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<p>Pieter -</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>In the fullness of time...</p>
<p>- Steve<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 5/8/21 1:13 AM, Pieter Steenekamp
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
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<div dir="ltr">To answer above questions about Quercetin and
vaccines in South Africa<br>
<br>
a) Quercetin is, to my best knowledge, not widely used in South
Africa<br>
<br>
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 <br>
<br>
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. </div>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Sat, 8 May 2021 at 08:24,
Steve Smith <<a href="mailto:sasmyth@swcp.com"
moz-do-not-send="true">sasmyth@swcp.com</a>> wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px
0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><br>
> 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:<br>
><br>
> • the complicated calculus in trusting agencies under
cronyism,<br>
> • all the social chaos (BLM, right-wing rallies, etc.)
coinciding with COVID-19, and<br>
> • that each attempt at expression should be as authentic
and error-correcting as possible<br>
><br>
> I need continual (not periodic, not discrete) reminders
of that last one. Thanks.<br>
<br>
wow... "what HE said!". <br>
<br>
I so appreciate both of your superlative
analytical/summarizing<br>
skills. By form Eric's rant here looks a lot more like my
rants than<br>
any I've seen before, but the concise on-point aspect of the
content is<br>
totally out of my range to generate. And Glen's skill at
finding<br>
essences and summarizing succinctly is exemplified here!<br>
<br>
This is not to say that others don't achieve similar heights
on a<br>
regular basis, but this just caught me as a one-two punch.
And I know<br>
neither of you need my cheerleading. nevertheless "go team!"<br>
<channeling Nick?><br>
<br>
- Steve<br>
<br>
><br>
> On 5/6/21 3:38 PM, David Eric Smith wrote:<br>
>> 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. <br>
>><br>
>> Yes, the mRNA platform is great, and should be a
geme-changer. Let’s pursue that topic. I’m fully with you on
that.<br>
>><br>
>> And?<br>
>><br>
>> 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?<br>
>><br>
>> 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?<br>
>><br>
>> 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<br>
>> 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? <br>
>><br>
>> 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<br>
>> 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.<br>
>><br>
>> 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.<br>
>><br>
>> 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.<br>
>><br>
>> 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.<br>
>><br>
>> So, onward…<br>
>><br>
>> Eric<br>
>><br>
>><br>
>><br>
>>> On May 7, 2021, at 6:02 AM, Pieter Steenekamp
<<a href="mailto:pieters@randcontrols.co.za"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">pieters@randcontrols.co.za</a>
<mailto:<a href="mailto:pieters@randcontrols.co.za"
target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">pieters@randcontrols.co.za</a>>>
wrote:<br>
>>><br>
>>> 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.<br>
>>> <a
href="https://reason.com/video/2021/05/06/why-covid-19-may-be-the-last-pandemic/"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">https://reason.com/video/2021/05/06/why-covid-19-may-be-the-last-pandemic/</a>
<<a
href="https://reason.com/video/2021/05/06/why-covid-19-may-be-the-last-pandemic/"
rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">https://reason.com/video/2021/05/06/why-covid-19-may-be-the-last-pandemic/</a>> <br>
>>><br>
><br>
<br>
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