[FRIAM] FW: Covid-Lancet-PART-2 (002).doc
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Sat May 8 03:47:37 EDT 2021
Pieter -
I have a LONG list of friends/family who think they had COVID as early
as December 2019. Being a Skeptic unto Cynic especially about health
matters, I suspect *most* of them of making it up for one reason or
another. None were hospitalized, several are borderline hypochondriacs,
a couple wore their (potential) COVID infection recovery as proof of
their fitness/robustness. None got COVID tests (not easily available at
the time or not yet even suspected, just in hindsight). Your
anecdotal group is probably drawn from a very different sampling than
mine! Glad they all came through.
I haven't checked lately with my Swedish colleagues, I hope they are
coming out of the woods they were wandering into with attempted low-key
herd immunity. My UK colleagues are hunkered down but report it being
semi-tragic there, my NZ friends are jeering at all of us, my AU friends
are resenting the international travel limitations their low case
numbers but low vaccine rates have lead to, and my Ukrainian friends
have a lot more to worry about right now than a slow-rolling global
pandemic (internal and external). I don't believe we have heard from
our (one?) member here from the Indian Subcontinent (Sarbajit?) and hope
that does not reflect anything dire for him. Mohammed E-B (retired
from or passive on this list) in Egypt/Sweden hasn't reported recently.
A friend expatriated to southern MX who is one who thinks she already
had it and is "sure she is immune cuz she's tough as nails" says the
incidents are low in her region. Glad to hear from Gary in Ecuador
from time to time. When in history could most of us have this kind of
spread of first hand reports so easily?
I think it is going to be a long time before we can really say "this
Pandemic is Over" though the US (and much of EU?) is acting as if it
might be for us in the next few months.
In the fullness of time...
- Steve
On 5/8/21 1:13 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> To answer above questions about Quercetin and vaccines in South Africa
>
> a) Quercetin is, to my best knowledge, not widely used in South Africa
>
> b) The lack of vaccines up to now seems to be just some South African
> botch up, I don't have the details, but the vaccines are coming
>
> Just some interesting facts. A friend of mine has three children who
> are married with children and living overseas. One in Sweden, one in
> Norway and one in Portland, USA. In December 2019 all the children and
> families visited him here in South Africa and some of them became very
> ill. The doctors could not diagnose them and they were hospitalized
> and recovered in full. My friend tells me that in hindsight, after
> details of covid emerged, he is convinced they had covid infections.
>
> On Sat, 8 May 2021 at 08:24, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com
> <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com>> wrote:
>
>
> > 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>
> <mailto: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/>
> <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/>>
> >>>
> >
>
>
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