What's most concerning IMHO is that this appears to be from community spread with no known recent travel history (polio apparently incubates in 7-21 days so they would have caught it in the last few weeks).
Even more troubling is that they were paralyzed which means they were one of the less than 1% of polio cases that turn into a severe event like being paralyzed. The vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or just give you diarrhea.
How many people could be out in the community and spreading it without anyone knowing?
Some of the most intelligent, knowledgeable, respected-in-their-field distant family members of mine are like that. I've spent decade trying to figure it out, because selfishly it's terrifying and I don't want it happening to me.
One thing that seems to be common and is my working hypothesis, is that they're so smart and so respected in their field (or, in subset of cases, arrogant), that they simply trust themselves more than anybody else. There is nobody in their family and friends who can truly "slap some sense into them"; provide perspective, course-correct, nudge into objective reality or mainstream story, whatever we call it. I've actually asked a couple of them point blank - and they admitted, nope, there's nobody that they trust more than themselves. Couple of them even said - if you don't have trust and faith in yourself, you're weak.
So I'm hoping I'm somewhat inoculated against going off the deep end by having at least 3 people in my life (wife, sister, and one good friend) who can, and have, slapped some sense into me when I was going off the rails.
I was reading a book on cognitive biases recently and the part that really stuck for me was: The smarter you are, the more likely you are to fall prey to the Narrative Bias/Fallacy.
Super smart people are so good at constructing plausible narratives that they can convince themselves of almost anything. You have to actively look for ways to disprove your own narratives. This is hard because they sound so plausible.
So smart people don't know when they're wrong because they're smart enough to convince themselves that they're right, and dumb people don't know when they're wrong, because they're too dumb to see how dumb they're being. We can't win.
Yes, I think the lesson to take away is that you want not only to be smart, but also wise and humble. Wise enough to realize you need to poke holes in your ideas, humble enough to fix your hypothesis when facts change.
>wise and humble...you need to poke holes in your ideas...
But where does critical thinking come in? Seens there should be a heuristic or generalized approach for deciding what to believe. Epistemology, I suppose.
And this should all preface the formation of our ideas in the first place.
I'd argue that there is no nobody you should trust more than yourself. This does not mean disregarding expertise or imagining that you know, or can know, everything. But the moment that you grant final primacy over your own thoughts to somebody other than yourself is the moment that that person can make you believe, and consequently act, in nearly any way. And, at scale, that's quite a disconcerting thought.
When people trust themselves above all it means we'll never have a utopia because we all can't help but believing some pretty stupid stuff at times. But at the same time we'll never have an absolute dystopia, because the diversity of thought ensures we'll never all fall off the deep end, or be pushed off it, together.
It's not binary; it's not like I'm promoting being in a cult and surrendering your rights to thoughts and opinions :->
On a daily and regular basis, I trust myself, my thought process, experience, rationale, etc. I spent decades consciously honing my analytical and logical skills and I will spend lifetime continuing to do so. And it serves me well.
But, I believe, there needs to be a "safety valve". A "who watches the watchmen", somebody to provide a sanity check on your own rationale and story and narrative and thought process, which left alone can take you from first principle to lala-land, one seemingly logical step at the time, over years if needed. There needs to be an external influence/person who can, if situation calls for it, help you see things from an external yet trustworthy perspective, when your internal narrative, the "personal story of your life", starts strongly diverging from objective consensus reality.
(on a deeply personal note, I'll freely admit my sister did that for me ~15 years ago - after for a year or so I spun an increasingly personal internal narrative about something in my life, with a short but incisive comment, she momentarily enabled me to see myself through her eyes, and not love what I saw, and get that instant split-vision of my narrative and external narrative of what and why and how and whence I am where and how I am. Anybody else, I would've discarded or been defensive or otherwise ignored it. And I see many people around who desperately need a "grounding" or "reality check" or "slapping sense into" or "righting the boat" or whatever we choose to call it, but don't have anybody that can reach them. )
This is kinda a weird take to me, because I don't see "trust someone else more than yourself" as equivalent to "grant final primacy over your own thoughts to someone else".
I trust myself very little when it comes to many topics, because I have next to zero expertise in them, and I know that "common sense" often does not lead us to good decisions on topics where we have little understanding. That doesn't mean I'm going to outsource decision-making to others who are experts on those topics, but I am probably going to most often do what they say, after applying their information to my own situation and determining what seems reasonable and doable.
As an example, I will most likely get the Omicron-tuned COVID vaccine when it becomes available, assuming the relevant experts I trust say that it's a good idea. I have no idea if I really need it, but the non-zero threat of long COVID, coupled with the fact that we still know fairly little about the long-term effects of having contracted COVID, means I would rather face the very low risk of vaccine complications than increase my risk of getting COVID, with the attendant risk of it being something that causes lingering health problems for some significant part of my life. I won't be outsourcing my decision-making to a third party, but I recognize that I do not trust my expertise in this field (since I do not have any), and will allow those with expertise to heavily inform my decision.
You shouldn't need someone you trust more than yourself to slap sense into you. You should view someone whom you trust strongly (but less strongly than your own thoughts) arguing hard as an indicator, even if you disagree with them. You should be able to ask "Why do we disagree", and trace that back to (hopefully) some simple but core value difference, like "I like hotdogs and they like hamburgers".
Your trust in someone also doesn't need to apply equally on all topics. I'm much likelier to trust a virologist over myself about virology than about the best way to cook pasta.
I've had discussion with a guy in lab of a top university and they believed 911 was an inside job. steel beams and all that.
It doesn't seem to correlate to technical ability, there are something in psychology that draws a certain type of people towards conspiracy and in which they go into a mental state where normal explanations are removed from their logic and they go seek outlandish explanations or slightly hard to explain things and turn a twist into it. I don't understand why but I think a pretty decent amount of people subscribe to this kind of thinking.
Neurology researchers here, please give us answers.
> they believed 911 was an inside job. steel beams and all that.
911 is definietly a conspiracy. A bunch of telecom engineers acting in unison with dispatchers and first responders. There is no other explanation how else police/emt/fire brigade shows up when you dial that number and tell them about an emergency. But what it has to do with steel beams I don’t know. \s
Joking aside: I have noticed that sometimes when I preceive that everyone around me thinks X i feel an urge to think the opposite of it. I only had mild and inconsequential cases of this (opinion about shows, products, etc), but I can imagine that this type of contraryness in edge cases can convince people that everyone is wrong about some important historical event. And it seems once they convinced themselves their belief is stable enough to make them stick with it.
Obviously hating Game of Thrones when everyone was raving about it feels very different from subscribing to conspiracy theories, but maybe the phenomena is similar, just one latches on to a different subject?
Funny that that's the conspiracy you reach for to make the joke. Not the one where people planned in secret to send people to the United States to learn how to fly airplanes so that they could hijack commercial airlines and commit suicide attacks.
Good thing you mention or I fell for it (that you meant it seriously, not that I believed in the conspiracy). Poe's law in effect.
But that's the thing. People who believe in conspiracies are susceptible to them. For example, they could've lost their trust in society, or smoke a lot of pot, or have a friend or two who are into it. Very much like a cult.
And I am saying that as person who was into conspiracies, who lost faith in society, who used drugs (psychedelics, mostly), and had a severe psychosis (not at all related to the previously mentioned though but stress from another factor).
Was their argument rigorous or obviously irrational? On the spectrum of plausibility from lizard people to JFK, 9/11 doesn't strike me as especially delusional. I believe we sometimes don't differentiate well enough between abnormally suspicious people that act rationally from the clearly deranged. Non-consensus views could be a sign of either but a failure mode a different set of smart people have is to write off anything non-consensus merely because it's low status.
Indeed. As someone with experience of extreme manic psychosis, it is the pattern recognition/dot connection algorithm kicked into absolute overdrive. Spurious correlation abounds when afflicted with such a condition.
Thankfully my experience was acute and triggered by drugs, so a few years of anti-psychotics and refraining from anything other than cannabis and alcohol in moderation have let me stop taking the anti-psychotics and at worst I experience cyclothymia, which I've decided to just live with and not medicate.
They're very prone, in my experience, to believing that their explanations are ultra-rational, though, reality be damned. And to falling for arguments with the trappings of rationality, but deeply flawed premises or early steps slyly skipped so the castle's built on sand but looks like a perfect castle with all these crazy-tall minarets reaching for the sky (ahem, like a certain popular-online political & economic philosophy) and then treating everyone who doesn't agree that the castle's beautiful as irrational, probably-emotion-driven morons.
> They're very prone, in my experience, to believing that their explanations are ultra-rational, though, reality be damned.
Like for example, their analyses of "conspiracy theorists" (when what they are actually analyzing is their own incredibly flawed semi-conscious representation of conspiracy theorists). It's quite funny that the world is this way if you think about it deeply, because it could be otherwise.
But many people are not rational in any part of their lives, so irrational arguments are not surprising from them. Some people don't actually know what a rational argument is - it's something that you learn in school, not something that is intuitive. They think that argumentation is when you make the other person shut up, rather than when you make a step by step case to get to a point from a set of agreed upon (at least provisionally) premises. You can recognize these people because they have a tell of repeating the same sentence over and over again to drown out the other person speaking. They're not trying to lay out a convincing case, they're trying to survive. If they trusted you, you could absolutely teach them argumentation and reason.
Engineers do know how to argue rationally, because they have to remember why things work to a pretty intense depth. The question is how people can wall off that ability instead of applying it to other things that are important to them.
Being "human" isn't an explanation, though. That's just saying that humans are frail, and this is a failure, therefore it should be expected from humans.
There's nothing special about engineers that makes them less prone to human weaknesses. I had a (software) engineer colleague who believed in overunity energy, and was so into it they traveled to paid conferences.
Also no legitimate method of inquiry works by someone saying "I'll give you a reward if you prove me wrong!" and then having that promise of reward settled in court.
If Lanka said "there is no proof that gravity makes things fall down" he'd loose the 100k. That proof is really well supported by hard evidence.
At this point viruses are simply not proven by hard-science and Lanka was made to pay up based on non-hard-science papers, that are now vetted by a court case to be just that: no hard scientific proof.
Machine translation gives me the following for point 20: "In addition, the submission of a single publication was required, in which both the proof of the existence of the measles virus and the determination of its diameter were provided, so that it was not sufficient if - as advocated by the expert - merely the combination of the scientific statements in the six submitted professional articles prove the existence of the measles virus and at least two of these articles contain sufficient information on the diameter of the measles virus."
I would count that as a "formality": the bet required the proof to be in a single publication, but as it was instead split across several it didn't count.
On the latter question the machine-translated text is hard enough to read that I can't reliably tell what the defendant is claiming and what the court is declaring, but I think maybe the court is saying they're not convinced the submitted papers constitute proof?
But if you read on from where your citation stops (i.e. after "...on the diameter of the measles virus"), you find:
"Furthermore, the content of the publications submitted did not meet the requirements for proof. The phenomena presented therein as measles viruses are actually transport vesicles (bubbles) of the cell itself. None of the documentation submitted is based on attempts where the pathogen - as required - had previously been isolated and biochemically characterized or even such an isolation had been scientifically documented. [... (cut out some more things that are formalities to me)...] The determination of the diameter was also not well-founded. The size range of 300 to 1000 nm given in one of the publications presented already refutes the thesis of the virus, since viruses are characterized by a small variation in their diameter between 15 and a maximum of 400 nm. Incidentally, information from the RKI dated January 24, 2012 states that the diameter of measles viruses is said to be 120-400 nm and often contain ribosomes inside, although the latter contradict the existence of a measles virus."
What I get from this is:
1. The virus was not properly "isolated and biochemically characterized" and "isolation had been scientifically documented"
2. The diameter established by the evidence provided was not well founded, and greatly contradict other findings.
What Lanka's main point to me is, is that in order to scientifically establish the existence of a (sub-)microscopic infectious disease carrier, you need to first truly isolate it.
Not "claiming to have isolated it in virologist terms", that is: claiming to have it contained in a concoction monkey kidney tissue, bovine fetal serum, and more; thus in a soup with other DNA carriers. Because this "redefinition of isolation" makes it impossible to say we actually found it. Also we cannot sequence the DNA/RNA of the virus in order to establish it's identity, when we are testing a soup that has other DNA/RNA in it. (That's why virologists use "in silico" sequencing, which is not trustworthy either: especially not when other DNA/RNA is present in the sample)
Since the theory of viruses has become widely accepted, we have learned a lot about other sub-cell biological things with DNA/RNA in them, like exosomes. We have truly isolated them, and truly sequenced their genetic material.
But somehow for viruses with still cannot do that.
I hence hold the position that the hard-scientific evidence on the existence of viruses is very thin, or just not there. It's merely a theory at this point.
Only once the existence is established we can meaningfully establish contagiousness.
For instance with polio it is claimed by "the horrific anti-vaxxers" that the vaccine was introduced when the wave of polio-like symptoms was on the decline. And that polio-like symptoms are since also, conveniently, characterized as other diseases. So there are other reasons than the effectiveness of the vaccine to the disappearance of symptoms in the population.
Hence we need to establish first the virus exists and is contagious, or we end up with the vaccine's effectiveness being the proof of the existence of the virus. Which is basically what I believe is where we currently are. And a decline of the wave of polio-like symptoms
for other reasons can then easily be mistaken for effectiveness of the vaccine.
Therefor hard-scientific evidence is so important. Especially if states enact laws based on it, like we saw with covid measures and all state run vaccination programs.
Thanks for sticking to the discussion btw, I really appreciate you take the time to respond to my points that --i also know-- seem ridiculous from a mainstream viewpoint. Have a great day.
I know less about measles, but the broader question of how to identify viruses by DNA sequencing is what I'm now doing professionally.
You write: "Also we cannot sequence the DNA/RNA of the virus in order to establish it's identity, when we are testing a soup that has other DNA/RNA in it." That is generally not correct. When you sequence, what you get are subsequences ("reads") of around 200 base pairs. Generally a very large number of them. Then you try to figure out what genetic sequences could have led to you observing those reads, through a process called "assembly". The idea here is that if I have one read that looks like ABCDE and another like BCDEF, it's very likely that these were generated from an original sequence of ABCDEF. If your reads were drawn from a sample that has multiple things in it you will piece each one together separately, and as long as you took enough reads you'll be able to get the genetic sequence for each.
I've been working on wastewater recently, which is a huge mixture of many different things, but we see some extremely common genetic sequences. When you look up these sequences with BLASTN they turn out to be ones people have previously identified as plant viruses from vegetables people commonly eat, such as tomatoes, peppers, and cucumbers. [1] You can download the data and play with it yourself if you want?
Here's an approach that should let you replicate the identification of these sequences and is simple enough that you could code yourself:
1. Download one of the 180 FASTQ files the authors published
2. Extract the nucleotide sequences ("grep '^[ACTG]' fname.fastq")
3. Write a little program that emits all subsequences of length 40. Short enough not to get too many read errors, long enough that mismatches are unlikely.
4. Sort those subsequences. (Unix sort will do it, even though this will exceed the memory available on your machine unless you have a much better machine than I do.)
5. uniq -c
6. sort -nr
7. At this point the data should all fit in memory. Write a program where you make a map from the first 39 characters in a sequence to the last character, and from the last 39 characters to the first. Take the most frequent subsequence in the data and attempt to extend it using those two maps. You should end up with a sequence about 6k long.
I just want to clarify for my own understanding - are you making an argument that this individual, that has been tested for and is known to have the polio virus in their body (one of the most widely understood viral infections we have), is actually not afflicted with polio because…the symptoms are comparable to other, potentially unknown, diseases or causes?
Additionally, are you claiming that virologists, an area of study that has proven, repeatedly (through the very apparent efficacy of countless vaccines for diseases that ravaged humanity for millennia) to be one of the most remarkably successful scientific endeavors in human history, is somehow…not scientifically rigorous?
(I’m going to take a lot of karma damage for this, but I believe it has to be said)
(Meanwhile, on other threads, there are discussions about the lamentable fraud that may have tainted Alzheimer/“brain plaque” research for the past 20 years, another thread about recent studies showing seratonin may have squat to do with depression, and you can always count on occasional thread regarding the Theranos debacle that deluded some very educated people. Greater harm, it seems, comes from lack of skepticism than too much of it.)
There's a super strange trend I've been seeing, since COVID, where science is no longer allowed to be wrong. Even though the very discipline is about making hypothesis and proving them wrong; I'm seeing a lot of arguments that kind of boil down to "Science is a liar sometimes"[1].
Do you have the same opinion on particle physics? Scientists have spent the better part of 80 years on an obviously wrong standard model - has that caused you to doubt Maxwell's equations or how the circuits in your computer works?
More seriously, "lack of skepticism" is bunk when the "skeptics" don't provide equal or greater research and reasoning. People have started to think of themselves as nobel laureates because they can say "no, I don't think so", and have 0 data to back them up.
I have followed that thread, and the Alzeimer "story" with great interest over the couple years I've been aware of it - in no way was my comment above meant to be a reflection on the possibility of a "taint" or lack-of scientific rigor (to bring in another example - the lack of repeatability in, oh, nearly every(?) social psychology experiment, etc. etc.) in the scientific and medical-science fields. The rise in administration at academic levels at the expense of science, the growing discontent in scientific funding being tied to results rather than curiousity, all very important - and very important to keep a skeptical mind about it all! Absolutely, that, to me, is the core of the scientific excercise.
I only meant that, in this particular case of polio detection, the cause and origin of the case is fairly cut-and-dry (there are other articles that have been published about it that give additional information), and introducing skepticism of the manner I responded to initially is likely to do more harm than good. Disinformation often begins with a distortion of a grain of truth, and the effects of that public skepticism and, dare I say it, ignorance (ironically?) breeds the environment that causes the reemergence of, for example, polio, amongst a public that is just being "skeptical" of vaccines.
In regard to Polio vaccines, there is some head-scratching to be done if you go down that rabbit-hole. It’s all ancient history now, but the numbers of polio cases was dropping even before the vaccine roll-out. I don’t know enough about it to comment beyond that. But, I do know human nature: polio outbreaks were terrifying to parents, and there would be every reason not to be a bit skeptical when a solution to the problem was found… that is, it wasn’t a time for clear thinking in the midst of the panic. It’s precisely times like that when people are prone to overlook things.
For instance, imagine the chaos that could ensue if a disease that was overwhelmingly trivial and asymptomatic was advertised as possibly being 10 or 20 percent lethal? Heck, I bet folks would be so scared that they’d shut down entire countries, weld people into their apartments, gulp down horse de-wormer, mandate experimental drugs, etc. Of course, I exaggerate. I doubt something like that could happen in modern times. But, if it did, the skeptics back when it was going on and even after the panic had died down, would most likely be pilloried and accused of being unthinking idiots. Just saying.
Except unlike that Alzheimers research, vaccines work. They often work astonishingly well. If you want to pretend viruses don't exist, you need to provide alternative reasons for why these vaccines work so well, and especially now that we have shown mRNA vaccines work, this alternative explanation also has to work in cases where only a tiny subset of that virus exists in the vaccine.
Quite simply, not understanding something, or not liking the consequences of it, is not skepticism, it's ignorance. Skepticism requires having good reasons to reject good models/research/outcomes etc. In the Alzheimers case, the reason for skepticism, which many people in the field had, was difficulty reproducing results, and lack of positive outcomes from therapies using that working hypothesis.
Blind skepticism makes you beyond stupid, and eventually turns you into an idiot who watches Alex Jones and thinks your own son is a crisis actor
I'm not saying viruses do not exist. I'm saying that they are merely a theory that is not proven with the same scientific rigor that bacteria infections have been proven. In fact I find the science on the existence of viruses rather thin.
> especially now that we have shown mRNA vaccines work
Right, they dropped from 100% effective to 30% effective in the first weeks, then requiring boosters. They totally lied/oversold them. And everyone got "it" anyway. How does that mean "they work"?
Are they? EM changes the sample, it can destroy cells.
Also they do not look at truly isolated samples of viruses: they look at concoctions of monkey kidney cells, bovine fetal serum and more with the supposed virus in there. When looking at a concoction like that, what certainty you have you see the virus and not another small biological particle (like exosomes, or dead cell debris)?
Last thing, it seems that with many of these EM photos of viruses, is that the control group was omitted. You also need to bring a concoction that does not have supposed virus in there and somehow show that does not contain the visual element that ARE seen in the sample with supposed virus. Virologists disagree and are okay with going ahead without control groups in these cases.
> When looking at a concoction like that, what certainty you have you see the virus and not another small biological particle (like exosomes, or dead cell debris)?
Because a virus looks nothing like cells that would make up any of those organs. When you examine enough samples and suddenly see some cells that don’t look like they belong that’s a pretty good indicator of a foreign body.
I would have completely agreed with this until Covid, when many (not all) virologists completely threw scientific rigor out the window. It will take generations to rebuild the trust they burned.
I would be cautious of making group generalizations like that. If a couple idiots who call themselves physicists publish a terrible paper -- that doesn't indict all of psychics. Covid made every amateur virologist and wanna-be-scientist come out of the woodwork. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
I don't want to put works in cies's mouth, but it possible to read the comment in a reasonable way. It is not necessarily a claim that polio isn't real, but rather that patient's signs and symptoms can overlap with other medical issues. Stefan Lanka doesn't pass my sniff test, but reference to him and to test contamination can be read as examples that these sorts of tests are not always clear.
I found the roll-outs of these vaccines only came when the numbers of sick people were already well on the decline. I think polio is likely related to use of certain --now forbidden-- pesticides.
Animal testing played a significant role in development of a Polio vaccine. I understand you are making a point that correlation is not causation, but there are actual animal trials where they purposefully infected monkeys and watched the disease progression. There are plenty of things we may not understand in the world, but we do understand some science well enough to prove beyond reasonable doubt causal relationships in certain kinds of experiment design.
I didn't know scurvy was considered contagious; that's pretty cool. I did know people used to cure it by drinking tea made from Arborvitae trees - or at least its European counterpart (I think they have the same common name).
I find the stance a little baffling though; if Measles isn't a virus, why can it's spread by halted by vaccination? Aside from the general usage and success thereof, sometimes it's easy to wonder just because the major outbreaks in the US happened a fairly long time ago. But a couple years back I had a coworker from Nigeria - I guess they still have outbreaks there?... anyway he scrambled to help get them money for MMR vaccines (I don't know if they're usually free via the WHO but supply wasn't abundant so - I guess bribes are a thing there moreso than here). And lo-and-behold none of his family got sick at all, but most of their smaller town did -- including their neighbors; a few had persistent physical problems (I don't recall what now) and a few people died. That's anecdotal, but goes very well with existing evidence and provides a nice microcosm for observation.
The MMR vaccine isn't a nutrient cocktail and I find it quite hard to conjure a Occam's razor explanation that doesn't involve a known virus (or maybe I severely lack imagination or am too tainted by existing knowledge). To make the vaccines (at least ones like the MMR vaccine) they culture viruses - letting them replicate in cells - and then weakening or killing them. Do the vaccines just happen to have a weakened form of a virus that doesn't cause Measles and it's protective quality merely a startling coincidence?
Sometimes science gets used badly and misconceptions abound or bad routes are taken for a while until they prove untenable; sometimes prevailing wisdom lasts a thousand years and then a Copernican revolution happens. They tend to be most useful to question though when there is a better alternative explanation that better fits the observations than the current prevailing wisdom.
Anyone can "question" anything - but what is the better fitting explanation exists for observations about Measles than the prevalent wisdom and evidence that it is a virus?
> I find the stance a little baffling though; if Measles isn't a virus, why can it's spread by halted by vaccination?
I mean surely anyone making the first claim would also make the claim that the measles vaccine is bogus. That second claim is already infamously popular enough in areas of the U.S. that there have been measles outbreaks among unvaccinated children.
> if Measles isn't a virus, why can it's spread by halted by vaccination?
I say that viruses are still a theory. To truly scientifically prove it they need to isolate (truly isolate) the virus, and they never did that. Always there was cell materials in the concoction the virologists call an "isolated" virus.
They looked at an concoction with lots of other biological particles: cells, decaying cells, cell parts, etc. There is simply no way to know they EM-photo'ed a virus or one of the other things.
And all the while they have not been able to truly isolate viruses, they were able to isolate all kinds of other small biological particles. Some carrying DNA. They managed to properly sequence that DNA. So far they never manage to truly sequence the DNA of a virus
, but instead virologists do an "in silico" sequencing, which is more guesswork than actual sequencing.
A lot of what you're saying sounds smart but is devoid of meaning. I'm wondering if you have done any bench top research in biology. It's a humbling experience.
Viruses clearly exist. You can observe them infecting and lysing cells in real time. You can do controlled experiments where only the cultures containing viruses you've added get lysed. You can purify antibodies against them. You can prove that the antibodies inactivate the virus. As there are viruses that affect everything from bacteria to plants and animals, proving Koch's postulates for at least one virus is trivial.
None of that depends on EM. Microscopy merely gave us a picture of these things which lets us understand their structure better.
It doesn't depend on genome sequencing. That just helps us understand what proteins they make and why they vary.
However, both those techniques are substantially more valid than you give them credit for and are always used in the context of other tests to assure you're studying the right thing.
You talked about bovine serum and monkey cells. While both can be used in virology, the trend is for serum-free media and generally you want to use human cells when studying human viruses. In any event, if both the control culture and the test culture use the same media and cell type, anything different between them is likely due to the test. That's kind of fundamental to how science works. After all, human cells may contain dormant viruses or viral genomes, so you want to make sure that your controls are identical such that your intentionally infected cells are the only ones that show viral activity.
I used to joke that mouse deer didn't actually exist. That they were just jackelopes that the taxidermists made up for the museum of natural history. I bet that I could have made that very convincing with a lot of rhetoric. A visit, however, to a zoo with said ungulates alive and in the flesh would quickly prove me wrong. I think you're relying on the fact that you won't have to put your ideas to the test and nobody in your real life will be sophisticated enough to show you the reality. In that case, perhaps you'd be better served asking what you can do to prove that viruses exist? Otherwise you'll just go on like this.
Can you show a somewhere the old postulates are all met for a virus?
> It doesn't depend on genome sequencing. That just helps us understand what proteins they make and why they vary.
And, not totally unimportant, to ID the particle we're looking at.
> While both can be used in virology, the trend is for serum-free media and generally you want to use human cells when studying human viruses.
Nice trend. Now can they also truly isolate (that is without other DNA/RNA carrying particles present) a virus? Like biologists have done with other biological particles of similar size?
Because without true isolation you could always be looking at "dead cell debris" or other stuff that is there and is not the virus, but may look like one.
> After all, human cells may contain dormant viruses or viral genomes, so you want to make sure that your controls are identical such that your intentionally infected cells are the only ones that show viral activity.
Bingo! So as long as you put "culture" cells in the sample and call that an isolate, it is polluting the sample.
> you'd be better served asking what you can do to prove that viruses exist?
Isolate them. Truly isolate them.
> I used to joke that mouse deer didn't actually exist. That they were just jackelopes that the taxidermists made up for the museum of natural history. I bet that I could have made that very convincing with a lot of rhetoric. A visit, however, to a zoo with said ungulates alive and in the flesh would quickly prove me wrong.
Because in the zoo you can see the animal all by itself. Now if you say you can only see deer mouse when they are in a soup with 50 other species of mouse, and you make a crummy black white pictures of the soup claiming some provide proof of your deer mouse: should I take you seriously?
It's amazing how you so rapidly made my point. You display no interest in the subject at all, you're just trying to win what you think is a rhetorical argument. Nature doesn't care about arguments.
> HN is generally okay with dissenting viewpoints.
No, it is not. HN is for more or less like-minded people and if you stay too far from the beaten path you risk the ire of moderators regardless of whether you are right or not.
Apparently this is the price of keeping it civilised.
He didn't travel in the last 30 days I read, and the incubation time is shorter than that. I.e. he caught it after coming home.
Vincent has been a very bad source of information for the COVID pandemic. He has famously been against vaccine boosters, and even declared he didn't think he needed one. Even now as the need for second boosters is clear (and the need for first boosters completely justified and verified) he still says they aren't necessary. This is on top of him downplaying every variant like Omicron and saying they wouldn't be a problem (and then they went on to be huge problems). He should not be platformed IMHO.
Based on your opinions, I don't think you should be platformed.
Kind of stinks when it's used against you, doesn't it?
The solution to bad ideas is more ideas, not "deplatforming" or whatever mealy-mouthed word is currently being used to make censorship marketable these days.
So would you consider @dang to be some mealy-mouthed censor when he admonishes and possibly removes content here that goes against community guidelines?
Outright incitement to violence against others is easy to recognize as speech not worth tolerating.
But here it gets interesting: hate speech wrapped up as "opinions, ideas, and beliefs". At the risk of downvotes (what ev er), I posit that Fox News engages in high level hate speech (not every minute but enough for it to count).
Case in point: Tucker Carlson's "The Great Replacement" agenda. It's thinly veiled white nationalism -- basically arguing that white people are under attack from non-whites. Yes, it gets discussed by him as "what if" and "how come" but it has an agenda that is prepared to be enforced by violence by those who are spooked by it.
I don't have an answer for how to deal with this, but it is in the end hate speech and is not healthy for society as a whole.
Manner restrictions are different than content restrictions.
There’s speech that doesn’t fit the community’s guidelines in terms of the manner it is expressed, but I don’t believe there are any ideas that should not be tolerated here.
Sure. Why not? Make a cogent argument for the idea.
I’ll disagree, of course, but in the exceedingly unlikely event that you present a strong argument, it’s still an opportunity to hone my own counter-argument.
And I'd happily engage you to try to convince and educate you, in a respectful way, why I believe that's incorrect.
Because that's how we raise ourselves up.
Censoring, reviling, shutting down and abandoning people who hold these sorts of beliefs only serves to reinforce them and drive them into echo chambers of radicalization.
So yes, by all means. Express any thoughts, ideas, opinions or dreams you have.
By actively participating in the marketplace of ideas, we can let the best ones rise, and the worst ones defeat themselves.
Through discussion and debate, not force or cooersion, of which censorship is an insidious form.
Context matters in my opinion. If you say this to a person whose jewish family has survived the Holocaust, then I would say this statement is an indirect verbal attack. You could as well say "Your family should have been killed". Verbal attacks are an attempt to hurt people, just like physical attacks are, and therefore in my opinion it is fair to ban them to some extent.
I don't even think this has anything to do with free speech, as in freedom to express your thoughts. The key with free speech is that everyone is entitled to that. Verbal attacks are often an attempt to stop others from expressing their thoughts, so I think they are fundamentally an action against free speech.
That being said, as a German, I don't agree with the German blanket bans of certain expressions. Context and intentions always matter, I think.
Most, if not all, meaningful speech risks offending someone.
Framing uncomfortable beliefs as attacks grants a form of "victim power" by which anyone can claim to be a victim of your "attack" as a means of shutting down speech.
This isn't a hypothetical, I see the technique used frequently.
I agree that this is a possibility and a risk, but I think that a bit of common sense goes a long way. One of my classmates tried to frame everyone who disagreeed with him as nazi, but nobody fell for it, because it was obvious that he just tried to evade criticism. There also needs to be some leeway - for example a German court has ruled that a public service worker could not be fired for calling his boss an "old asshole", because they've known each other for very long. Context matters.
At a broader level I think the solution is simple. Any person must be able to decide who he/she personally wants to listen to. in forums this can be implemented by a feature that allows you to hide certain people's comments based on your own judgement. At HN and most other forums the moderator or others decide if a person's comments are to be visible to others.
I really have a hard time understanding what the drama is about.
If you're less likely to get COVID if you are vaccinated (which seems to be the case; at least in my city, two-thirds of the case rate is coming from unvaccinated people), then it absolutely does reduce spread. Not "prevent", but that was never a realistic outcome.
One judges decisions based on available information. All the then available information indicated that mass vaccination was the best means of reducing transmission, especially because such large portions of the population were unwilling (or unable) to lock down to prevent spread. Even then, it still has been shown to prevent spread, just not as effectively as hoped.
From a public health perspective mass vaccination was definitely the right approach.
Certainly one cannot judge a decision by its outcome, but we can perhaps learn something if the skeptics we were banning from social media ended up being correct.
Whether they were following proper reasoning or not, if they were right it’d be good to take a step back and figure out if anything in the “proper reasoning” system needs adjusted.
That I agree with. A lot of bad assumptions were revealed, but not the ones I think you are alluding to.
- If the market and the government disagree on the value of human lives, the market wins. (Basically the government should just consign more people to die, especially vulnerable populations to avoid drama)
- A nontrivial portion of the population reacts to government intervention with spiteful noncompliance (we need to be using a softer and more coercive hand than 'authority says X is the best plan')
- If we have to fall back on socialized medicine whenever there is a crisis, maybe we should just do it all the time.
- There will be more pandemics, more often, until the forces permitting them change.
As somebody who immunocompromised, this pandemic taught me exactly how little my life is valued by my civilization and government.
There is plenty of data to establish exactly what the vaccine does, and how effective it is (very), so we don't have to guess or infer from weird anecdotes.
surely they are testing sewage to see if there is more of the polio virus in the drainage. I thought the CDC had started using that a lot more often. On the left you have nuts who think vaccines are unnatural and therefore awful, and on the right you have nuts who say the government is injecting nanites for 5G mind control. It's a crazy world out there.
I mean... the crazy nuts also predict a lot of stuff that ends up being true.
I got vaccinated because "if you get vaccinated, you won't get covid"... and then the narrative changed. 5G (well, every technology from 2g onwards) also enables a lot more precise tracking of users (their location).
If you get the vaccine, you won't get (and this detail is important) the ALPHA VARIANT of covid. And indeed, I'd bet dollars to donuts you did not end up catching Alpha.
The vaccine was never going to be great against variants (though some people did claim it would be just as good with little evidence) and the more removed the variants get (ie, variant of a variant) the less chance those older vaccines have of resisting them.
So it's not exactly that the "narrative changed" so much as that the virus changed and the narrative didn't keep up fast enough.
Almost nobody caught Alpha or the original strain the vaccines actually targeted because they had naturally disappeared before the vaccines were even available.
The fact that the virus would change was obvious from the start. Coronaviruses always do mutate fast, it's why nobody bothered making vaccines for then before. The narrative changed not because the emergence of yet another variant was unexpected but because the narrative was always and everywhere whatever would convince people to take shots, not what was true.
The rampant historical revisionism about vaccines is absurd. It's 1984 level stuff.
The trials didn't even measure "severe illness", so no, we definitely didn't know that by any definition of early. Actually that claim only came to the fore as effectiveness against infection collapsed and a new justification was required.
> “So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,” Fauci said.
So, very few get it at all, and the ones who get it, can't spread it, even without masks. This (well, similar, from our local agencies) was the info I got when i went to get vaccinated.
If you want people to trust you, you have to be honest. If you make obvious lies then you get caught and trust is destroyed. The CDC repeatedly lied and misled the American public and now is having trust issues leading to people not getting vaccinated like they should.
> “So even though there are breakthrough infections with vaccinated people, almost always the people are asymptomatic and the level of virus is so low it makes it extremely unlikely — not impossible but very, very low likelihood — that they’re going to transmit it,” Fauci said.
So, almost noone vaccinated will get it, and those who do, won't spread it.
So, people literally died, because they though they coudln't get it, and went out, and other people who though they couldn't spread it, spread it around.
"According to the New York State Health Department, a person was found to be infected by a vaccine-derived poliovirus type 2 (VDPV2), aka revertant polio Sabin type 2 virus."
I doesn't seem likely that a "young adult" who hasn't travelled outside the US would be exposed to the OPV. Possibly, from some of the other cases mentioned in the CDC article, someone the young adult interacted with had been exposed to it, though.
The original article doesn't mention if the young adult was immunocompromised, which seems like a requirement for a secondary OPV infection.
This does indeed seem like the unfortunate confluence of being exposed to someone shedding the vaccine-strain and community transmission. Which is exceedingly rare in the U.S., but is entirely foreseeable in low vaccination rate enclaves, which are growing more common.
The risk of spread from weakened virus is completely eliminated under a proper vaccination program. You go into a community, vaccinate everyone, and you have zero risk.
The fact the patient was unvaccinated was effectively their "immunocompromise" that allowed the virus to spread to them.
Unfortunately, vaccinating everyone is not actually zero risk. A small proportion of people who recieve the oral polio vaccine develop vaccine-associated paralytic polio which is exactly what it sounds like - full-on paralytic polio caused by receiving the vaccine. It's a rare complication, somewhere around one in a million, but back when polio had been eradicated in most of the world it was the main cause of paralytic polio. So we'd really like to fully eradicate polio and then stop using that vaccine.
This is made harder by another similar but subtly different problem - circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses. They come from the oral vaccine too, but instead of affecting vaccinated people they spread amongst the unvaccinated population and evolve to regain the virulence and high rate of paralyzation of wild polio. It's one of those viruses that was found in New York. This poses a problem for eradicating polio and stopping vaccination, because once you're no longer vaccinating people they can catch and spread the virus from the oral vaccine and it can evolve into something dangerous. The current VDPV problem traces back to an attempt to finally finish eradicating the type 2 poliovirus, which no longer exists in its wild form, by removing it from the oral vaccine and stamping out any subsequent VDPV spread. This failed badly.
> A potential, adverse effect of the OPV is its known ability to recombine to a form that causes neurological infection and paralysis.[27] This genetic reversal of the pathogen to a virulent form takes a considerable time (at least 12 months) and does not affect the person who was originally vaccinated. The vaccine-derived attenuated virus is normally excreted from vaccinated people for a limited period. Thus, in areas with poor sanitation and low vaccination coverage, the spontaneous reversal of the vaccine-derived virus to a virulent form and its spreading in the environment can lead to unvaccinated people becoming infected.
Which boils down to no, you cannot get polio from the polio vaccine but potentially some others could get polio from you for a short period a year later if they’re not vaccinated.
A couple of paragraphs up in the Wikipedia article: "Oral polio vaccine results in vaccine-associated paralytic poliomylelitis in about three per million doses". I've also seen one in two million doses quoted elsewhere, but it's somewhere around the one in a million mark. You coupld probably quibble about whether that really counts as getting polio, but it's paralysis caused by infection with poliovirus and there is "no clinical difference between the paralysis caused by wild poliovirus, OPV, or VDPV" according to the CDC's FAQ on the topic so that's not a particularly interesting semantic quibble to me.
One in 200 infections leads to paralysis. So yes it is effectively zero risk compared to non-vaccination.
If you eliminate the unvaccinated population, vaccine-derived infections are a non-issue. Which is how we addressed the problem prior to 1979 - largely due to the fact that everyone saw first had what the virus did and there was no vaccine hesitancy.
But we haven't used weakened virus vaccines for polio in the last 20 years, so it's kinda moot.
Which has been thoroughly debunked by the scientific community. "Food and Chemical Toxicology" is not a respected journal, and most famously published the "GMO foods cause cancer" paper that ended up being retracted.
The link you provided is just a standard vaccine efficacy over time study using data from Sweden. These are a dime a dozen and all show two things: 1) you are less likely to die when vaccinated, and 2) immune response reduces over time so you need boosters.
> [Rockland County residents], have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the state; Monsey's is the lowest in the state, at 17.8%, as of June 15, 2021
Wow, the author really went out of their way to avoid saying why this is happening repeatedly in Rockland County.
> The Orthodox Jewish community, the largest in the country, have some of the lowest vaccination rates in the state; Monsey's is the lowest in the state, at 17.8%, as of June 15, 2021
I lived in a Brooklyn neighborhood densely populated by Hasidim for years and this is unfortunately not the first time something like this has happened.[0] The highly insular community means misinformation is hard to combat. This quote is pertinent:
> ”Being a religious Jew, you also get used to having a minority viewpoint,” said Alexander Rapaport, the CEO of the Masbia Soup Kitchen Network in Brooklyn, and a public face of the Hasidic community. “So if something is not mainstream, it doesn’t take you away from believing it.”
Because the orthodox Jewish community is a constant source of outbreaks in the area. In 2019, there was a measles outbreak, in 2020, a number of COVID outbreaks, and now polio. No one is claiming that this community is the only to have a disease outbreak, but if there is an outbreak of a preventable disease in Rockland County, then it's most likely coming from Monsey.
> From June 28, 2009, through June 27, 2010, a total of 3502 outbreak-related cases of mumps were reported in New York City, two upstate New York counties, and one New Jersey county. Of the 1648 cases for which clinical specimens were available, 50% were laboratory-confirmed. Orthodox Jewish persons accounted for 97% of case patients.
Man, he was just doing an interesting remark about where those outbreak often happen (aka in unvaccinated communities). It was a small dig at antivax (and a really tame one), not an attack on all Jews.
Oh, certain people, like those of us who are sick of the repeated behavior of our co-religionists from this exact same community? The minute I read this polio outbreak was in Rockland county, my heart sank. Everyone knew what that likely meant.
A frum friend of mine told me today that the rumor is an Israeli kid, vaccinated with the live polio vaccine, had just moved into the community and was the likely carrier, and will likely be blamed, completely unfairly — instead of the fact that Hasids in Monsey have a ghastly problem with under-vaccination and non-vaccination.
Yeah, there’s a very good reason that people bring up this same community every time there’s a preventable disease outbreak.
It seems plenty pointless to finger point a community when a case pops up after 20 years and ignore all the other cases in the country popping up from foreign travelers and other communities.
It seems even more pointless if you don't want to say what you want to do to prevent that specific case. Just complaining to complain? Or singling out a community because you don't like them?
Simply put, what would you like to do?. Let's not side step around your intentions because you can't back them up morally.
Left leaning communities like this one are the most vicious towards Orthodox Jews, Israel, and religion in general.
It's really sad and predictable at this point.
-- edit --
Explain your diagnosis of my "persecution complex".
Define what it is and how you think I have it, doc.
Dude, your persecution complex is amazing. Best I’ve seen in years.
Literally no one here is talking about geopolitics or religion outside of the context that a specific subset of Hasidic Jews in Monsey (and Boro Park, and Williamsburg) keep getting infected with completely preventable diseases again and again and again. It’s not happening in Lakewood, Shaker Heights, Scarsdale, Boca Raton, Pico Robertson, Encino, the Five Towns, or a hundred other Jewish communities INCLUDING ORTHODOX JEWISH communities! You know why? Because they (we) know enough to vaccinate their (our) kids against fucking measles and polio! We’re not talking about Jews, Judaism, Orthodoxy! We’re mad about a completely predictable result of compulsive non-vaccination!
And what I personally would like to do is force people to vaccinate their children against deadly diseases, unless there is a very clear medical reason to abstain. Not doing so is flat out child abuse. It’s damning little kids to lifelong paralysis to own the libs.
Guess what? Sometimes they are! The issue here isn’t kashrut, niddah, or the eternal shidduch crisis. The issue isn’t really about Orthodoxy at all.
The issue is that this exact group of people don’t vaccinate or else under-vaccinate, in ways that are unlike every other community around them, in ways that continually cause outbreaks of diseases that are completely preventable, in ways that absolutely show up in the national data.
Sorry-not-sorry if that hurts your feelings, bubbeleh.
Because they're not comparable. 75% of the measles cases in 2019 (which was the worst measles year since 1992) were associated with the Orthodox communities in NY[1]. Oregon and Washington do have higher prevalence due somewhat lower vaccination rates in specific counties but they lack the same clustering and congregating that is found in the Orthodox communities.
I focused on the bad year for that specific reason, because it was BAD. WA and OR have some cases throughout the years, but they don't produce large outbreaks because the overall populations are still vaccinated enough for herd immunity to act as a barrier. Orthodox communities on the other hand don't have that advantage, and when there's an outbreak there, it creates outliers and outliers are what we're trying to avoid when it comes to pathogens.
It is a relatively common stance in the ultra-orthodox community and it was not unusual for me to see families bringing their kids to playgrounds in Brooklyn with active measles infections.
This neighborhood was notorious for its measles outbreaks before covid also. It's not disgusting, it's just very obviously a concentrated group of people that generally refuse vaccinations.
The cited article on WP ( https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/ultra-orthodox-zip-codes-have... ) notes that measles vaccination rates were around 70%, vs 99% for the rest of the state. Given the vaccine schedule, it's pretty likely that if you're a kid not vaccinated for measles, you're not vaccinated for polio either.
OPV isn't just used in Muslim countries. Nigeria is the biggest source of cVDPV2 infections. Ghana, Chad, Niger, etc. have cases. Ukraine has cases. Even Israel has cases.
That's probably less of a smoking gun than it seems like. This case was only discovered because someone actually suffered from paralysis, which is somewhat uncommon even in the unvaccinated and extremely uncommon amongst the vaccinated. The thing is, although it gives very strong protection against paralysis and death the inactivated vaccine used in countries like the US probably isn't all that effective at preventing people catching and spreading polio - all of the polio elimination efforts globally have used the oral polio vaccine which contains live virus for this reason. It's not used in the developed world because the serious side effect rate is hard to justify in a country where polio no longer exists.
Okay, I should probably have been a bit clearer about that. Polio eradication efforts everywhere in the world, including the US, were based around the oral polio vaccine due to its apparent benefits in stopping vaccinated people from spreading polio. This was discontinued in the developed world, including the USA, a couple of decades ago (edit: and replaced with the inactivated polio vaccine - I though this was clear enough from the context...) after polio was eliminated there and the risk of spread from other countries was considered low enough. Entire age groups have never been vaccinated using the OPV. And of course it doesn't matter how well protected the population as a whole is if there's a subcommunity of people who regularly interact with each other who aren;t...
> This was discontinued in the developed world, including the USA, a couple of decades ago after polio was eliminated there and the risk of spread from other countries was considered low enough.
Whats the vaccination rate for polio outside of this area? I suspect it's quite low, it's not in the standard vaccine series for most in the US to my knowledge due to low risk now. Outside of some older people and immigrants, I think many aren't vaccinated for polio.
When I saw the article I thought exactly the same thing. I had to check the Kaiser app, but apparently I have had 4 polio shots as a child.
I don't have the smallpox vaccine though. I know my mom has a big scar on the inside of her arm from that one, so I am pretty sure they've phased that one out.
I just confirmed both my kids have the polio vaccines from the standard set given to kids. The polio vaccine is called IPV (inactivated poliovirus) and usually comes in a bundle branded as PENTACEL which is “a 5-in-1 combination vaccine that protects against diphtheria, tetanus, whooping cough, polio, and Haemophilus influenzae type B”.
...in the same county that had America's largest recent Measles outbreak in 30 years. Rockland county.
My good friend is a pediatrician in the area and frequently gets calls from mom's who ask if he does "evaluations for potential vaccine injury" - which is code for "I need a note from a doctor to have my child exempt from vaccination".
Unfortunately, their poor vaccination culture caused Measles to spread to neighboring New York City, and then across the country.
Its worth noting that on both the Rockland County and NYC sides, these outbreaks are largely contained to ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities that operate sort of adjacent to secular society.
Not that this excuses anything; much has been written about the challenges within and around these communities and the lives of people within them. But the issue is less that the modern public health apparatus has collapsed and more that there are large groups of people in these areas who have extreme religious views and generally seek isolation from the secular world - an isolation that extends up to and includes public education and public health.
The ultra-Orthodox Jews in Rockland are wrong. They just are. I'm Jewish. Judaism places the value of life above all else (Pikuach Nefesh). There's 613 commandments that guide an Orthodox Jew's life and you are commanded to break virtually all of them to preserve life. Vaccines are life preserving. By what interpretation of Judaism they can refuse vaccination, I cannot imagine.
At least that's my understanding of Judaism and how it was taught to me.
For people unfamiliar with the different Jewish movements: Rockland county is overwhelmingly Orthodox, specifically Hasidic. The Hasidim are a modern conservative interpretation of Judaism: it didn't coalesce until the 18th century.
If I was going to be disparaging, I'd say that their closest Christian analogue is the nakedly revisionist evangelical Christianity of the the American 1970s and forwards.
> If I was going to be disparaging, I'd say that their closest Christian analogue is the nakedly revisionist evangelical Christianity of the the American 1970s and forwards.
That would be disparaging to the evangelical community. Even if you find modern evangelicals to hold distasteful beliefs, and I personally do, I don't think that's an apt comparison.
A much closer analog would be the radical Mormon cults of southern Utah.
A radical version of a controversial branch of the religion.
The radical Mormon sects, to my understanding (which is limited to Under the Banner of Heaven[1]) have somewhat strong textual justifications for their practices: it's a matter of historical fact that the early Mormons were polygamists, were vitriolic racists, &c.
This is in contrast to both reactionary evangelicals (who do not make up all evangelicals) and Hasidic Jews (who are do not make up the entire Orthodox community), where both groups have largely substituted contemporary doctrine (as a conservative religious expression) for historical (and even canonical) interpretations. Compare evangelical interpretations of capitalism (and the "doctrine of wealth") to descriptions of wealth and charity thoughout both the Old and New Testaments. Similarly, Hasidic interpretation to pillars of Jewish doctrine (Pikuach Nefesh, Tikkun Olam).
That's fair, I think you're looking at it from the perspective of similar belief structure and religious doctrine. I was thinking about community size and distance from the "mainstream" beliefs of those religion, not necessarily the way in which they diverge.
> If I was going to be disparaging, I'd say that their closest Christian analogue is the nakedly revisionist evangelical Christianity of the the American 1970s and forwards.
I think the current strain, as far as Biblical interpretation is concerned, goes back to Darby's crappy-but-popular 1909 Bible, incorporating extensive same-page notes from Darby:
The 70s are just when the GOP's plan to sell itself to evangelicals, on social issues, as a deliberate ploy to capture them as a constituency to support the rest of the GOP agenda, really started to take off.
Ooooh... I am a non-US christian and been trying to understand certain things, tracked down a lot of origins for some of the more heterodox (in my view) beliefs. But never had heard of this bible, despite SEEING that bible multiple times.
After opening your link and reading more about it a lot of more things make sense and "clicked" into place.
Ultra orthodox is just another term for extremism. Extremists are not rational. Even within something that's irrational like religion they have even more absurdly irrational views.
I'm torn on whether to see this as a problem that needs solving by people outside of those communities.
I.e., the libertarian in me wants to let each community make its own choices based on their values, and then live with the resulting pros / cons.
On the other hand, those communities aren't 100% insular from surrounding society. Maybe their lower vaccination rates increase the chances of spreading the virus to outsiders who can't be vaccinated, consume extra healthcare resources, and/or increase the odds of generating a new variant that current vaccines can't stop.
The libertarian in me thinks that it’s unfair for a child to be crippled for life because of the imbecilic views of their parents. That’s where the “to each their own” philosophy breaks down for me - it assumes that children “belong” to their parents, and that it’s fair for them to have to shoulder the consequences of their parents’ decisions
Libertarianism always falters when it's up against one of the many commons we inhabit with our fellow humans. None of the single-word -ism ideologies work because the world is just too complex for us to reduce to a single way of thinking.
The isms as points on the political compass are abstractions, they don't exist and the writings of anyone associated with them are always far more complex than the one-sentence summaries.
Libertarians believe (I know that's an impossible statement, they're too heterogeneous) that people should be liable for harm they do to others, so maybe that'd be grounds for a class action.
Conversely, the libertarian in me essentially ceased to exist after personally witnessing the initial American response to the pandemic. Libertarianism works best if every individual acts selfishly in their own interest, and the number of people who chose to _not_ get vaccinated _against_ their own best interest showed me the folly of treating individual choice as paramount concern to any policy discussion.
OP is referring to a place like Chicago that has some of the strictest gun bans, is lambasted by conservative media, "look, gun bans but still high shootings," but generally fail to realize that Chicago is surrounded by areas with the loosest gun restrictions like next door Indiana. The guns just come right across state borders 5 miles away.
Guns are not banned in Chicago. There do have tighter restrictions than surrounding areas (and some of those restrictions may be unconstitutional), but many Chicagoans legally own guns.
Yes, a ban would mean you'd be a criminal by mere possession, while restrictions means you have to jump through lots of hoops in order to not be a criminal. You can legally conceal carry a gun in Chicago. And based on my conversations with several members of law enforcement as well as a few notable cases of self defense, you probably won't be charged if you have a strong self defense case, even if you happen to be unintentionally breaking a law. Such as the woman that shot a man trying to rob/rape her while she was waiting for the bus. She would have been carrying illegally by virtue of using public transit, but no charges were pressed.
They were for a very long time, but right-wing rhetoric takes decades to be updated. Most of it is recycled Ezra Pound/Eustace Mullins/John Birch shit.
And yet those states with lax gun regulations have nothing even close to the level of gun crime in the Chicago area.
If it was availability of guns that was the catalyst for this behavior, one would expect to see similar patterns elsewhere.
"Phillips County, Arkansas, with only 22,000 residents, had the nation’s highest homicide rate. Meanwhile, Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), which often captures the media’s attention around violence, had the 79th highest gun homicide rate." (https://publichealth.jhu.edu/sites/default/files/2022-05/202...)
People have no living memory of polio. Anyone who has been to or lived in a country with people who have been afflicted with polio would absolutely not have this attitude.
We need better education.
Public is becoming less and less informed.
It's heartbreaking seeing young people afflicted with polio. People who should be running around, having fun, dating, will never experience that. And I'm sure it will continue to impact them as they age.
Typical for republican congressmen, they only care about things that affected them personally. You see the same thing with republicans who suddenly have a child come out
My grandmother tells the story of the big US polio outbreak when she was a child. Her parents were scared to death, so put her on a train in Indianapolis out to Iowa to live on her grandparent’s farm . She talked about multiple towns that the train stopped in and let people disembark, but refused to allow boarding, and looking out the windows at the signs and evidence of widespread fear.
It’s not something you would forget, and she is definitely still alive ;)
Mine too! He was a first generation American, born and raised in the Bronx. Caught polio at summer camp, probably in his very early teens.
WAS IN AN IRON LUNG FOR A YEAR. HAD TO LIVE APART FROM HIS FAMILY FOR A LONG TIME. As immigrants working their way up from the sweatshops, and eventually running their own quasi-sweatshop, they could not leave to be with him through years of recuperation.
Recovered. Never ever wanted to talk about what he had been through. My dad didn’t even know until he was an older teen.
Post-polio syndrome arrived. No medications available to help, because there was no interest from companies in putting money into developing the medications, because no one was ever going to get polio again, right?
I know someone who has been sick with polio for all of her life, she's really old now. Her body is broken, although not completely paralized. That virus is a nasty piece of work.
I agree that public awareness is declining, but I don't think it's because of a lack of living memory. Almost no Americans have living memory of Ebola, but we all understand that it's very bad.
(I'm still in my mid 20s, and my adult neighbor growing up was paralyzed from the waist down from childhood polio. He was born the year before the Salk vaccine.)
My father in law, mid Boomer American of rural upbringing, got polio as a child and sustained some muscle weakness which led to him swimming for physical therapy and later becoming a competitive swimmer. It was an interesting conversation to have when COVID was a concern and vaccines were just starting to get deployed
During COVID, we podded up with our son's best friend's family, husband and wife are both highly focused specialist doctors. One of them is an allergenist (hopefully I am spelling it right), a very straight up and no-nosnese person and I recall her telling us about a woman who showed up to her office about 9 months ago trying to get an allergenic exemption from vaccine so they could turn it in at work, as she wasn't going to be able to keep the job without it. He refused to provide it, because allergic reaction to the mRNA vaccine is not a thing, and it was doubly so for her.
They're both aghast that people would be refusing proven science. My wife and I share that, although hey, Darwin awards, take yourself out from the pool if you really want to do it. It's just too bad that their behavior impacts us too.
> Maybe my reasoning is too simplistic here, but I'd think NYC was only vulnerable if they too had a poor vaccination culture.
Not the case. Vaccines aren't 100% effective. It's possible for an unvaccinated person to infect a vaccinated person. Ideally, everyone is vaccinated, and the risk becomes extremely small.
If you understand the limitations of the two types of vaccines, then these polio stories that pop up are just something that should be expected to happen.
The US vaccinates with the non-live version. This non-live version cannot mutate, but it is non-sterilizing- the vaccinated can still become infected in their gut- the vaccine prevents it from getting into their bloodstream and become poliomyelitis. We now see this outcome in some articles about Polio showing up in sewage samples in the developed world where this vaccine is given.
So polio is already spreading and the un-vaccinated population in question here is not necessarily increasing the spread of Polio. The tragedy though is that someone is now suffering paralysis from poliomyelitis which probably would not have happened if the person were vaccinated.
Then scroll up and see how it's page after page after page of vaccine derived Polio.
There's currently a huge problems: Subtype 2 doesn't exist in the wild, so normally you would not vaccinate for it. But if you don't vaccinate for it than vaccine derived subtype 2 takes hold - but if you do vaccinate for it, then you create cases of vaccine derived polio!
This was published in 2015, when they thought exactly that. It really seemed like it was almost over, I remember checking the stats every few months hoping for the end.
It failed.
See my post for why it failed (in short: cVDPV2), but this xkcd is no longer correct. And ironically the person we are supposed to be laughing at in the strip, actually turned out to be correct - we need a whole new strategy (which is called nOPV2 if you want to lookup info).
Isn't the vaccine derived polio simply because it's the cheap version? If that's correct then the direct answer to your somewhat rhetorical question is: subsidise the expensive version globally so that we don't have to later pay for the externalities caused by a riskier vaccine?
You can't eradicate polio (the virus, not the disease) by doing that though, IPV (Inactivated Polio Vaccine), even the enhanced version, can't produce gut immunity to the level required to stop transmission even with a 100% vaccination rate.
Are you saying the problem is that we can't stop vaccinating for polio even if this normal type polio is gone? Because if we do stop vaccinating there is a risk of subtype 2 spreading. This looks like not a big problem. And it can be solved by making a beter vaccine(?)
The saddest anti-science movement in the 2000s is the mass anti-vaccine movement. So much progress lost by Wakefield's nutjob paper that spawned the mass movement we see today.
I hope we'll look back at this period 100 years from now and just shake our heads, and hope that it's not an ongoing concern then.
The anti-vaccine movement is a problem but they're not really the big problem this time. Basically, the global effort to eradicate polio failed catastropically due to a major flaw in the strategy devised by the WHO and all the other groups involved in it, this directly caused a wave of new polio cases that is now starting to reach the western world, and no-one has figured out a way to fix it: https://www.science.org/content/article/polio-eradication-pr... (Notice also the date on that article: two and a half years ago. It took a while for this to spread out of Africa and I certainly didn't anticipate at the time how likely this was.)
The worst case is blaming anti-science people, it's absolutely their fault, relatively not their fault. The real issue lies behind policy, especially education right.
Surgical masks do reduce the spread of COVID-19, and even cloth masks reduce symptoms of respiratory illness. [1] During an emergency, we have to act. It's absurd to expect that we should wait for a huge study to confirm what we we already know about respiratory viruses in general. In a low-info environment, the prior is clearly to favor mask mandates. And it turns out, it was the right call!
Let's be clear on the limits of the study you're quoting -- the total effect size was a tiny, tiny fraction a percent for the surgical mask arm (.09%), and barely reached a reasonable level of statistical significance (p=0.043). There was no statistically significant effect size for cloth masks.
No matter how you look at this study -- if you actually read it [1], and don't just read press releases -- it was not a strong result. Moreover, after the raw data for the study was released, there were a number of legitimate critiques that call into question the primary result. For example, this one [2]:
> In this short note we re-analyze the data from this trial using standard non-parametric paired statistics tests on treatment/village pairs. With this approach, we find that behavioral outcomes like physical distancing are highly significant, while the primary outcome of the study is not. Importantly, we find that the behavior of unblinded staff when enrolling study participants is one of the most highly significant differences between treatment and control groups, contributing to a significant imbalance in denominators between treatment and control groups.
Even if we accept the claims of the original paper at face value, the fact that you're citing this study as some kind of definitive rebuttal is, deeply ironically, a perfect example of the OP's critique: the highest quality evidence for mask mandates is simply and objectively weak, but most casual observers believe the opposite to be true.
Public health has exaggerated (or outright lied about) evidence quality throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. Is that the reason for this Polio event? Likely not, but if we're casting about for secondary or tertiary reasons, a drop in trust in public health due to their own trivially falsified propaganda wouldn't be the worst place to start.
I’d like to second timr’s remarks on that study. I’ve read the whole thing twice, and I found it to be low quality and tendentious: they didn’t even fairly present the results they did have.
It may be that the “surgical” masks they used, while not N95, had an electret layer. That would make them a lot better than the “procedure” masks commonly worn in the US against COVID.
Do you have evidence that asymptomatic people are even contagious? At the start of the pandemic there was a Pew survey that showed that 10% of people who know they have covid would still go to work. I think stuff like that explains the spread a lot more than lack of masking by non-sick individuals. Not everyone can afford to quarantine.
18 Nov 2020 "Research early in the pandemic suggested that the rate of asymptomatic infections could be as high as 81%. But a meta-analysis published last month1, which included 13 studies involving 21,708 people, calculated the rate of asymptomatic presentation to be 17%. ... Byambasuren’s review also found that asymptomatic individuals were 42% less likely to transmit the virus than symptomatic people." (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03141-3)
7 Jan 2021 "The baseline assumptions for the model were that peak infectiousness occurred at the median of symptom onset and that 30% of individuals with infection never develop symptoms and are 75% as infectious as those who do develop symptoms. Combined, these baseline assumptions imply that persons with infection who never develop symptoms may account for approximately 24% of all transmission." (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...)
Properly fitted N95s help a lot. Procedure masks, which are the type normally worn against COVID, do very little, especially since they are usually worn incorrectly. Other cloth masks do less than nothing, because they provide a false sense of security.
As you know, virus particles are too small to be stopped by the openings in the mask (which allow you to breathe). They are airborne, like smoke.
N95 masks have an electret layer which is made by blow molding fiber against a charged target. The result is charge embedded in the fibers. The charged fibers attract and hold the virus particles.
It would be possible to add an electret layer to a surgical mask, but it seems that this isn’t generally done, probably because they fit so poorly. Maybe someone here could speak to that.
Look at N95 on Wikipedia. The EU has required N95 on transportation for some time.
The Bangladeshi study mentioned in this thread might have used something like that (it isn’t clear from the paper and the promised paper on what kind of surgical mask they used hasn’t appeared yet).
Bottom line: the masks commonly used in the US over the past two years do virtually nothing, unless someone is coughing. How many coughing people have you seen in panic lately?
We found clear evidence that surgical masks are effective in reducing symptomatic seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2. Although cloth masks clearly reduce symptoms, we find less clear evidence of their impact on symptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infections, with the statistical significance depending on whether we impute missing values for nonconsenting adults.
> They still (to this day) did not acknowledge that vaccines and mask mandates do not limit spread of COVID.
They don't "acknowledge" that because it is not a true statement. Masks do limit spread of COVID-19. So do vaccines. Neither one prevents it completely, but that's different from "do not limit spread", and at no point was there either scientific or public health consensus that either one would completely prevent spread.
> Yes - at very beging the assumtion was that vaccines will limit COVID spread but that is not true any more for BA variants
Vaccines still do limit COVID-19 spread, even for the latest variants. They do not prevent it entirely, and for the latest variants, they are more effective against preventing illness or serious illness than against infection (an important clinical distinction), but that's still a huge deal, and it limits spread by reducing duration of illness (infectiousness window) or virus particles produced (the degree of infectiousness).
> In short, mandates should be imposed only if science is 100% clear.
This is another way of saying that you categorically oppose all mandates. Science is never "100% clear", ever.
I would love that I’m wrong. Can you please send me the link to US based study showing that masks mandates limit spread of COVID?
As far as I know, californa had mask mandates while Florida did not and both states had similar number of COVID cases per capita.
Florida had 6,614,806 cases while California had 10,367,437.
More than a few people are "unimpressed" by America's geopolitical adventures in foreign lands, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that this may play more than zero of a role in willingness to be "a team player".
Whether this is logical behaviour misses some important points about humans.
Upthread someone blames it all on Wakefield. I suspect this is also less true than it seems.
I often wonder: could having inaccurate models of reality be harmful?
VDPV2 has also been in W Africa, are you in possession of all Jews' travel history worldwide? (VDPV was also in London and China where I hear Jews even dare to dwell let alone travel) I suspect ADL or Mossad would like to speak to you if you are...
They absolutely should not have done that, but it has nothing to do with the anti-vaccine stance in the U.S., and even in Pakistan:
> "'The CIA is not exclusively responsible for the problems we have in getting children vaccinated but it certainly didn't make it anything easier,' says Anthony Robbins, the co-editor of the Journal of Public Health Policy. Robbins wrote an editorial denouncing the CIA use of fake vaccination programs back in August of 2012. Even before bin Laden was killed in 2011, the Taliban had banned polio immunization in the parts of Pakistan it controls. The Taliban claimed the polio drops sterilize Pakistani children and vaccinators were American spies.
If there's anything the CIA is good at, it's fucking things up. These are the nutjobs that came up with operation Northwoods and actually implemented many other of their stupid ideas.
If you are right, the problem will fix itself. So just relax (unless you still believe in herd immunity: i certainly do not after the crappy C19 vaccines)
Doesn't make sense. We already had non-herd immunity producing vaccines for flu. That covid vaccines produce the same outcome isn't a particularly special case. It's not even that complex to understand the WHY they don't produce herd immunity.
I can understand being frustrated because herd immunity was touted as a possible benefit of mass covid vaccination, but that has nothing to do with whether it exists in general.
The flu is a couple dozen different strains of influenza. The yearly shot is only for around 2-4 of those viruses that are expected to be most prevalent. "Bad flu years" are when they got it wrong.
Like it was claimed the vaccines were 100% effective, while documents now show they knew already it was not. I certainly do not believe the govt-pharma-media complex on this one. They lied too many times in a row to be take serious when it comes to C19 and measures against it.
Not really, they take your chances down to dying from it by a factor of 10 fold. The vaccine is a success. Covid-19 is a much more unstable and mutable virus than polio so it changes so quickly we may always be just a couple steps behind, luckily the human immune system is also ready for such viruses for the most part after being primed by the vaccines. The antivax crowd turn their back on science and turn to mysticism and demagogues for their answers.
The point I’m trying to make is that there’s a wide range of vaccine efficacy. Current vaccines against BA4/5, very poor.
Now, my question is, since the current mRNA vaccine is causing our body to create old spike protein, and BA4/5 almost completely evades the resulting antibodies, what’s the mechanism that reduces severe disease from BA4/5?
There isn't really a meaningful difference; either way the immune system is responding to a protein and "remembering" it.
mRNA breaks down within a few days, by which point spike protein production by your cells has stopped, and the spike proteins themselves break down within a few weeks.
Inactivated virus would be broken down and excreted within a similar timeframe or faster; it's the immune system memory of the proteins that it encountered that persists.
I happen to believe that no disease has been truly eradicated and cannot be done so. Smallpox appears to have many avatars: Chicken pox, shingles and so on. The average HN idiot would be quick to point out to me that that they are all distinctly different viruses and I most assuredly don't know what I'm talking about.
Earlier. In 1721 in Boston, a bomb was thrown at proponent of smallpox inoculation. There were far earlier methods than that, I assume they too faced witchcraft-like accusations and such.
Maybe U.S. is not anymore entitled for this title.
No efficient and free healthcare or education like the other first world countries have. And other issues which you just stated.
It feels that even democracy has serious challenges at the moment.
It's not about healthcare access or education, both of which are free and ignored in the case of vaccines.
It's about the increasing ideological fracturing of this country.
It's probably natural too. Without an actual enemy threatening our way of life, we've turned inwards against ourselves. Like an under stimulated immune system attacking itself.
Emotions are easy to manipulate with political subjects. Partisan narratives sell, they're mimetic, and they spread like wildfire. It turns into a religious war, and each side distrusts the other, stops listening.
A lot of that internal conflict is actually the results of foreign acts of war though. Just look at how much money and other forms of support for the far-right came out of Russia - and not just for the US but also about half of Europe.
And in any case the US has been continuously involved in some kind of war for like the last decades? Vietnam, Iraq 1, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq 2, anti-IS coalition...
> It's about the increasing ideological fracturing of this country.
> Emotions are easy to manipulate with political subjects. Partisan narratives sell, they're mimetic, and they spread like wildfire. It turns into a religious war, and each side distrusts the other, stops listening.
I would dare to argue, that both of these issues would be drastically reduced with increased high level education.
Some could say extreme capitalism.
Good healthcare is paywalled behind expensive insurance and good job.
The college fees are on average $40k per year for private, high quality colleges.
For public out-of-state colleges, average is $23k and for public in-state colleges around $10k per year. [1]
On average in 2018, the degree cost was around $100k [2]
> On average in 2018, the degree cost was around $100k
wow, i couldn't imagine even trying for a degree if i was a teenager nowadays... i can see why student debt forgiveness has been a huge issue recently.
> has something gotten to the average American population ?
Social media makes it very easy to find like minded people and this is not always a good thing. It also makes it easy to reach people that are susceptible to disinformation.
Even more troubling is that they were paralyzed which means they were one of the less than 1% of polio cases that turn into a severe event like being paralyzed. The vast majority of cases are asymptomatic or just give you diarrhea.
How many people could be out in the community and spreading it without anyone knowing?