CR: COVID-19 --Political Talk

[ChiTownDoc 21175]

30 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

The studies I saw on the original SARS virus on a quick pubmed search showed protective levels of antibodies out to 3 years in SARS recovered patients. I didn’t see any that looked out further. 

One thing I saw about the common cold coronaviruses is that the first thing they do when they establish a beachhead in the lungs is knock out all the T cells. The T cells are the immune system’s long term memory, so if none are around when the battle with the virus is on, you can’t build long term immunity. I did read about a study on covid 19 that did find T cells activated against it, so that’s somewhat encouraging.  

People who know way more about this than I do thought it would be around 12-18 months immunity on an educated guess.  They didn't see over 2 years as very realistic - so by the time enough people get it after a couple years you'd have a hell of a time getting  herd immunity.  We really need the vaccine.  Not to say it's the only way out but it's, no doubt, the easiest...barring the virus burning itself out with mutations etc.  

[Gil Bang 26051]

 

[Gil Bang 26051]

1 hour ago, Wanker Bob said:

You can't wear a mask while working out on anything that gives a heart rate increase. That's why opening gyms was so damn stupid. I'm in relatively good shape and can fly up 4-5 flights of stairs like nothing without breathing any harder at all. When this first started I tried to go up 3 flights of stairs but kept the mask on and I thought I was going to pass out. Felt like I just ran a mile at 10000 ft and couldn't get my wind back for a bit

get tested.  You likely have it dude.

[DDD Dad 14358]

All of Athens should assemble between the hedges and French kiss each other till they win a National Championship again.

Go Gators

[staboner 4988]

1 hour ago, NAVY said:

Folks fancy themselves badasses whilst arguing on the intertrons. They get an addicting endorphin rush regardless of the stupidity of their position. The fight matters more than the the substance. 

Shaming the idiots hasn’t worked but to drive them together. Consequence is Amplified echo chambers for every imaginable type of hate. 

We have Technology driven modern day Tower of Babel. No real communication between factions... just grunting, clicks and whistles 

not sure the answer but free speech isn’t working in the current form 

yeah man, i don't know what to do.

Maybe some kind of regulation on how debates and political adds are distributed? UK has some regs with this in mind to some extent. Time based, which makes sense. Its absurd that we create a POTUS hate machine election fuckall for 2 whole years within a 4 year term. On the other end I guess just listening to people outside of your experience is one place to start. In person, with a mask on of course. 

In the positive side of the pandemic - I think everyone is getting a crash course in turning our empathy up. I can see it in my family that is "the other side". So thats good. Something has to give. It can't march on. We need a society that tries to understand we are not as divided as it seems. We are just people who eat sleep and shit and want to be safe, have opportunity, and are all afraid of the great unknown. Everything else is just a construct that doesn't mean much.

PUFF PUFF GIVE 

Ya'll be good. No nuke Friday is on the menu tonight 

 

 

Edited June 27, 2020 by staboner

[staboner 4988]

Technology Driven Tower of Babel . I think I saw them once at southby. I don't remember honestly, I was drinking at the time

 

[Message Board User 12396]

 

[Wanker Bob 379]

8 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

get tested.  You likely have it dude.

That was back in March/April when I first started wearing these masks. I learned the hard way to take it off before hitting the stairs. 

[Judge Roybeanbag 11821]

4 hours ago, StassneyHorn said:

 

Also, why southern states didn’t  push the message for bandanas instead of masks for the big bad manly men still irks me.

Because the point is below the chin, not above the head with eyeholes cut out.  

[Biff Tannen 45750]

25 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

 

Holy shit can he be president?

[Grade of D as in David 13253]

1 hour ago, ChiTownDoc said:

I love this shit.  They're going national to advertise and get dollars.  And it makes very happy to throw a nice $20 towards those efforts.  Fuck MoscowBitch.  I wish the LincolnProject went after Trump's band of shitheads too.  Get Lindsey the fuck out too. 

Mad dog PAC was doing work against Moscow Mitch and others but seems that they have pivoted a bit. 

I donated a few hundred during primary season to them.

[Sawbonz 27622]

40 minutes ago, ChiTownDoc said:

People who know way more about this than I do thought it would be around 12-18 months immunity on an educated guess.  They didn't see over 2 years as very realistic - so by the time enough people get it after a couple years you'd have a hell of a time getting  herd immunity.  We really need the vaccine.  Not to say it's the only way out but it's, no doubt, the easiest...barring the virus burning itself out with mutations etc.  

If it’s activating a T cell response you should get more than 2 years. What are they basing the 12-18 months on?

[Sawbonz 27622]

I thought we were testing too many people?

[Aqua Buddha 14625]

That means that Tulsa rally is about to blow the fuck up.

[triplehorn 2664]

25 minutes ago, Wanker Bob said:

That was back in March/April when I first started wearing these masks. I learned the hard way to take it off before hitting the stairs. 

 

Last Friday I climbed well over a vertical mile and a quarter.  Probably would have passed out and rolled down backwards wearing a mask.  At the barest minimum, do not want to get my lungs fucked up by this bug.  

Spoiler

 

 

[ChiTownDoc 21175]

5 minutes ago, Sawbonz said:

If it’s activating a T cell response you should get more than 2 years. What are they basing the 12-18 months on?

This was not a sit down convo and nothing was shared as far as studies.  The 2 were from U of C but they know their stuff and this was well over a month ago.  At the time the conversation was like a 'flu' in that it would change and come around each season.  So you'd get immunity and then there would be enough of a change that the antibodies wouldn't necessarily protect you from that next season's iteration (not a definite no). 

This is what I found since my post and it definitely looks promising and shows what you're saying: 

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/t-cells-found-covid-19-patients-bode-well-long-term-immunity

[Sawbonz 27622]

7 minutes ago, Aqua Buddha said:

That means that Tulsa rally is about to blow the fuck up.

Apparently some Arizona  sheriff who was at the Arizona rally and is big time anti mask got invited to the WH afterward, got there, and tested positive before he got to meet Trump. Fucking morons

 

Edited June 27, 2020 by Sawbonz
Dumb

[ChiTownDoc 21175]

1 minute ago, Sawbonz said:

Apparently some Tulsa sheriff who was at the Arizona rally and is big time anti mask got invited to the WH afterward, got there, and tested positive before he got to meet Trump. Fucking morons

 

Damn it, this close. 

[elfenix 34341]

1 hour ago, Message Board User said:

 

texas and florida should both know better than to go outside when you're in the eye of the storm.  but here we are.  eyewall's a bitch. 

[4th&Five 41603]

 

[Message Board User 12396]

 

[HenryJames 66189]

Bah Gawd!

[DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt 12301]

Who had “EU will ban Americans for entering Europe” in their Trump bingo?

this simulation is insane.

[Anastasis 23489]

11 hours ago, Sawbonz said:

If it’s activating a T cell response you should get more than 2 years. What are they basing the 12-18 months on?

 

More along the lines of immune response...

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/thoughts-on-antibody-persistence-and-the-pandemic

 

Thoughts on Antibody Persistence and the Pandemic

By Derek Lowe 22 June, 2020

Thoughts on Antibody Persistence and the Pandemic

By Derek Lowe 22 June, 2020

The fundamental challenge of dealing with this pandemic is uncertainty. There are just too many important things that we don’t know – and what’s more, they aren’t easy to find out, either. We’ve seen that with the waves of optimism and pessimism about various therapies, just to pick one. As everyone has been learning (if they didn’t know it before!), getting solid clinical data is not easy. The good numbers don’t come quickly and they don’t come cheaply, and data that are fast and cheap tend not to be any good.

That uncertainty extends deep into the biology of the disease. Let’s illustrate that with a look at a paper that’s come out recently that has shaken a lot of people up. It’s a valuable look at a controversial topic: people who have definitely been infected with the coronavirus, but who are asymptomatic. There are very important questions about this situation, among them how infectious such patients are and for how long, what might be different in their immune response as compared to people who become more overtly ill, and how the longer term effects on immunity might differ as well. And not least: how many such asymptomatic patients are there in general, and are they more common among some parts of the population than others? All of these questions are very important to our understanding of the pandemic and our responses to it, and none of them are as well-worked-out as we need them to be.

This group (from China) looked at 37 patients who tested positive (by RT-PCR) for coronavirus infection, but who had not displayed symptoms before testing (and continued to show none during subsequent monitoring), and compared them to the more well-studied symptomatic patients. One thing that stands out from a public health perspective is that the asymptomatic group had a much longer period of viral RNA shedding. That is not what one would have wanted to hear, since these are the people who are walking around without realizing that they’re sick at all.

But it’s also important to realize that this report, as with so many reports of viral shedding, it looking at it by detection of viral RNA. That does not mean that there is infectious virus present. (This distinction has confused a great number of reports about the persistence of the virus on surfaces as well). We still don’t know how long infected patients (symptomatic and asymptomatic) are shedding infectious virus – those are far harder data points to obtain than just detecting viral RNA. I should note that this goes for the recent reports, which were all over the media, about the possibility of spreading coronavirus through flushing toilets. Now, I think that closing the toilet lid is a pretty good precaution, because it’s an easy enough thing to do. But the spread of infectious virus through toilet aerosols has not been proven, to the best of my knowledge. You can find viral RNA in sewage, and monitoring it could be a useful public health measure in water-treatment plants. But infectious virus is something else again.

Now, when you hear of patients who are infected but are showing no symptoms, you could have a mental picture of a stronger immune response that’s keeping the virus knocked down more. But it’s clearly not that simple: this paper shows that the asymptomatic patients had a weaker antibody response that tended to disappear during the convalescent phase. That’s the result that’s gotten a lot of attention – as it should – although it’s important to not run with it too quickly. Remember, there is more than one type of immune response – you have T cells pitching in as well. That response is one of the great unanswered questions of the epidemic, from what I can see. We already have data about some of the T cell responses in symptomatic infected patients as compared to uninfected ones, and one of the most intriguing things about that earlier work was the finding that 40 to 60% of those uninfected people had CD4+ T cells that appear to already recognize the new coronavirus. The speculation is that this could be immune memory of past infections with other coronaviruses (such as the ones that can cause common-cold illnesses), and that they are cross-reacting with the current pathogen. (Update: from the comments, this work that raises the possibility that the T-cell response is from zoonotic coronavirus infections that we hadn’t appreciated). That’s very much in contrast to the antibody situation in uninfected patients – it seems clear that the human population had raised no circulating antibodies to the new coronavirus before the advent of this pathogen. Prior infection with other coronaviruses does nothing for you on the antibody side.

And that’s the missing piece from this new work. It is possible that these asymptomatic patients are showing a weak antibody response because they already had a more robust T-cell response ready to go. Now, this hypothesis could be wrong, but it has to be tested. In the same way, it’s possible that there is a percentage of the population that, because of their T-cell profile, are more likely to have only such an asymptomatic infection or perhaps to not become infected at all. That’s a very important thing to clear up, but it’s unfortunately a lot more labor-intensive to profile CD4+ and CD8+ T cells in people than it is to profile their antibody responses. This applies to the vaccines under development as well: T cell effects are an important component of vaccine efficacy, but there’s a lot that we don’t understand about how various vaccines raise such responses. There have been many reports of recovered patients who never seem to have raised much of an antibody response at all, and it’s not yet clear how they cleared the virus: was it the innate immune response that did the job before the adaptive system kicked in, particularly in younger patients? Was it the T-cell response instead? We just don’t know yet.

So my advice is not to panic, but not to be complacent, either. The complexities of the immune system mean that we have a whole range of possible situations in how this pandemic is unfolding. At the most optimistic end, it is possible that a larger percentage of the population than we realize might already be protected (to some degree) from the coronavirus. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that almost everyone is, in fact, still vulnerable and that we just haven’t seen the virus run through most of the population yet. Everyone will have seen the various population surveys with antibody testing that have suggested, in most cases, that a rather small percentage of people have been exposed. Think of the various ways you could get such a result: (1) it’s just what it looks like, and most people are unprotected because they have so far been unexposed. (2) the antibody results are what they look like – low exposure – but people’s T-cell responses mean that there are actually more people protected than we realize. (3) the antibody results are deceiving, because (as this latest paper seems to show) the antibody response fades over time, meaning that more people have been exposed than it looks like. And that means you can split that into (3a) the antibody response fades, but the T-cell response is still protective and (3b) the antibody response fades and so does the T-cell response. That last one is not a happy possibility.

You can extend this thinking to the effects of the coming vaccines. The protective effects of the antibody response versus the T-cell response are going to be important to figure out, of course. And keep in mind, the timelines that we’re seeing do not allow for time to see how quickly either of these responses might fade. So we could be in a situation where people would have to get re-vaccinated with a different agent after a few months when some of this comes into better focus. There’s no particular reason why the first workable vaccine to make it through trials should be the best long-term answer, but we also don’t know how much these things are going to vary, either.

So we need to take this new paper and its results about antibody persistence seriously, but we also need to keep our eye on the T-cell situation as well. We’re not going to know the whole picture until we know more about both of those. And in the end, we’re not going to know about the protective effects of recovery from a coronavirus infection, or the protective effects of being vaccinated against it, until enough time has passed in a large population of both cohorts. You’d want a faster, less difficult readout for those things, but I’m just not sure that there is one.

[Fudge Nuggets 19228]

11 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

That means that Tulsa rally is about to blow the fuck up.

When it spreads to a larger population than those in the arena the Dotard Campaign is going to use the infection figures as the attendance number.

See, we had 80,000 people at the rally!!!!!

[NWBuck 8588]

1 hour ago, Message Board User said:

 

To be fair, there are a lot of capitas 

[Sawbonz 27622]

1 hour ago, Anastasis said:

 

More along the lines of immune response...

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2020/06/22/thoughts-on-antibody-persistence-and-the-pandemic

 

Thoughts on Antibody Persistence and the Pandemic

By Derek Lowe 22 June, 2020

 

  Hide contents

 

Thoughts on Antibody Persistence and the Pandemic

By Derek Lowe 22 June, 2020

The fundamental challenge of dealing with this pandemic is uncertainty. There are just too many important things that we don’t know – and what’s more, they aren’t easy to find out, either. We’ve seen that with the waves of optimism and pessimism about various therapies, just to pick one. As everyone has been learning (if they didn’t know it before!), getting solid clinical data is not easy. The good numbers don’t come quickly and they don’t come cheaply, and data that are fast and cheap tend not to be any good.

That uncertainty extends deep into the biology of the disease. Let’s illustrate that with a look at a paper that’s come out recently that has shaken a lot of people up. It’s a valuable look at a controversial topic: people who have definitely been infected with the coronavirus, but who are asymptomatic. There are very important questions about this situation, among them how infectious such patients are and for how long, what might be different in their immune response as compared to people who become more overtly ill, and how the longer term effects on immunity might differ as well. And not least: how many such asymptomatic patients are there in general, and are they more common among some parts of the population than others? All of these questions are very important to our understanding of the pandemic and our responses to it, and none of them are as well-worked-out as we need them to be.

This group (from China) looked at 37 patients who tested positive (by RT-PCR) for coronavirus infection, but who had not displayed symptoms before testing (and continued to show none during subsequent monitoring), and compared them to the more well-studied symptomatic patients. One thing that stands out from a public health perspective is that the asymptomatic group had a much longer period of viral RNA shedding. That is not what one would have wanted to hear, since these are the people who are walking around without realizing that they’re sick at all.

But it’s also important to realize that this report, as with so many reports of viral shedding, it looking at it by detection of viral RNA. That does not mean that there is infectious virus present. (This distinction has confused a great number of reports about the persistence of the virus on surfaces as well). We still don’t know how long infected patients (symptomatic and asymptomatic) are shedding infectious virus – those are far harder data points to obtain than just detecting viral RNA. I should note that this goes for the recent reports, which were all over the media, about the possibility of spreading coronavirus through flushing toilets. Now, I think that closing the toilet lid is a pretty good precaution, because it’s an easy enough thing to do. But the spread of infectious virus through toilet aerosols has not been proven, to the best of my knowledge. You can find viral RNA in sewage, and monitoring it could be a useful public health measure in water-treatment plants. But infectious virus is something else again.

Now, when you hear of patients who are infected but are showing no symptoms, you could have a mental picture of a stronger immune response that’s keeping the virus knocked down more. But it’s clearly not that simple: this paper shows that the asymptomatic patients had a weaker antibody response that tended to disappear during the convalescent phase. That’s the result that’s gotten a lot of attention – as it should – although it’s important to not run with it too quickly. Remember, there is more than one type of immune response – you have T cells pitching in as well. That response is one of the great unanswered questions of the epidemic, from what I can see. We already have data about some of the T cell responses in symptomatic infected patients as compared to uninfected ones, and one of the most intriguing things about that earlier work was the finding that 40 to 60% of those uninfected people had CD4+ T cells that appear to already recognize the new coronavirus. The speculation is that this could be immune memory of past infections with other coronaviruses (such as the ones that can cause common-cold illnesses), and that they are cross-reacting with the current pathogen. (Update: from the comments, this work that raises the possibility that the T-cell response is from zoonotic coronavirus infections that we hadn’t appreciated). That’s very much in contrast to the antibody situation in uninfected patients – it seems clear that the human population had raised no circulating antibodies to the new coronavirus before the advent of this pathogen. Prior infection with other coronaviruses does nothing for you on the antibody side.

And that’s the missing piece from this new work. It is possible that these asymptomatic patients are showing a weak antibody response because they already had a more robust T-cell response ready to go. Now, this hypothesis could be wrong, but it has to be tested. In the same way, it’s possible that there is a percentage of the population that, because of their T-cell profile, are more likely to have only such an asymptomatic infection or perhaps to not become infected at all. That’s a very important thing to clear up, but it’s unfortunately a lot more labor-intensive to profile CD4+ and CD8+ T cells in people than it is to profile their antibody responses. This applies to the vaccines under development as well: T cell effects are an important component of vaccine efficacy, but there’s a lot that we don’t understand about how various vaccines raise such responses. There have been many reports of recovered patients who never seem to have raised much of an antibody response at all, and it’s not yet clear how they cleared the virus: was it the innate immune response that did the job before the adaptive system kicked in, particularly in younger patients? Was it the T-cell response instead? We just don’t know yet.

So my advice is not to panic, but not to be complacent, either. The complexities of the immune system mean that we have a whole range of possible situations in how this pandemic is unfolding. At the most optimistic end, it is possible that a larger percentage of the population than we realize might already be protected (to some degree) from the coronavirus. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that almost everyone is, in fact, still vulnerable and that we just haven’t seen the virus run through most of the population yet. Everyone will have seen the various population surveys with antibody testing that have suggested, in most cases, that a rather small percentage of people have been exposed. Think of the various ways you could get such a result: (1) it’s just what it looks like, and most people are unprotected because they have so far been unexposed. (2) the antibody results are what they look like – low exposure – but people’s T-cell responses mean that there are actually more people protected than we realize. (3) the antibody results are deceiving, because (as this latest paper seems to show) the antibody response fades over time, meaning that more people have been exposed than it looks like. And that means you can split that into (3a) the antibody response fades, but the T-cell response is still protective and (3b) the antibody response fades and so does the T-cell response. That last one is not a happy possibility.

You can extend this thinking to the effects of the coming vaccines. The protective effects of the antibody response versus the T-cell response are going to be important to figure out, of course. And keep in mind, the timelines that we’re seeing do not allow for time to see how quickly either of these responses might fade. So we could be in a situation where people would have to get re-vaccinated with a different agent after a few months when some of this comes into better focus. There’s no particular reason why the first workable vaccine to make it through trials should be the best long-term answer, but we also don’t know how much these things are going to vary, either.

So we need to take this new paper and its results about antibody persistence seriously, but we also need to keep our eye on the T-cell situation as well. We’re not going to know the whole picture until we know more about both of those. And in the end, we’re not going to know about the protective effects of recovery from a coronavirus infection, or the protective effects of being vaccinated against it, until enough time has passed in a large population of both cohorts. You’d want a faster, less difficult readout for those things, but I’m just not sure that there is one.

 

I'm just a dumb bone doctor, but memory T-cell lineages can live for decades. If the body mounts a T-cell response to the virus it should confer lasting (not necessarily lifelong, but more than 2 years) protection.   

[NameAlreadyInUse 5132]

2 hours ago, Fudge Nuggets said:

When it spreads to a larger population than those in the arena the Dotard Campaign is going to use the infection figures as the attendance number.

See, we had 80,000 people at the rally!!!!!

Actually that brings up a question. Those that went had to sign a waiver. But if I got sick because I was around one of those numbskulls and they got it at the rally, would I be able to sue the campaign?

[LTbear 4171]

14 hours ago, triplehorn said:

 

Last Friday I climbed well over a vertical mile and a quarter.  Probably would have passed out and rolled down backwards wearing a mask.  At the barest minimum, do not want to get my lungs fucked up by this bug.  

  Hide contents

 

 

Shasta? Rainier? I've climbed the former, not the latter. 

[LTbear 4171]

14 hours ago, elfenix said:

texas and florida should both know better than to go outside when you're in the eye of the storm.  but here we are.  eyewall's a bitch. 

[mchookem 16414]

in my more philosophical moments* i wonder if this isn't all work of mother nature's immune system, to rid herself of harmful agents...🤔

 

 

 

*philosophical moments might mean i'm high 

[ChiTownDoc 21175]

4 hours ago, DefinitelyNotHollywoodColt said:

Who had “EU will ban Americans for entering Europe” in their Trump bingo?

this simulation is insane.

Wife is an EU citizen so she should be good to go back a full month.  Unfortunately that means I’ll be left to my own devices.  Pray for me.  

[Francisco 2.0 32432]

Some interesting history about Jonas Salk and the development of the polio vaccine that I was not familiar with.  And as the author explained, I can easily see this happening:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-new-virus-plan-is-to-quit-even-trying-pray-for-a-vaccine-before-november?ref=home

 

Quote

Republicans have now put themselves in the position of palpably hoping and praying that a vaccine arrives by Election Day. 

The virus is now worse in this country than it’s ever been, and it’s likely to get worse still. Meanwhile the vice president is bragging that sure, infections may be up, but death rates are not, as if that’s reassuring. Donald Trump pulls back federal funding for tests, in Texas, where it’s raging, prompting a mild letter of protest even from sycophantic senators who will go down in historical shame for their complicity in Trump’s madness. Larry “Crazy Eddie” Kudlow keeps just saying shit, arrogant enough to think that if he says it, then surely it has to come true.

 

Quote

They’ve given up. They’ve run up the white flag. The position is: The hell with it, people are going to get sick, some are going to die, with any luck not enough to cause a scandal, but we’re not shutting anything down again, and if people want to go to the movies and football games this fall, well, they’ll just have to roll the dice and man up, it’s on them, not us, cuz this is America, and we didn’t steal all that Indian land and conquer the world by being a bunch of stay-at-home ninnies, and in the meantime we’ll just hope that the scientists—you know, the people we constantly denounce because they talk about, you know, science—discover a vaccine. Ideally on about October 8 or so, in which case Republicans and Fox News will be carrying on as if Trump had donned a lab coat and developed it himself (“I know more than the scientists”).

 

Quote

It’s a moral scandal of immense proportion, and so surreal that Buñuel couldn’t even make a film about these people, since the reality of what they say and do on a weekly basis is so much more bizarre than any fiction. But it can get worse. With these people, it can always get worse.

Here, I have a little historical story I ran across a few weeks ago that I’d like to share with you. It’s quite illuminating as to our current predicament, and it has the advantage of carrying with it not one but two morals.

 

Spoiler

It was the spring of 1954. Polio had been afflicting millions of children in America and around the world for generations. Cases surged in 1952 just as Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh was beginning to make some important breakthroughs. That same year, he developed a promising vaccine, and he and his laboratory began injecting some children with it. In 1953, he injected his own children. By early 1954, massive trials were undertaken.

At the time, Walter Winchell was the most famous journalist in America. He had a newspaper column, syndicated everywhere, and a radio show that was more popular than Jack Benny’s. Once an ardent New Dealer, he was, by the 1950s, a conservative, or indeed a reactionary crank. He was a feral supporter of Joseph McCarthy. He was friends with Roy Cohn, mentor of you-know-you. He launched a vicious attack on Josephine Baker, who’d said once that she wasn’t allowed into the Stork Club—the swank East Side spot where Winchell held court and never picked up a check—because she was Black. Ed Sullivan, God bless him, the same Ed Sullivan who a decade later would happily risk offending Southern CBS affiliates’ racist sensibilities by taking Diana Ross’ hand, said, “I despise Walter Winchell because he symbolizes to me evil and treacherous things in the American setup.”

Salk’s vaccine used dead viruses to build up immunity to the disease. It was produced in different batches and tested on groups of children and animals. Apparently, some months before, some tests produced for upcoming trials had shown evidence of containing a live virus. Further tests on monkeys showed spinal lesions that were a possible sign of polio, according to David Oshinsky, a historian at New York University and author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning Polio: An American Story. 

And so it came to pass that on the night of April 4, 1954, Winchell opened his radio show with his customary salutation, followed by a broadside that must have sent a terrifying chill through his audience: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea. Attention everyone. In a few moments I will report on a new polio vaccine claimed to be a polio cure. It may be a killer.”

He went on to say that in one test, the vaccine had killed several monkeys. Switchboards across the country lit up. Salk was on the defensive.

He answered back immediately, visiting the newsroom of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the very night of the broadcast. All vaccines dispensed to children, he argued, had been triple-tested—by his own laboratory at Pitt, by the manufacturers, and by the National Institutes of Health. I have even, he said, given this vaccine to my own children. Others in the scientific community backed up Salk. The furor settled, and the next year, the vaccine became widely available. Salk became one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century, for developing the vaccine and especially for refusing to take a patent for it, and Winchell is recalled as one of the century’s leading dirtbags.

Moral one: If Fox News had existed in 1954, we might never have had a polio vaccine, or at least it might have been delayed for a few years. As it was at the time, Winchell, though he commanded a huge stage, was not part of a larger right-wing fake news ecosystem that created its own “reality.” 

Luckily, in the America of 1954, the mainstream media and the scientific community were able to push back successfully against Winchell, who had been fed his information by a doctor who’d been fired years before by the March of Dimes and had an obvious axe to grind. The information—shocker here—turned out to be false. “The monkeys did not die,” Oshinsky told me via email. “They did not have polio, and the vaccine used for the trials was perfectly safe.” Huh. He used dubious information to whip up public paranoia. Sound like anybody you know? 

Winchell was outgunned. But if there had been a Fox News and dozens of talk-radio hosts and all these wingnut websites that we have today, who knows how long the war on Salk would have lasted? 

Moral two, and far less hypothetical: Let us suppose that next year, Joe Biden is the president of the United States, and a vaccine is developed. And suppose, as seems somewhere between likely and inevitable, there’s a glitch in the trials. What Fox et al. will do will make Winchell look like an undergrad at a debating society. They’ll move heaven and earth to do exactly what Winchell tried to do, but times ten. They will hammer away at and inflate every little problem. They will in other words prefer that people die in order to deny Joe Biden any kind of bank-shot credit for anything. 

Oh, come on yourself. Don’t be naive. Of course they will.

As Trump and team quit even trying on the virus, his defenders will become even more insistent that the emperor is wearing clothes and the plague is contained. No real-world fact is more important than crushing science and the libs. And as the Winchell-Salk episode shows us, it didn’t start with Trump.

 

[RomaVicta 30033]

I appreciate the medical professionals and intelligent lay persons sorting the information looking for correct conclusions. I read some of it, but abandon much of it because I'm not a scientist.

Then I get angry again that we're being left to sort through this for ourselves due to horrifically bad and malign government.

We should all be planting victory gardens instead of wondering which seeds are safe. Or loading the seeds into shotguns and firing them at each other.

 

[Message Board User 12396]

 

[triplehorn 2664]

2 hours ago, LTbear said:

Shasta? Rainier? I've climbed the former, not the latter. 

Adams south climb.  that's Hood with Jefferson over the shoulder

[LTbear 4171]

32 minutes ago, triplehorn said:

Adams south climb.  that's Hood with Jefferson over the shoulder

Nice work!

[Brisketexan 105457]

Oh, motherfucker.....this is getting funny.  Your local GOP leadership at work (image below shared with me by a friend).

 

 

 

This.....is fucking funny.  I guess we need to BUILD THE WALL a coupla miles high now?  Is there fucking anything the GOP WON'T blame on dirty brown people?  The mental gymnastics to justify their fucking xenophobia, paired perfectly with their steadfast refusal to take ANY responsibility (seriously, GOP xenophobia and responsibility avoidance go together like peas and carrots)......it's awe-inspiring to watch.  I mean..."he saw something" -- pretty solid sourcing, there.  And apparently, the GOP has now determined that not only is the virus airborne....it's WIND-borne.....over hundreds of fucking miles [Brisket checks map for distance between Mexico and Dallas, for example]....yep.  Hundreds of miles.  How fucking stupid can you be?  Try "all the stupid."

These are the dumbest, most irresponsible, hateful bunch of oozing fuckholes in American history, and they are fucking PROUD of it.

Edited June 27, 2020 by Brisketexan

[conVINCEd 21472]

10 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Oh, motherfucker.....this is getting funny.  Your local GOP leadership at work (image below shared with me by a friend).

 

 

 

This.....is fucking funny.  I guess we need to BUILD THE WALL a coupla miles high now?  Is there fucking anything the GOP WON'T blame on dirty brown people?  The mental gymnastics to justify their fucking xenophobia, paired perfectly with their steadfast refusal to take ANY responsibility (seriously, GOP xenophobia and responsibility avoidance go together like peas and carrots)......it's awe-inspiring to watch.  I mean..."he saw something" -- pretty solid sourcing, there.  And apparently, the GOP has now determined that not only is the virus airborne....it's WIND-borne.....over hundreds of fucking miles [Brisket checks map for distance between Mexico and Dallas, for example]....yep.  Hundreds of miles.  How fucking stupid can you be?  Try "all the stupid."

These are the dumbest, most irresponsible, hateful bunch of oozing fuckholes in American history, and they are fucking PROUD of it.

Matt used to be a pretty likable guy.

[Aqua Buddha 14625]

2 hours ago, Message Board User said:

 

They’re posting 10K per day now and we’re still a month out from the peak?  Jeez.

[LTbear 4171]

30 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Oh, motherfucker.....this is getting funny.  Your local GOP leadership at work (image below shared with me by a friend).

 

 

 

This.....is fucking funny.  I guess we need to BUILD THE WALL a coupla miles high now?  Is there fucking anything the GOP WON'T blame on dirty brown people?  The mental gymnastics to justify their fucking xenophobia, paired perfectly with their steadfast refusal to take ANY responsibility (seriously, GOP xenophobia and responsibility avoidance go together like peas and carrots)......it's awe-inspiring to watch.  I mean..."he saw something" -- pretty solid sourcing, there.  And apparently, the GOP has now determined that not only is the virus airborne....it's WIND-borne.....over hundreds of fucking miles [Brisket checks map for distance between Mexico and Dallas, for example]....yep.  Hundreds of miles.  How fucking stupid can you be?  Try "all the stupid."

These are the dumbest, most irresponsible, hateful bunch of oozing fuckholes in American history, and they are fucking PROUD of it.

Holy fuck...

[jimmyjazz 46259]

Let's try a little logic here:  breezy day, 10+ thousand protesters in close proximity, admittedly with plenty wearing masks, but whatever virus exists in the air is certainly concentrated, and doesn't even spread locally.

Pan to:  cities 100s of miles from Mexico are probably getting doused with high viral load from dirty Messicans.

[Brisketexan 105457]

Matt used to be a pretty likable guy.

It’s actually one of the saddest descents I’ve ever seen. I mean, setting aside addicts who’ve destroyed their lives, the relative ease with which he has slipped into flat-out wickedness and relentless lies is eye-opening.

[Gap03 3340]

3 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Let's try a little logic here ...

You lost them here ...

[conVINCEd 21472]

39 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

It’s actually one of the saddest descents I’ve ever seen. I mean, setting aside addicts who’ve destroyed their lives, the relative ease with which he has slipped into flat-out wickedness and relentless lies is eye-opening.

I wish I saved the last text exchange we had when I asked him quit sending me his little email newsletter thing he was doing for a while, which I signed up for pre-2016 solely to help out a friend who was trying to get his numbers up.

[4th&Five 41603]

 

[JimmyJames 12271]

22 hours ago, Message Board User said:

JFC.  He mad.

 

I thought we were supposed to shoot mad dogs? No?

[JimmyJames 12271]

5 hours ago, Francisco 2.0 said:

Some interesting history about Jonas Salk and the development of the polio vaccine that I was not familiar with.  And as the author explained, I can easily see this happening:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-new-virus-plan-is-to-quit-even-trying-pray-for-a-vaccine-before-november?ref=home

 

 

 

 

  Hide contents

It was the spring of 1954. Polio had been afflicting millions of children in America and around the world for generations. Cases surged in 1952 just as Jonas Salk of the University of Pittsburgh was beginning to make some important breakthroughs. That same year, he developed a promising vaccine, and he and his laboratory began injecting some children with it. In 1953, he injected his own children. By early 1954, massive trials were undertaken.

At the time, Walter Winchell was the most famous journalist in America. He had a newspaper column, syndicated everywhere, and a radio show that was more popular than Jack Benny’s. Once an ardent New Dealer, he was, by the 1950s, a conservative, or indeed a reactionary crank. He was a feral supporter of Joseph McCarthy. He was friends with Roy Cohn, mentor of you-know-you. He launched a vicious attack on Josephine Baker, who’d said once that she wasn’t allowed into the Stork Club—the swank East Side spot where Winchell held court and never picked up a check—because she was Black. Ed Sullivan, God bless him, the same Ed Sullivan who a decade later would happily risk offending Southern CBS affiliates’ racist sensibilities by taking Diana Ross’ hand, said, “I despise Walter Winchell because he symbolizes to me evil and treacherous things in the American setup.”

Salk’s vaccine used dead viruses to build up immunity to the disease. It was produced in different batches and tested on groups of children and animals. Apparently, some months before, some tests produced for upcoming trials had shown evidence of containing a live virus. Further tests on monkeys showed spinal lesions that were a possible sign of polio, according to David Oshinsky, a historian at New York University and author of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning Polio: An American Story. 

And so it came to pass that on the night of April 4, 1954, Winchell opened his radio show with his customary salutation, followed by a broadside that must have sent a terrifying chill through his audience: “Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, and all the ships at sea. Attention everyone. In a few moments I will report on a new polio vaccine claimed to be a polio cure. It may be a killer.”

He went on to say that in one test, the vaccine had killed several monkeys. Switchboards across the country lit up. Salk was on the defensive.

He answered back immediately, visiting the newsroom of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on the very night of the broadcast. All vaccines dispensed to children, he argued, had been triple-tested—by his own laboratory at Pitt, by the manufacturers, and by the National Institutes of Health. I have even, he said, given this vaccine to my own children. Others in the scientific community backed up Salk. The furor settled, and the next year, the vaccine became widely available. Salk became one of the greatest Americans of the 20th century, for developing the vaccine and especially for refusing to take a patent for it, and Winchell is recalled as one of the century’s leading dirtbags.

Moral one: If Fox News had existed in 1954, we might never have had a polio vaccine, or at least it might have been delayed for a few years. As it was at the time, Winchell, though he commanded a huge stage, was not part of a larger right-wing fake news ecosystem that created its own “reality.” 

Luckily, in the America of 1954, the mainstream media and the scientific community were able to push back successfully against Winchell, who had been fed his information by a doctor who’d been fired years before by the March of Dimes and had an obvious axe to grind. The information—shocker here—turned out to be false. “The monkeys did not die,” Oshinsky told me via email. “They did not have polio, and the vaccine used for the trials was perfectly safe.” Huh. He used dubious information to whip up public paranoia. Sound like anybody you know? 

Winchell was outgunned. But if there had been a Fox News and dozens of talk-radio hosts and all these wingnut websites that we have today, who knows how long the war on Salk would have lasted? 

Moral two, and far less hypothetical: Let us suppose that next year, Joe Biden is the president of the United States, and a vaccine is developed. And suppose, as seems somewhere between likely and inevitable, there’s a glitch in the trials. What Fox et al. will do will make Winchell look like an undergrad at a debating society. They’ll move heaven and earth to do exactly what Winchell tried to do, but times ten. They will hammer away at and inflate every little problem. They will in other words prefer that people die in order to deny Joe Biden any kind of bank-shot credit for anything. 

Oh, come on yourself. Don’t be naive. Of course they will.

As Trump and team quit even trying on the virus, his defenders will become even more insistent that the emperor is wearing clothes and the plague is contained. No real-world fact is more important than crushing science and the libs. And as the Winchell-Salk episode shows us, it didn’t start with Trump.

 

When Biden becomes president the first order of business should be to shut down Fox News and arrest every single person who works for them. From the heads on down to the interns. And if Australia refuses to extradite Rupert we should threaten to nuke them if they don’t. 

I am not joking. Profiting off of killing people is still an accessory to murder. 

Edited June 27, 2020 by JimmyJames

[GreenspointTexas 9686]

2 hours ago, Aqua Buddha said:

They’re posting 10K per day now and we’re still a month out from the peak?  Jeez.

This

[conVINCEd 21472]

54 minutes ago, JimmyJames said:

I thought we were supposed to shoot mad dogs? No?

Are you a cop?