I've been subscribing to Scientific American for a very long time. The current issue has an article titled What We Learned From AIDS (which is behind a paywall) by William Haseltine, who founded the cancer and HIV/AIDS research departments at Hahvahd Medical School and who wrote A Family Guide to Covid
Haseltine distinguishes between viruses that if you get either the virus or are immunized, your body clears it with a long lasting immunological response (polio, measles); ones that if you get it, you have it forever (HIV), and ones that if you get them, your body clears it and then forgets about them, which are viruses like the common cold.
The common cold is a coronavirus.
Will this also happen with Covid-19? The fact is that nobody knows and won't know for several years. Maybe these vaccines will work. But there is a possibility that they won't, that herd immunity[1] will be ineffective and we may be dealing with this for a very long time.
Don't touch that dial.
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[1] Trump calls it "herd mentality".
Santa, Pspsps Me Thumbs
1 hour ago
6 comments:
WTF? Trumpites already have herd mentality.
One of my rants is that it's been so long since we had a pandemic (polio, which ended in the early '50's with the Salk/Sabin vaccines and paralyzed my mother when I was one so that I grew up taking care of her) that the public doesn't really believe in contagion or pandemic. Yeah, we know about colds, but they're just a PITA, not any kind of threat.
Being a (white) American is supposed to be a life of plenty and opportunity, nothing but blue skies. Which is to say that it's heresy to suggest otherwise. But here comes pandemic and perhaps a second Great Depression and we have a public and its leadership that doesn't have the wit to come in out of the rain, that thinks a sort of Ghost Shirt belief will overwhelm any challenge with blinding righteousness. Good effing luck with that. Would it not for the collateral damage to the young, the elderly, the truly innocent, I'd say give these willful, sneering ignorants all a class action Darwin Award.
Experience is a dear school, but fools will learn at no other - Franklin
Even then, some have to repeat a grade over and over again - Me
There is one only cure for stupid, death. Rightfully so - Robert Heinlein
Good job with the Ghost Shirt analogy, Stew, too few can do it justice. Be advised in some circles some few are starting to wonder just barely out loud and not outside certain circles that maybe, knock on wood just maybe The Dance - where the white-dogs kill themselves off and the land unchained - is working. That it's about a hundred and fifty years to late for the rest of is just The Way these things play themselves out.
It's kinda looking like the vaccine will have to be like the flu shot: lasts one season and has to be updated every year.
For that to work, we'll need a functioning science infrastructure again.
Vote.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
Nah, Doug, you just scream and wave your hands (that's what orange shitgibbons do, barely qualifying as higher primates)...and everything happens magically.
When DJT started to run, I ran into a utility lineman who was all fired up and saying that DJT would make a difference and get things done.
About 10 minutes after we parted company, I realized what I should have said; the script that rolled in my mind went like this:
Me: Have you ever had a boss that was a screamer?
Him: God yes, and it was awful!
Me: Did he get things done?
Him: No, he just screamed and then we had to pick up the pieces and make it work
Me: Well, DJT is a screamer. Think about it.
COVID-19 is already 75% of the way to being a racist’s wet dream...it hits minorities harder than whites, what’s not to like, eh? I’ll be very interested in the data on the vaccine they pick, especially the composition of the testing group. Given that men are hit 50% harder than women, that suggests possible differences in immune system response, but I doubt the tests contain a properly representative number of women...or minorities for that matter. Eight of the last ten medicines whose approval was pulled in the U.S. had significantly different, and worse, side effects on women, but their testing focused on white males.
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