outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

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.

possible does not = plausible

also note that if the lab leak story is true the jumped-from-animals story is quite possibly also true

the idea that this virus was "designed" as a bioweapon is clearly false and it's funny to see the same people who spent a year insisting that it was basically harmless now spout that line

it did seem plausible that this virus was discovered and then was studied in a lab and may have escaped from there, idk if there's any proof of that though. that article is paywalled for me.

idk if there's any proof of that though. that article is paywalled for me.

lol

possible does not = plausible

― cancel culture club (Neanderthal), Wednesday, June 16, 2021 6:24 PM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yeah that's why I wrote possible the second time. I changed my mind after reading more information.

Love you Neanderthal, but sometimes this fucking place is so lame.

The author of that FP piece, Justin Ling, was writing articles dismissing the lab leak theory as early as January 2020, so he may not be the most unbiased observer.

Read the full Foreign Policy article and while I felt like not all of the author's arguments are bulletproof, the main takeaway that it's much more likely to have come from animals/nature than a lab is pretty convincing.

After reading it and bearing that point in mind, it sucks extra hard to see Stewart doing that familiar "Has the world gone insane? How am I the only person seeing how obvious this is?" routine about it. Dennis Miller comment otm. We're truly in The Upside-down.

I agree it's more likely it didn't come via the lab in some shape or form, but rather took another pathway to Wuhan, just because that's one very specific pathway which has gotten a lot of attention, and there are many other less visible pathways. Most likely we will never know exactly where or how it started. However, I didn't find his arguments all that convincing. He seems to think that Wuhan Institute of Virology wouldn't have had any virus specimens that the international scientific community didn't know about. That seems unlikely to me.

Love too call a place 'lame' when my efforts to be clever with words fall flat.

there’s an unstated implication that it’s this huge coincidence that wuhan has a virology lab because well, wtf is wuhan, but it’s as big as new york, of course there’s a virology lab there

Well as of 2017 it was the only lab of its type in China, rated to study the most dangerous pathogens.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2017.21487

it also literally doesn't matter

Not trying to be clever. Just accurate. But keep piling on. You are clearly very confident in your take!

right o nate, just that there’s a kind of “of all places” appended to the conspiracy theories and it’s like.. wuhan is a major world metropolis. plus it’s close to where a bunch of viruses appear to have propagated earlier, so it kinda makes sense it would be there as opposed to somewhere else

Sure, I agree. There's lots of ways the virus could have gotten to Wuhan. I can also understand why some people see it as a coincidence though. If you just read that 2017 Nature article, highlighting the fact that a new lab was opening in Wuhan to study the most dangerous viruses and some scientists were worried about the possibility of lab leaks, and fast-forwarded to today, you might say, "Huh, that's a coincidence."

Take Long Covid seriously. Searing BBC documentary making the case for essential workers to be treated like soldiers damaged in the line of duty. Europe is moving forward with this, sounds like we should toohttps://t.co/4URTjriWCE

— Giles Wilkes (@Gilesyb) June 18, 2021

The idea that covid was designed as a bioweapon seems ludicrous. Weapons of war need to be aimed in some way. Covid is indiscriminate and uncontrollable and there was no way to ensure the safety of your own population or that of your allies through inoculation against it.

we are post-thinking now. pre-now, however, some would say that the idea would be to secretly innoculate your own population and then give secret covid to everyone else and watch them die. that's why bill gates is involved. he knows how to do all of it. however, now we are post-now, so no need to think

Totally agree bioweapon theory is ludicrous. However, gain of function research in which scientists genetically manipulate animal viruses to make them transmissible to humans is very real.