outbreak! (ebola, sars, coronavirus, etc)

I read something about the protein based vaccine a few weeks ago - sounded positive but also wait-and-see on the trials. It reads like the variant specific identifiers will need to be identified and the vaccine base modified for each, similar to the mRNA tweaks. But it can carry 24 different identifiers simultaneously vs. single or tri/quad as in the current flu vaccines. Like a tiny Swiss army knife of vaccine spikes.

the army news is indeed good news, it's just that it's currently in Phase 1, where they test if the vaccine is safe, so it'll be a while before they get to Phase 3 and test how well it works.

it and other developments like the GSK monoclonal antibody treatment that works against Omicron as well as COVID pills are all good news, though a lot of them will not really be available the way we need them for a while. but when they arrive, great news indeed.

Yeah it passed phase 1 ie people took it and lived to tell the tale. No idea if it works yet. L

has this already been posted?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7wz5a/people-got-sick-at-a-conspiracy-conference-theyre-sure-its-anthrax

I saw a mention of the Walter Reed vax this morning and had the same reaction as you Karl, started immediately googling and was surprised that i couldnt find much info about it. if there's anything at all to it, i'm sure we'll hear more about it soon enough. if it actually adds up to anything and however far in the future it may be, the idea of a vaccine that targets SARS-related coronaviruses in general seems like the only way off of the endless merry-go-round of new variants & new waves.

xp thats like the most Dale Gribble story I've ever heard

This is the preprint I read last month, from May: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8132231/

is the army vaccine going to be as precise as their drone strikes?

has this already been posted?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7wz5a/people-got-sick-at-a-conspiracy-conference-theyre-sure-its-anthrax

― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, December 22, 2021 7:38 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think this is the real story from that article:

While Oltmann said he was “sick, sick,” he claimed his symptoms were tempered because he was already taking the antibiotic doxycycline as a result of impaling his leg on an arrow in an accident in his brother’s garage weeks previously.

"... but then I took an arrow to the knee"

Karl, I’m with you. Sounds like great news! Hopefully it pans out.

IL and Cook County just yesterday broke the daily record for # of new cases. (clicks play on Tony! Toni! Toné! 'Feels Good' cassingle)

JUST IN: Air travel is HIGHER than pre-pandemic levels. TSA says it screened more people at airports yesterday than on the same day in 2019. 2.08 million vs 1.94 million.

— Pete Muntean (@petemuntean) December 23, 2021

Not great.

great time to be a viral pathogen

This is good

I’ve been writing a small, practical, maximally chill omicron newsletter for friends and family for a few weeks. It’s not about policy or even really data, just neighborly summaries of useful stuff.

I’m opening it up to a wider group for awhile: https://t.co/CtgERjLR6q

— Erin Kissane (@kissane) December 23, 2021

(Erin was one of the volunteers providing reliable national data about the US while trump was obstructing his own agencies)

just got two texts from people who were at small gatherings I was at (both 6 people) saying they tested positive. my brother's girlfriend just tested positive too. just in time for Christmas!! feel like more people I know have tested positive in the last month than the rest of the pandemic combined. luckily no one has gotten all that ill. I feel like a have a little cold and a little sore throat, but nothing serious. we've all tested negative but I guess I'm just gonna assume I have it

sadly that's wise, until you get definitive confirmation :(. sorry to hear that, man.

really surprised I haven't seen more of my circle reporting infection - during Delta, they popped up every other day. I think Florida right now is seeing more explosion in South FL but Central Florida has been almost all Omicron for a while.

hoping you somehow manage to avoid it and that if you do get it, it's nothing serious and you can clear it fast.

we decided to keep our pre-k daughter out of school this week because the school had multiple exposures (in other classes) over the last few weeks and if she was exposed this week, we wouldn't be able to spend the next two weekends celebrating the holidays with our families. It was tough, especially for my wife to be home all day with her, though we know we're lucky that it was even feasible for us to do that.

guess what notification we got today from our principle?

Jesus, Eric Feigl-Ding is really leaning into the doom and gloom, huh? He’s loving this.

Not “vague”—➡️We are staring at a thermonuclear-level bad pandemic 2.0 HMOG wave with #Omicron heading straight at us with BILLIONS infected in the next 3 months (@IHME_UW)—while some hand-wave it’s slightly milder—all while many choose to stay ignorant of exponential math.🔥 https://t.co/V1lz8xusGO

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) December 24, 2021

I mean, Omicron does not look good but “thermonuclear”?

DeWald is pretty bad too, she follows lunatic crank AJ Leonardi and posts shit like EF-D often, even though she also makes salient points that often get buried BECAUSE of that.

EF-D needs to be deplatformed completely.

Particularly annoyed to see people like Judd Apatow signal boosting him tonight.

even Dr Peter Hotez shares his shit sometimes which drives me nuts, as the guy gets basic science wrong fairly often

i'm trying to tag some of his peers but they get tagged in so much they'll never see it.

a lot of them also have him blocked already

*posts some guy's tweets*

Really annoyed to see ppl platforming this guy's tweets tonight.

Yep, you got me. I’m properly called out. My posting itt reaches the exact same audience as Judd Apatow’s 2.4 million followers. People just love my posts that much.

You’re an asshole.

Yeah, that last part was unnecessary, it’s just been a long week and I have zero patience for people that only pop into threads with the sole purpose of trolling or policing posts for imagined lapses in posting etiquette. As if the true problem is my post citing one of his more egregious tweets and not the guy tweeting that shit out to his nearly three quarters of a million followers. Anyway, timely reminder that this place has some posters just intent on making sure ilx stays toxic.

lol you are such a baby

Bold move; smart move. https://t.co/hasVuzWfLz

— Georgia Ladbury 🍫☕ (@GeorgiaLadbury) December 24, 2021

I don't think feigl-ding is deriving those hyper-scary numbers from any reputable models. I think he just grabbed them out of his personal nightmare and was thoughtful enough to share his out of control anxieties with the rest of us.

But it's worth glancing at the idea that, if one's projection is for more than a billion people to be ill near-simultaneously, that outcome would indeed would cause massive hardships for the ill and the well alike. It would be trauma at a scale that would test every social and economic structure we depend on. Some of those might break in ways that would be very hard to fix.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled holiday cheer.

For a given value of "ill" that would seem rather unusually debilitating vs actual reports here tho

True that. But when you speak of billions, even minor percentages of the gravely ill run into awfully big numbers.

Yes, but they are absorbed into awfully big systems!

I dont think we gain anything by failing to acknowledge that for the vast majority of vaccinated healthy people getting covid is not at this stage something that will impact health systems, which is to all intents and purposes where our macro attn should be

Solid summary here from Don McNeil:

Just like last spring, NYC’s omicron wave “may prove a harbinger for the rest of the nation,” writes Donald McNeil Jr. “What happens in New York never stays in New York.” https://t.co/bXiGivLc2n

— Dan Diamond (@ddiamond) December 27, 2021

One explanation could be that they actually don’t have Covid, they have flu or a cold or an allergy. But that seems unlikely. We’re in the middle of a huge Omicron wave. As the old medical school axiom goes: “If you hear hoofbeats, think horses first, not zebras.” (ie, the obvious explanation is the most likely one.)

gotta disagree here. many doctors reminding people that normal colds still exist, and the flu vaccine has been ineffective against this year's strains. think it's a stretch to say tests are missing the virus just because someone is sick with something and test turns up negative - and should be also noted that rapid tests less accurate than PCR.

like, yes, these people should maybe still be cautious if their negative was an antigen, but if a PCR shows up negative, I'd just assume it was one of the less scary things.

I have allergies a lot during the year, usually during this time (but this year, somehow, avoided it) - and it has similar symptoms!

The above actually reflects my experience exactly

me and my partner both started having mild cold/flu symptoms last Sunday. At that point, we showed negative on antigen tests but she had a PCR test on the Monday as she was supposed to be travelling back to England for Christmas.

By Tuesday, we were both getting positive antigen results but there's a major testing backlog here so it took until Wednesday to get her PCR result back...which was negative. Completely threw us but obviously couldn't risk going to our respective families for Christmas just in case. Neither of us have been able to book a PCR since due to the aforementioned backlog but every single antigen test we've done since then has been positive.

Again, symptoms have been very mild throughout but it seems extremely unlikely that every single antigen test - on two different people - would be showing false positives.

well definitely, in your case, I would assume positive for sure (glad to hear it has been mild!).

in the article, though, they were talking about people who were sick who were taking antigen tests and showing up negative, and the author surmising it couldn't possibly be something besides Omicron causing the illness. Like...the common cold season, where colds most frequently occur, is considered from September to April in the US, and loooooots of people get sick in December, it seems farfetched to be suggesting "antigen tests may not properly detect Omicron" because a bunch of people with symptoms that could apply to multiple illnesses don't test positive. like there are other illnesses! it seemed a weird point.

I'm sure in some (or many) cases they are false negatives, because we know antigen tests are less reliable, but they certainly aren't all false negatives.

I should have linked to info on the author of that article. He received the 2021 Pulitzer for his COVID coverage for the NY Times, was one of the first to sound the alarm about COVID-19’s severity, and has been covering infectious diseases since 1995.

although it's not "proven," it's not the author making it up, he links to others explaining why there may be an immune response before tests can detect it. no one is saying it's not possible people might test if they have a cold and get a negative result. the scientists have definitely considered that people may have colds. my bf is going through the same thing. definitely exposed, sick, has tested negative twice.

Teardown time. OKSO this is a home test for that pandemic thing that I don't want to mention. It's a Fancy one: No screen, only one button. It bluetooths to your phone. pic.twitter.com/2I1EcvZesd

— foone (@Foone) December 26, 2021

(open the thread)

That particular test sucks. I got two boxes both of which came up as recalled. Then when I checked again as I tried to figure out how to get my money back said not recalled. Then every time you use it even to just run through to get to the “this has been recalled” notice you have to watch an annoying video. I threw them in the trash.

🚮

Symptoms are starting v early w Omicron (for a number of reasons I’ve discussed)

This means that there is a chance the virus isnt yet growing in the nose when you first test

Virus may start further down. Throat swab + nasal may improve chances a swab picks up virus. https://t.co/NfxHqjKpIo

— Michael Mina (@michaelmina_lab) December 27, 2021

I have to say that the new CDC guidelines are making people quit at my husband's place of work— politicians and the wheels of capital once again sacrificing healthcare workers for the sake of mammon and "going back to normal."

Should mention, too, that every single department in his hospital is running at half the staffing they need already.

(I told him about man alive's posts the other day, and he said, "if that asshole returns, make sure you get him banned again" lmfao)

ugh, do you mean the returning to work after 7 days with a negative test?

returning to ilx after a 7 day flag post ban