2021-12-02

Cool

Worthy

Fear Fuels the Vaccine Wars

Perhaps it’s my age, or perhaps it’s just blind prejudice, but when I wake to the news that the Austrian government has interned an entire third of its national population as a danger to public health, a chill runs down my spine.
100 years of whatever this will be - apenwarr

there's something here that needs solving. If I'm not solving it, or part of it, or at least trying, then I'm... wasting my time. Who cares about money? This is a systemic train wreck, well underway.

We have, in Western society, managed to simultaneously botch the dreams of democracy, capitalism, social coherence, and techno-utopianism, all at once. It's embarrassing actually. I am embarrassed. You should be embarrassed.
- HN thread
Matt Blaze: Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags

The same technique that produced 90 dB attenuation in one test would produce only 50 dB the next time, with no visually obvious differences. It is extremely difficult to reliably obtain a good RF seam, at least with the kitchen-grade foil I used.
- HN thread
"Here Comes A Revolution!" - Saxo Bank Unveils Its 'Outrageous Predictions' For The Year Ahead | ZeroHedge

etc

Horseshit

celebrity gossip

Assange judge is 40-year “good friend” of minister who orchestrated his arrest
MacKenzie Scott is giving away more money, faster, than anyone has before
Wikipedia Co-Founder Jimmy Wales Was Educated in a One-Room Schoolhouse
The Gun Did It? Baldwin Denies Pulling The Trigger in Fatal “Rust” Shooting – JONATHAN TURLEY

Baldwin clearly and expressly denies ever pulling the trigger or even pointing the gun at Hutchins: “The trigger wasn’t pulled. I didn’t pull the trigger. I would never point a gun at someone and pull the trigger on them, never.”
Christian Eriksen returns to former club to begin training after cardiac arrest

COVID / VaxCult

Derek Lowe Omicron Time

That's just what's going on inside a coronavirus patient if they can't mount a full immune response. The virus and the immune system engage in a prolonged battle where neither one can land a decisive blow, and things just keep on evolving. This is why they tell you to take your full course of antibiotics when you have a bacterial infection, and why effective vaccines actually suppress variant formation: if you kill off the pathogens as quickly as possible, they don't have time to explore their mutational landscape. You need to hit them hard and fast and keep them off-balance. Because if you take it slow, you will give a viral or bacterial infection time to experiment, and you will regret it.

Perhaps Omicron's precursor (something off the 20B clade) spent the last few months evolving in another species entirely before jumping back into humans. These are both plausible, and neither can be ruled out yet.

the greater immune evasion is, of course, still not good news. Again, that does not mean that vaccine protection (or protection via prior infection) is suddenly useless, just that it may have been eroded to some degree that isn't clear yet. Just as before, you really, really need to get vaccinated, and you really, really need to get a booster if you can do that as well. That's a far better option than facing either Delta or Omicron with a naive immune system - and if the latter really is a bit better at evading the human immune response, it's even more desirable to tune that up as much as possible before you get exposed at all.
- "why effective vaccines actually suppress variant formation" is as close to saying our vaccines are NOT effective as he cares to go. I must also note the big hole in the discussion under "naive immune system" for those who've been exposed, and recovered, with or without symptoms.
The first U.S. case of the omicron variant has been reported
- Fully Vaxxed San Francisco Resident First to Test Positive for Omicron
A different kind of Covid vaccine is about ready to roll
If London Breed thinks San Francisco's mask mandate is a joke, she should say so
Texas resident charged over $4k for Covid test: “I felt deceived”
Covid 19 Vaccine Effectiveness in NY State
Where did ‘weird’ Omicron come from?
Amazon accused of grossly underreporting Covid-19 cases to US labor agency
Missouri found mask mandates work, but didn’t make findings public
College students in declining mental, physical health one year into Covid-19
Pfizer boss: Annual Covid jabs for years to come
Israel Shin Bet is using phone tracking technology to contain the Omicron virus
Omicron Update, Dec 2
Pandemic will continue to rage as long as WTO keeps bickering over vaccine rules
Trigger of rare blood clots with AstraZeneca jab found by scientists

A spokeswoman for AstraZeneca stressed that clots were more likely to occur because of a Covid infection than the vaccine, and that the complete explanation for why they occur had not yet been established.
- ChAdOx1 interacts with CAR and PF4 with implications for thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome
Germany Imposes Strict Curbs On Unvaccinated, Limits Gatherings, Will Mandate Covid Shots
- Germany announces nationwide lockdown for the unvaccinated
Dying COVID-19 Patient Recovers After Court Orders Hospital To Administer Ivermectin | ZeroHedge
Trends in cardiology consultations for suspected myocarditis after Covid vaccine

Symptoms reported after vaccination that triggered evaluation included chest pain (n = 68, 60%), shortness of breath (n = 36, 32%), palpitations (n = 41, 36%), fatigue (n = 25, 22%), and/or reduced exercise tolerability (n = 30, 27%).

In 96/113 (85%) patients, myopericarditis was ruled out on the basis of normal ECG, echocardiography, and lab values. In 17 patients, additional CMR was performed for persistent suspicion of myopericarditis. In four of them, CMR ultimately confirmed myopericarditis.
Omicron ‘astonishing to behold,’ says Hanage

We know of a case from Israel in which a person who had received three shots transmitted to another person who had received three shots. I don’t want to overstate that single data point, but the fact that we have noted that happening already is important in terms of the ability of three shots to control transmission. Three shots can still be highly protective, though. I would fall off my chair if it turned out that the vaccines’ efficacy against serious illness was seriously affected.

About all we can exclude are the extremes. We know that it’s not very mild because hospitalizations are ticking up in South Africa. We know that it’s not incredibly serious, because hospitalizations are ticking up but not incredibly fast. So, all we can exclude is the extremes, and there’s a lot of room between those extremes for the virus to spring a nasty surprise upon us.
Biden to announce changes to federal COVID-19 strategy for winter months.
Everything Tumbles After Second US Omicron Case Identified In Minnesota

Omicron "will of course be used as an argument for more stimulus ahead." Those selling stocks on this news clearly have not been paying any attention to what happened in the past year.
Scientists Studying Omicron See Rise in Covid Reinfections

Scientists in South Africa tracking the spread of the variant are seeing a rise in coronavirus reinfections in people who had recovered from Covid-19, suggesting previous infection provides less protection against the new variant.
Marcus Lamb, a Christian Broadcaster and Vaccine Skeptic, Dies of Covid
BREAKING: Fully-vaccinated LeBron James tests positive for COVID-19 | The Post Millennial
Trying to find out why some people don't get Covid-19
SARS-CoV-2 spike and its adaptable furin cleavage site
Some experts suggest Omicron variant may have evolved in an animal host

“I know that most people think that these [come from] immunocompromised individuals, and I do think that that’s plausible, but to be perfectly honest, I actually think this reverse zoonosis followed by new zoonosis seems more likely to me given just the available evidence of the really deep branch, and then the mutations themselves, because some of them are quite unusual,” Andersen told STAT.
- HN thread
  - comment (abridged quote)
  you'll see that its nearest relative is wildtype from the spring of 2020. That's pretty weird, and there are really only three ways I can think of that it could happen: + human manipulation in a lab using early wildtype samples. This seems unlikely, because what would be the point and how did they let it escape? + chronic infection in a single immunosuppressed patient. + spillover of wildtype in spring 2020 to some animal, evolution in that population for about 17 months, then spillback last month into humans. I favor 3 even though there's some evidence for 2 just because i can't quite understand how the omicron patient might have gone all that time without infecting anybody else with a proto-omicron version of the virus (which would then spread and be picked up on that chart).
  - another:
  Issues like this highlight the importance of the emerging One Health (https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/index.html) approach to tackling human, animal, and environmental health. Transdisciplinary collaboration across multiple health modalities is the only complete way to tackle large-scale health issues.
Germany’s chancellor-to-be Olaf Scholz ‘backs mandatory Covid jabs’
2nd US omicron case just traveled to NYC anime convention with 53K attendees
What were the effects of the Bangladesh mask intervention?
News release: Lab testing confirms state’s first COVID-19 case involving Omicron variant

The person with the Omicron variant is an adult male, is a resident of Hennepin County, and had been vaccinated. The person developed mild symptoms on Nov. 22 and sought COVID-19 testing on Nov. 24. The person’s symptoms have resolved.

Culture War / Re segregation / Faith Fights

Media / ShowBiz / Censorship

Those Cute Cats Online? They Help Spread Misinformation Archive link
Trump's Social Media Site Quietly Admits It's Based on Mastodon
Google voluntarily de-lists The Pirate Bay
"Quantifying social organization and political polarization in online platforms" Reddit underwent a significant polarization event around the 2016 US election

Reddit underwent a significant polarization event around the 2016 US presidential election. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, individual-level polarization is rare; the system-level shift in 2016 was disproportionately driven by the arrival of new users. Political polarization on Reddit is unrelated to previous activity on the platform and is instead temporally aligned with external events. We also observe a stark ideological asymmetry, with the sharp increase in polarization in 2016 being entirely attributable to changes in right-wing activity.
Judge blocks Texas social media censorship law
BuzzFeed is voting to go public, but much of its staff just walked out

2021-12-02

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