Immunology
Hank |
As we are hopefully exiting the third coronavirus pandemic of the last 17 years, it is time to consider that it might become an annual event, like the flu. Since it mutates, there could also be an annual vaccine, but if flu is any indication half of people won't take it.
What if there are more passive ways of preventing transmission?
A new epidemiology paper - the good kind of epidemiology, not the kind that says bacon is as bad for your health as plutonium or that coffee strained through a cheap paper filter increases lifespan - found that smokers get less COVID-19.
The claims were…
Hank |
Imagine I mention that a small group of people not only distrust science and technology despite thorough testing by government scientists, they don’t trust it because it was tested by the government. They are willing to put everyone else at risk because they believe government is colluding with corporations and lobbyists.
Without any other insight, a New York resident might think I am talking about Florida and COVID-19 vaccines. Yet the state that not only distrusts perfectly safe science and technology, but is considering outright bans, is New York. The state is considering a ban on…
Hank |
COVID-19 is certainly worse than the SARS and MERS pandemics that occurred a few years prior, and the reasons why SARS-CoV-2 is worse than those others is open for debate, but one thing is not; pandemics, even extreme ones, are not as rare as many believe.
The big difference between pandemics now and those of prior generations is the prevalence of real-time media and worldwide connections never available before. We have no real way to know how many people the Asian Flu of the 1950s killed because there was even less transparency in China then than there is now. Likewise, the Spanish Flu may…
Hank |
We have shown diseases can be eliminated, like polio and smallpox, but can you eliminate something like COVID-19?
Coronavirus was only recognized as distinct from the common cold in the 1960s so it's impossible to know what impact it had throughout history and was just called flu or something else. COVID-19 was the third coronavirus pandemic of this century and we didn't worry about eradicating SARS and MERS, it was just important than the pandemic would stop.
Yet COVID-19 and the media attention it brought has thrown out the virology rulebook; some epidemiologists are overruling scientists…
A just completed clinical trial of K.Vita (Betashot), a dietary treatment for children and adults with severe forms of epilepsy, found it was well tolerated and reduced seizures.
The product was developed to offset the risks of the ketogenic diet, which mimics a fasting state by altering the metabolism to use body fat as the primary fuel source. Ketosis is when the body switches from carbohydrates to fat for body fuel.
It has shown some success with drug-resistant epilepsies but the restrictive high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet can cause constipation, low blood sugar, and…
The first two COVID-19 vaccines authorized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) utilized mRNA technology previously unused in FDA-approved vaccines. One of its chief proponents bounced from research job to research job for low pay because government-controlled science funding prefers guaranteed success for each round of funding rather than the hit-but-we'll-mostly-miss basic research approach of the private sector. mRNA-based vaccines provide instructions for the body to build and release foreign proteins, such as the spike protein in the case of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, but prior to…
Experts got it catastrophically wrong, according to Dominic Cummings, UK prime minister Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser. Cummings has argued that the UK government’s official scientific advice in March 2020 hugely misunderstood how the pandemic would play out, leading to a delay in locking down that cost thousands of lives.
According to Cummings, it was certain specialists with less knowledge of pandemics or medicine – such as data scientist Ben Warner, artificial intelligence researcher Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, and mathematician Tim Gowers – who gave more accurate forecasts at this…
Hank |
If you are still being paid and your job is so secure you can go on strike to demand that your employer not ask you to come into the office, you might think getting a vaccine is not only no big deal, but is a moral mandate more important than any other. You can dismiss people who are less enthusiastic(1) as vaccine deniers or something even worse for journalists and 94 percent of science academics; Republicans.
That's privilege talking. It's also untrue.
Vaccine hesitancy is overblown by media and therefore science media on Twitter. As Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, former director of the CDC, told…
Hank |
A recent report by the World Health Organisation on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 and resulting disease COVID-19 glossed over China - the country is not even mentioned until page 15 - but the rest of the world is not so easily bullied.
While WHO ignores the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the world's largest coronavirus lab, and the fact that the closest relative of this form of the virus originated 1,000 miles from Wuhan and was only brought to the urban center after 6 miners died, the rest of the world wants answers. If it turns out that the Wuhan lab was sloppy again - an employee had been…
Hank |
The latest coronavirus pandemic started in Wuhan, China. You'd barely learn that from yet another non-report courtesy of the World Health Organisation, they don't mention it until page 15. You certainly won't learn anything about how it began.
The Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response instead did what the UN is famous for; a wordy, detailed description (86 pages!) of basically nothing that we didn't already know or is irrelevant filler. Their press release does not even mention China, even though it was clear China was lying about the pandemic, they continued and still…