outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

“Methodist Hospital is forcing its employees to be human ‘guinea pigs’ as a condition for continued employment”

These 'experimental' vaccines are currently undergoing the largest human trials ever conducted, involving more than 150,000,000 human ‘guinea pigs’ just in the USA alone. All the data being collected during this mega-massive-supersized human trial replicate and substantiate the findings during the much more modest trials that preceded their conditional approvals.

What more do these fuckers want?

Interesting. FWIW the vaccine is not compulsory for NHS workers in the UK, or any other groups of workers that I know about.

there are still a lot of conservatives who believe (or at least say out loud) that they think "more research" is needed on climate change

before they're willing to admit it even exists, i mean. of course more research is always needed on it, so we can have a better idea of how we annihilated ourselves

we have over 100 years of solid, publicly-reported data that’s pretty clear on it tbh

Being a guinea pig seems pretty awesome tbf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq9ghmgqoyc

"more research" means "I don't like the conclusion", just like when libs whine about GMOs and say "more research" is needed.

Anti-GMO types heavily overlap with antivaxxers, “libs” doesn’t quite seem to describe this kind of person.

It's not that GMO is directly harmful humans in terms of ingesting GMO products. People can eat them without apparent ill effect. I just wish GMO were used for purposes other than cranking out proprietary seed stock that tolerates ever heavier applications of glyphosate (RoundUp). Even decades into the GMO adventure, this remains the single dominant use of GMO technology in food crops.

Maybe some day this won't be true and the ever-receding promise of hardier, more drought-resistant, or more nutritious crops will finally get out of the 'demonstration project' phase and improve agriculture in ways that do not simultaneously encourage treating the living soil as a sterile medium for massive petrochemical applications.

Maybe... more nutritious crops will finally get out of the 'demonstration project' phase

Is more research needed?

Aimless otm. Also, the idea that mRNA vaccines might possibly come back to bite us in ways that we/scientists didn’t anticipate doesn’t seem like a ridiculous notion to me. Didn’t stop me from taking the vaccine though.

Ideally, GMO crops would deliver the same sorts of benefits that hybridization has been delivering for millennia, such as bigger yields, better taste, better adaptation to specific climates, more drought resistance, longer life when stored, etc. So far, I'm not aware of any of these benefits having emerged in a volume capable of supplanting any important hybridized crops.

All I've seen in widespread use so far are GMO crops with resistance to a particular herbicide, so farmers can apply that herbicide more often and in greater quantity. It's petrochemical weeding. GMO is touted as a fucking agricultural miracle, the magic answer to feeding the billions.

RoundUp resistance is not the miracle I was really looking for. Is that the GMO miracle you wanted? Cuz that's the one we've got so far. Fuck whether "more research" is the answer. More results. More benefits. That seems to be what's lacking.

One thing you can do is get tomatoes to express the gene that produces capsaicin which is pretty cool

You ask for miracles Theo, I give you... spicy fucking tomatoes

Mas de 180 000 peruanos muertos por el Covid. Una tragedia nacional. Dos veces y media la cantidad de fallecidos durante el periodo de violencia 1980 - 2000.

— Jose Alejandro Godoy (@jgodoym) May 31, 2021

God's judgement for others, Hell's judgement for me

Wiles reports that he has been released from the hospital, but several family members and employees are now very sick. https://t.co/b91NEAAvZX pic.twitter.com/PFvgtFAHC8

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) June 1, 2021

To stop associating the variants with specific countries they will be called Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta,...
https://gizmodo.com/british-and-indian-variants-renamed-alpha-and-delta-und-1847006007

Result: the Greek are offended

As a Greek I am deeply offended by the appropriation of our ancient and magnificent alphabet to name coronavirus variants!
What fresh hell is this?
(By the way if you think Greek letters are easier to say you have no idea how Greeks cringe when non Greeks pronounce them!) https://t.co/N0T9jZuwbx

— Theodora (@theodora_nyc) May 31, 2021

Think the WHO erred in assigning Greek characters to the variants of interest as well.

The VOIs haven't received more than a small fraction of media coverage that the variants of concern have, and given vaccination rates in the developing world, Covid will be a global health concern for months to years to come. I fear the WHO will run out of Greek characters.

they can use Beanie Babies then

I am deeply offended

(gently lifts right hand to head and places it against forehead, palm out, while tilting head slightly backward)

It does seem like a stupid idea tbh.

It's in line with the WHO's best practices for naming new human infectious diseases from 2015.

“In recent years, several new human infectious diseases have emerged. The use of names such as ‘swine flu’ and ‘Middle East Respiratory Syndrome’ has had unintended negative impacts by stigmatizing certain communities or economic sectors,” says Dr Keiji Fukuda, Assistant Director-General for Health Security, WHO. “This may seem like a trivial issue to some, but disease names really do matter to the people who are directly affected. We’ve seen certain disease names provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade, and trigger needless slaughtering of food animals. This can have serious consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods.”

Neutral names are a good idea. And the existing scientific nomenclature was terrible for media coverage.

National Geographic: How virus variants get their confusing names—and why that’s changing

“Who wants to keep saying 501Y.V2?” Abdool Karim says. “501Y.V2 is such a mouthful to say. It’s a terrible name. You wouldn’t want to call your child 501Y.V2.”
...
“I have no doubt that the associations between COVID-19 and China and the stigma around that has been unfortunately critical to the rise in anti-Asian hate crime around the world,” he says. This is not exactly a new phenomenon. The spread of infectious disease has been a powerful force for justifying racism and xenophobia for centuries.

But there’s also a scientific argument for staying away from geographical names: Scientists point out that the names are misleading at best and totally inaccurate at worst. The truth is that scientists don’t know where the so-called South African variant actually originated. Sure, the variant was first identified in South Africa, but researchers haven’t yet found patient zero. It’s possible that South Africa was just the first country to find the variant because it was doing more genetic sequencing than other countries. Abdool Karim also says the label is misleading because the variant has spread throughout the world and is now more prevalent in places like the United States than it is in South Africa. “So you can see how crazy it is to call it the South African variant,” he says.

I wouldn't name my child "Mad Cow Disease" either

up until this year, the World Meteorological Organization would name any tropical storm/hurricane after the 21st storm of the season using the Greek Alphabet. they stopped only due to preventing confusion, as apparently people were dumb and thought Hurricane Alpha wasn't a real hurricane.

beginning this year, they're just adding more first names instead

xp: To be fair, "Monkey Pox" has charm as a nickname.

Lemme go ask my children if being named after a disease is a bad thing. Their names are Sam and Ella.

lol

Hi, Philip Perlman here, and these are my kids Donna and Rhea

Those bastards in Kent have a lot to answer for.

not Kent, alpha

Alpha Men or Men of Alpha.

“To get 70% of the planet’s population inoculated by April, the IMF calculates, would cost just $50 billion. The cumulative economic benefit by 2025, in terms of increased global output, would be $9 trillion, to say nothing of the many lives that would be saved.”

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/06/09/the-west-is-passing-up-the-opportunity-of-the-century

oh well!

If you save lives, you rob pharmaceutical companies of the ability to treat them

yes, but if they're lucky, some of the saved lives will go on to get other slow-motion death diseases that will also drain the money out of families

chin up, pharmaceuticals!

Appears that the Delta variant may have different symptoms to the traditional continuous cough etc

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-57467051

Luckily runny noses aren’t that common in hay fever season

yeah I fuckin' get those on the regular, as does my mother. yay for having to worry whether it's allergies or COVID!

"Does Nicotine protect against Covid symptoms?" researchers were paid by... (guess!)

https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1303

surely people with covid could also have hayfever. and then a runny nose looks like a “symptom”.

Terrific piece on the lab conspiracy

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-hold-up-covid-china/

Love #resistance types, libs, democrats pushing this Trump type conspiracy because China.

Right now: Jon Stewart on the Covid Lab Leak “theory” is solid laughs pic.twitter.com/WlRX35p9WK

— siskin.eth (@mns) June 15, 2021

it is definitely cool that jon stewart got dennis miller'd by covid

I was waiting for Jon to reveal he was just messing around but apparently not? wtf

I'm not as confident as Jon, but the lab leak thing has always been totally plausible.

I mean, no.

The only people who have been confident about the lab leak theory or the jumped-from-animals theory had obvious agendas, or are very credulous of people with agendas. I'm not saying the lab leak theory is true, just that it is plausible.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/06/15/lab-leak-theory-doesnt-hold-up-covid-china/

So possible, but very unlikely? That sounds about right, I guess.

Sorry, I couldn't read that article until switching to Chrome.