Shanghai Disneyland will close in effort to contain coronavirus

60 Minutes had an interesting segment last night sandwiched between an interview with Powell at the Fed and a story about the Prince music vault (both also interesting) about the defense advanced research project agency. Defense Department agency started by Eisenhower.

They looked at the blood cells of survivors of the 1918 pandemic. They still had immune cells that reacted to the 1918 influenza 100 years earlier. Our bodies are libraries of everything we have seen over our lifetimes.

They recreated the 1918 virus (from a tissue bank), infected animals with it and then cured them of it.

Talked about having engineered antibodies within 60 days from having a blood sample from a survivor that offer near immediate protection once administered. Effectively cutting off tranmission in communities before pandemics start.

Also talked about a small sensor that can be placed under the skin that monitors chemical reactions going on inside the body that can warm of symptoms before they are seen to allow for early isolation. And a blood filter that removes viruses.

Also working on a vaccine for not just Covid but the entire family of coronaviruses. Its in clinical trials now. In 5 years, we could have a vaccine for many common colds, Covid-19 and thousands of others. Doctor working on it said its not science fiction; its science fact. Could provide protection against killer viruses we haven't seen or even imagined.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/last-pandemic-science-military-60-minu...021-04-11/

The mind typically runs along quicker than I can speak, or type for that matter.

So my comment on climate change, and the tipping point, along with everyone who will be on a level playing field is quite literally the tipping point.

We are already experiencing climate change, but most if not all of it is still reversible. At some point in the future unless changes are made we will reach a tipping point. Kind of like thermal runaway. We will have crossed a threshold which will be point of no return and a cascading failure of ecosystems and environmental balances will start to happen. If this happens in a fast enough manner you might just see mass extinctions and up endings of basically everything on earth. That's when the level playing field kicks in, your social status probably won't save you any longer. :)

I've been trying to find updated information on the progress of vaccine trials for the under-12 set (my kid just turned 11), and I happened to see an article about flu death in children. There has been 1 death all season, compared to 195 last year. They also happened to have the adult numbers: 450 this year compared to 22,000 last year. That creates some really interesting context for the dip****s who insisted Covid was no big deal last year. With the mitigation protocols impacting both diseases, that's 450 deaths versus 560,000 so far. Anyone still hanging on to any comparison there is a special kind of stupid. (Also interesting, among kids, the hospitalization rates are similar between flu and Covid, with more severe symptoms on Covid, the problem being that Covid spreads more easily, so more infections means more hospitalization.)

Oh, and kids under 12 at best probably won't see the vaccines until late fall, which sucks.

Although I think I remember seeing a headline last week suggesting that Pfizer had formally requested an EUA for their vaccines in patients ages 12-16. I don’t know what trials they have run so far, but it sounds like vaccines for young people may be closer than you might expect.
In Ohio, once vaccination opened up to everyone, the State immediately started focusing on getting as many vaccines as possible into our high school and college students, with vaccination events at school and on campus. If the current theories about the present outbreak hold true, it’s got to help.

—Dave Althoff, Jr.

US calls for temporary halt on J&J vaccination over blood clot fears

I know this will become fuel for the "but what about the long term effects" people but it's 6 out of 6.8 MILLION.

I don't know. I think there is more to it than what is being shared right now. I can't see them holding the J&J back just for 6 out of 6.8M, but who knows.

Yeah. I sort of get the "do no harm" thing, but of those 6.8 million people, more than 6 would have died from Covid. I don't get why this is worth pausing the use of the vaccine.

SteveWoA said:

I don't know. I think... but who knows.

So you have opinions.

This "pause" doesn't make sense, especially if the intent is just to warn the medical community about treatment. If every American were simultaneously given this vaccine, 330 would encounter this side effect, and it's not even necessarily fatal. When you weigh that against 70k cases and 500 deaths per day, you stop? It's not logical.

But...experts.

Well, to be fair my conclusion isn’t “clealry they should resume use of the vaccine.” My conclusion / question is “What do the experts see or know that I don’t?”

I would suggest that the above humilty in the face of expertise is what’s increasingly been lacking in the public.

It just seems like un-necessary fear mongering. It is literally one in a million. There has to be more going on behind the scenes.

This really is going to fuel the anti-vaxxers.

Interesting...

Both Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca use adenoviruses to carry DNA into human cells to begin the process of generating immunity to the coronavirus.

Also interesting....

In the United States, 300,000 to 600,000 people a year develop blood clots in their lungs or in leg veins or other parts of the body, according to the C.D.C.

Based on that data, about 1,000 to 2,000 blood clots occur in the U.S. population every day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/health/blood-clots-johnson-vaccine.html

eightdotthree said:

I know this will become fuel for the "but what about the long term effects" people but it's 6 out of 6.8 MILLION.

Sliders in action!

Here's the thing: They are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

If they don't hit this pause they will be accused of hiding information. You know darn well that social media will take these six cases (and one death) and go bat **** crazy over them. Because the production and distribution of the other vaccine options is on a good pace maybe they are just being extra precautious. Did I hear something like 140 million vaccines distributed so far...and only 6.8 million are J&J?

The pause also catches everyone's attention. Doctors across the nation now are being told what to watch for and how to treat (and not treat) when this negative side effect presents. Considering there was already vaccine hesitancy in the population this doesn't seem like a bad way to handle this...in my completely uneducated opinion.

Oh, and my wife had a serious scare with blood clots a year and a half ago. It's no joke.

eightdotthree said:

Also interesting....

In the United States, 300,000 to 600,000 people a year develop blood clots in their lungs or in leg veins or other parts of the body, according to the C.D.C.

Based on that data, about 1,000 to 2,000 blood clots occur in the U.S. population every day.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/health/blood-clots-johnson-vaccine.html

But why are we ignoring the fact that this just isn't "blood clots"? It's CVST.

This is from the exact same NYT article:

"But the clotting disorder of concern in the vaccine recipients is much rarer and different from typical blood clots. In addition to clotting in the brain — called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, or CVST for short — the patients all had a notably low level of platelets, which left them prone to abnormal bleeding."

It's not just blood clots.

Pass this out to any guys out there still questioning it and I'm sure you'd get a decent percentage of them to change their tune

Pro vaccine propaganda

Geritol! Well, I remember that stuff and always saw some in..... GRANDPA!!!

I'm not ignoring it. I just found it interesting that there are that many people per day who develop blood clots — which is how we are being presented this information at surface level — without the help of a vaccine.

Well, the article says there are thousands of normal blood clots and this is much rarer. From that information we don't know what the baseline for CVST incidence is. Maybe it's 0.1 per million or 0.95 per million. Without that information, it's hard to make a judgement on how much we should care about this possibility.

I also wonder if the pause is a pro forma response because the vaccines are still under emergency authorization. Like, maybe it has nothing to do with weighing the risk vs. the benefit in the short term and everything to do with the approval process for vaccines. I'm just speculating, but I guess the general disposition of the FDA, especially with anti-vax as a general idea in addition to Covid specific anti-vax, is to make sure that no real health risk can ever be attributed to approved vaccines. The vaccine rollout is important but so is the long term confidence in the safety of vaccines for the next few decades.