it is likely a rare event. There are multiple high quality studies that demonstrate people who have recovered from COVID are well protected, and we've also known for months that in recovered individuals the second shot is likely not providing any substantial benefit. And yet, I have yet to hear any mention that spread from vaccinated individuals is likely a rare event (particularly if you are vaccinated and asymptomatic) in his interviews or in the media, nor have I seen any specific guidance for those that have recovered from infection. We might very well need a third shot. But at 8 months I think the data is very weak to go ahead and give one to healthy people. Given the slow mutating nature of this virus and the preliminary promising data on the development of long term immunity, my bet is that a boost every 5-10 years will be warranted, but it might be even longer. Right now though, the evidence for a third shot is very weak and we need to be focusing on getting people naïve to the infection vaccinated both here and abroad. I am not trying to Fauci bash. He has an impossible job. But given how divisive he has become he is likely doing more harm than good constantly giving interviews, particularly if he is giving direction and opinions without fully grasping the current literature.