[FRIAM] FW: Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc

[Steve Smith]

> Well, FWIW, posts like this help me. I'm particularly susceptible to over-simplification, especially when it comes in an optimistic package. I need all 3 of realism, pessimism, and cynicism to keep my episodic forgetting in check. In particular, here, your remembering:
>
> • the complicated calculus in trusting agencies under cronyism,
> • all the social chaos (BLM, right-wing rallies, etc.) coinciding with COVID-19, and
> • that each attempt at expression should be as authentic and error-correcting as possible
>
> I need continual (not periodic, not discrete) reminders of that last one. Thanks.

wow... "what HE said!".  

I so appreciate both of your superlative analytical/summarizing
skills.   By form Eric's rant here looks a lot more like my rants than
any I've seen before, but the concise on-point aspect of the content is
totally out of my range to generate.  And Glen's skill at finding
essences and summarizing succinctly is exemplified here!

This is not to say that others don't achieve similar heights on a
regular basis, but this just caught me as a one-two punch.  And I know
neither of you need my cheerleading.   nevertheless "go team!"
<channeling Nick?>

- Steve

>
> On 5/6/21 3:38 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:
>> Pieter, there is a good conversation to have here, but these bastards who seem committed to doing _everything_ in bad faith irritate me to the point where I spend time writing FRIAM posts instead of doing anything that will _ever_ benefit anyone or accomplish anything.  
>>
>> Yes, the mRNA platform is great, and should be a geme-changer.  Let’s pursue that topic.  I’m fully with you on that.
>>
>> And?
>>
>> Oh, human challenge trials are an “innovative technique”.  They also explicitly violate the Hippocratic oath.  Do we fail to do them for no particular reason, or has someone thought about whether the Hippocratic oath is an important consideration?  Dunno, hmmmm.  How would one decide?
>>
>> Oh, public health people admonished Americans away from buying medical masks early on.  Clearly just because those bureaucrats are so dead set against efficiency.  We haven’t had that conversation ad nauseam on this channel already?   We know why they did it; they are communicating to Americans, which is like communicating to a troupe of Tasmanian devils surrounding a roadkill.  They know their words have consequences, and they feel the weight of that responsibility.  Then, sometimes they also make mistakes.  Do we criticize to correct, or exploit to destroy?
>>
>> And, just by the bye of things not mentioned.  Let’s do a ballpark of what the best-case scenario might have been with very proactive response and people really trying to work together, like maybe some events in US society in WWII.  Instead of having spent maybe USD5Tn by the end of the trump term, with — what was it at the time — something like 450k people dead, I could imagine that with a scaled-up S. Korea like response, the economic support could have been maybe USD 1Tn to 1.5Tn to achieve a similar backstop, and maybe 100k people dead.  That would have been _really hard_ to pull off, but it is the kind of hard that good countries aspire to and sometimes achieve. And the fact that _all_ that didn’t happen is clearly to the fault of some public health people who didn’t know early how much transmission was fomites and how much respiratory droplets?  Or trying to redirect masks to hospitals?  The public health people were _against_ testing?  I believe that last claim is
>> flatly false, and overwhelmingly documented to be so.  There was nothing else going on at the time?  Hmm, can’t recall.  Or since?  Or still, even worse?  How would one tell?  And Americans have a great record of really being supportive of each other, and using great reasoning based on all the best evidence, but were just thwarted again and again by the public health officials and agencies?  
>>
>> And the vaccines were developed so rapidly, this time only because the agencies removed obstacles that they could have removed any time.  Well, for the adenovirus vaccines (a largely established technology)  there is a claim to that effect that can be made fairly.  But of course the article puts up the mRNA vaccines as evidence of how, because the agencies got out of the way (is implied), BioNTech and Moderna had vaccines in a few days.  That is deliberate BS, and I doubt the writer is such an idiot that he doesn’t know it.  (cf. the very useful article in NYT a couple of weeks ago on Kariko and a little about the history of mRNA update and expression research.)  They were done in a few days because of 30 years of work, much of it publicly funded, that was waiting in the wings, and had been postponed earlier, and only pushed through now, only because there hadn’t been a disease structure that enabled the (non-human-challenge) trial at a price the companies were willing to
>> pay.  The disinformation on that simple matter of fact has been wonderfully employed by those who will now ensure that we have an endemic, no longer just a pandemic.
>>
>> And now there is a fight on about suspending patent limits on vaccine production to open to more operators, and the companies argue that it wouldn’t make any difference because it is current capacity saturation that limits us (Jon’s DW news articles yesterday, which the Canadians say is false even now), deliberately bypassing the obvious intent of the suspension that capacity can be built by more actors in parallel, going forward from now.  The company objection is that it would not be capacity _they own_, cf my rant from yesterday.  But sure, now that the technology _exists_, clearly everyone will be fine.  I find that foreshortening of the conversation harmful, because it is again anti-empirical.  We are not distributing the technology we have well enough to evade an endemic — the needed and productive conversation is in large part WHY that is occurring, and what we want to change.  These guys will tie themselves in any knot to distract from a real version of that discussion.
>>
>> So I don’t object to all the good points you raise about mRNA vaccines and their potential.  I feel obliged to notice, however, the specific strategy by this klatch of writers, of using the techno-points to obstruct the conversation about human cooperation, which is immediately actionable, and responsible for a large part of the shortfall.  Because the empirical discussion is in large part a discussion about the restraint of POWER.  They live to prevent that discussion, and they will take us all down with them if they succeed.
>>
>> There is a thing we do, that they exploit.  If they include a few statements that aren’t false in an overall framework that is deliberately distorted, we all bend over backward to grant them standing because a few things they say overlap with the truth.  Maybe at first, a little.  But conversations have a pragmatics and it is relevant.
>>
>> So, onward…
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
>>> On May 7, 2021, at 6:02 AM, Pieter Steenekamp <pieters at randcontrols.co.za <mailto:pieters at randcontrols.co.za>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I know I run the risk of responses like "it's Pollyanna, oh sorry I mean Pieter, again", but I'll take the risk and share the link with the speculation about technological progress with mRNA vaccines that will end pandemics like covid.
>>> https://reason.com/video/2021/05/06/why-covid-19-may-be-the-last-pandemic/ <https://reason.com/video/2021/05/06/why-covid-19-may-be-the-last-pandemic/> 
>>>
>