CharonY

I only glanced through it so may have missed some dinner points. It seems interesting, but considering the end points measured, the cohort is too small and needs to be much more age stratified. Titer and disease severity correlate with age.

Well, you do also have to add the fact that we still have a historic association with markers of race. Even if things like critical race theory are dismantling these notions, it would be silly to assume that they suddenly have gone. Plus, many political parties are still using it as a wedge issue, so in other words race assumptions still permeate and influence society beyond just individual experiences. While that is true, there are also big differences depending on where you grow up, when folks have immigrated and so on. There can be a big difference between immigrants now, who are living in a generally more welcoming and accepting environment compared to, say First Nations folks or African Americans, who have experienced continued erasure of their identity and culture. It is easy to overlook those those issues if one does not experience them (heck, my immigration experience to Germany in the 80s was vastly different to what I am experiencing now), but they will still colour individual interactions. Terms like white (or dominant culture) behaviour usually arises if folks create an identity in an area which they can control, i.e. which feels like themselves than something the dominant culture forces them to do. It happens usually if society is less inclusive and on the one hand forces an adherence to norms, but at the same time always finds gaps in the adherence to criticize (i.e. using the framework from OP one could say by being of certain ethnicity one might not be white enough). Again, on the individual level it is fairly easy to resolve, but projecting it on a societal level things get complicated.

That is an excellent point. And just to support that point, the work on animal and most human coronavirus isolates is BSL-2. If they unknowingly isolated SARS-CoV-2 (which is considered BSL-3) then yes, it would be dramatically increase the risk of infection, but as John said, it would have to come from the outside. Perhaps somewhat ironically, they technically might have violated law before their system actually worked to a certain degree. The system they had was unfortunately specific to SARS so it did not trigger properly and while warnings were sent, they were ignored (mix of maliciousness and ineptness would be my guess). If they hadn't anything built up as a response to SARS, however, they would likely not have identified it in the first place (a situation that might have happened in Europe based on newer research). I.e. in a way they would have been in compliance if they simply hadn't identified the clusters in the first place and could then have claimed ignorance. So in other words failing at monitoring diseases would allow folks not to run afoul of reporting requirements (and again, it seems that before the WHO rang the alarm bells there were already cases elsewhere which were not identified and where we generally do not assign maliciousness to their motives.

Even if the organization is charged, it does not mean that anything will come back to the Trumps. Also white collar crime often does not see much jail time. But all is very much speculation at this point.

Well, that is the role of the UN, they can propose things but it is up to folks to take it up or not. However, at least they provide a basis for discussion. The idea of a two-state solution has been kicking around since the beginning and has been basically the working plan from the UN. Support came and went from either side of the conflict and has been e.g. part of the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. At least after the Annapolis Conference it is at least in principle agreed upon by Israel and the Palestinian Authority. In most recent times, Netanyahu has become a major obstacle with pushing settlements on the West Bank. He is also explicitly against a one-state solution seemingly favoring status quo (a cynical view could be that this is the only move to preserve his power). Similarly, during many times a two-state solution was favoured among Palestinians and Israelis, often fueled by threat of conflict. Again, it almost seems like the hardliners on each side are feeding each other at the cost of the citizens. Right, so historically how well did it work? What would be the body count where you think folks would be ready to submit? Especially in the last few years (2008-2020; Statista data) the death toll are already 20x among Palestinians over Israelis (not counting injuries and associated death due to loss of medical supply, hospitals etc.). So is the region more peaceful now? Since we have passed your highest levels, how far should they go? In contrast, I think it is wrong to have plans that focus on outbreak of violence. When the rockets are flying, it is already too late. Rather I would ask why were the Palestinian families evicted? Wasn't there a way to mitigate? How about strengthening the rights of Palestinians living under occupation to undermine the argument of Hamas? Was storming of the Mosque necessary? And so on. If the whole picture (rather than isolated events) paint the picture of a suppressive regime that clearly favors one group of the population, it is small wonder that there is an ample feeding ground for resentment.

Yes and that is what Israel is doing and obviously we have seen how well that worked. Other than a net increase of human suffering what are the positives? Also what would be the endgame? There is a whole range of other issues beside the attacks on either side, but it is clear that hardliners in Israel only bolster hardliners among Palestinians. Actually the tunnels are also used to smuggle food and medication, but profit margins are likely lower and the volume to value ratio probably too. Also there is that: Also the blockade is not only limiting influx of goods, but also efflux, which has devastated Palestinian economy. I.e. even if they smuggled food it would do little to improve the quality of life in Gaza. There are many reports on this issue see a recent one here https://unctad.org/news/israeli-occupation-cost-gaza-167-billion-past-decade-unctad-estimates

Eh, I am not sure that I would like smart fascists over dumb ones, though.

! Moderator Note As OP has not established that the discussion is based on accepted biological knowledge, the thread has been moved to speculations. As such it follows the usual speculation rules and requires some support to allow a proper discussion.

I am aware of Dr. Shi's work. But it is one thing to use the moniker in an article or perhaps a social media post, whereas in press interview and especially if accusations are made one would expect something to be a bit more specific. To be fair, she may actually be fond of the moniker and I suspect I am projecting a bit but I am personally not fond of these kind of nicknames, especially when they are used without the actual name.

This is a weasel tactic. Rand Paul did not provide any trackable information on: - the name of the researcher (installing calling them dismissively bat woman) - the specific grant he alludes to - any reference on the paper. This could just be sloppy, but more realistically it gives him and his ilk the ability to then continue to say that there is 'reasonable' doubt, or 'some' have said that and so on. If Fauci responds to that, there will be something else next week. It is not an honest inquiry. Rather the goal is to discredit the person and spin a narrative that suits their base.

One could change the wording a bit insofar that an engineer applies known principles to make things work rather than necessarily having a rigorous scientific framework (which is probably less applicable to modern engineering).

Also to emphasize that the article I linked also shows that the US private space sector has raised much more than the Chinese private sector.

It is not an either or question. China also has a fledgling private space industry (mostly involved in satellite delivery). https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/21/1016513/china-private-commercial-space-industry-dominance/ And looking at an apple-to-apple comparison the Chinese private sector has total lower volume in investments than their US counterparts. Also regarding unilateralism, the US congress has banned NASA from any bilateral agreements with China (with few exceptions). However, with respect to the Chinese space station, there are at least agreements with the Italian space agency and I have heard of some European universities involved in designing microgravity experiments.

In other words, all of them had at best a science-based education, but none of them worked in any capacity as scientists.

A new report has provided new estimates for COVID-19 deaths. Verified death numbers obviously are a lower estimate. By looking at excess deaths and accounting for non-COVID-19 related deaths the authors estimate a current death toll of 6.9 millions globally (more than double of verified cases). In the US the estimated total deaths are over 900k. In the UK both numbers are closer (209k vs 150k).

It got highlighted in the news for a while as fatal cases (often strokes) occurred also in younger (below 55) hospitalized patients. There are follow-up studies indicating that even after discharge COVID-19 patients were at a higher risk to suffer from thrombembolic events, so the numbers I provided above might actually underestimate the risk, if they only looked at the time during hospitalization (I honestly cannot recall the details, there is just so much being published and quite a bit of it is somewhat useless).

In addition to what Phi and exchemist said, there are folks who have lost loved ones or know of folks who did. The whole outbreak was perpetuated by the inability of us to pull together and do the right thing. The fact that even now, when the chance of herd immunity is slipping away, there are folks who cannot think beyond their own benefit is galling, to say the least.

We could shorten the discussion by simply stating that a) there is no age group where providing the vaccine does not benefit the population as a whole and b) with the potential exception of under 20 year olds there is no age group where vaccination does not significantly reduce the risk of adverse health outcomes. And even then in younger folks it would depend a lot on active case numbers and other factors, which goes back to a). I mean, theoretically you can avoid those risks altogether by isolating alone indefinitely in a bunker, but that likely carries other health risks.

There are values actually published and circulated in various news (I could try to find them, but it was maybe a few weeks ago). There is a bit of a problem with how the reporting should be done, as there are different thromboses risks. Looking at the published numbers The result was about a 10 fold higher level in COVID-19 patients. In the study the calculated rate was about 40 per million CVST (the form of thrombosis associated with AZ and J&J) in COVID-patients and about 7 per million for mRNA vaccines. However that study did not (to my knowledge) include AZ and J&J vaccines (i.e. adenovirus-vaccines). We cannot simply compare raw numbers as the cohort need to be matched and it appears that there is significant gender effect there. However, they also looked at PVT, which is a more frequent type of thrombosis found in COVID-19 patients (~400 per million), whereas the rate for the vaccinated group was again only ~7 per million. There is another pre-print out suggesting that CVST is actually not statistically significantly higher in a vaccinated cohort compared to baseline incidence.

This understanding is very wrong. As you mentioned the overall goal of vaccinations is to limit spread of the disease and thereby the creation of new variants that could increase morbidity in younger folks. This is happening right now, B.1.1.7 has resulted in much higher hospitalizations among younger folks. In many areas half the ICU cases are now under 40. However, even ignoring that, the risk of death drops with younger age, but even in the 30s it is still estimated at around 0.2%. This is way higher (orders of magnitudes) than any risk (i.e. not only counting death) from any vaccine. Taken together, individual as well as population risk suggest that vaccinations will improve both outcomes

As mentioned, those folks are not trained scientists by education, but perhaps more importantly, they did not make money via science or research careers. It also helped that their respective families were relatively well-off (not sure about Bezos, tbh). If anything the example actually demonstrates that one should not have an academic career if wealth is the goal. In fact, academics tend to earn less over a career than their counterparts in industry. A part is that after a PhD entry salaries in many industries are at least decent, whereas postdoctoral salaries is often just somewhat higher than minimum wage (depending on where you are) and then by the time you actually manage to get a faculty position, the industrial counterpart has moved on to senior position, outpacing academic salary at every step. Although being lower than industrial jobs, tenured salaries are not bad, but certainly far from making mountains of money (and certainly not anything near mansions). That being said, it is far worse for those who do not get a tenure track position. Sessionals barely make a living, for example. In other words, if you are in just for the money, focusing on research is not the way to go. As others mentioned, the actual reward is in the job itself, though it may depend on the individual to find what is important to them. Teaching, for example can be challenging, especially when you realize that the class dramatically drops performance when you make it harder for them to copy/paste assignments and exams to post online. The joys of online teaching... In addition, in many countries, including Canada, France and Germany (not sure about the UK and not that common in the US) professorial salaries are negotiated as part of public service or similar unions. So there are hard limits on upper salaries.

You were talking about phages. They only work with bacteria and it is fairly to get a site specific construct. Also expression systems typically do not require site-specific insertion into the host genome. The goal there is not to modify the genome, but to express specific proteins (or RNA). Site-specific mutations of eukaryotes are an entirely different thing, but again, you would not use bacteriophages for that one. I mean, if you are actually interested there are a whole bunch of books (including open source textbooks) you could read on that topic.

That's right. They looked vaguely familiar to me for some reason, that could be it.

These are bacteriophages, i.e. they only infect bacteria and there is no need to use CRISPR. They have been used traditionally as a cloning vector since they do not care too much about what is packaged in their heads and can therefore be used for specialized transduction. Nowadays there are versatile in vitro systems that utilize viral recombination reactions which makes the virus itself redundant and can be used to e.g. create mammalian expression vectors and other purposes outside of bacteria.

I would not frame it in evolutionary terms for a variety of reasons. The simplest being that I don't see a good reason to use that framework over classic cell biology. While it is not my field, I think that everyone promoting even only doubling of healthy lifespans is massively overhyping the little we actually understand. To me it seems like we just figured out how to somewhat reliably make fire and now want to create cold fusion based on what we just learned. There are many steps between and these have not been outlined in a satisfying way (and/or include hand waving away massive knowledge gaps and challenges). Note that cancer is not the only issue associated with aging, it is just one of the many things associated with it. Also there many cancer forms where it is more likely to die with it rather than of it (e.g.prostate). The average lifetime risk of getting cancer is about 44% in Canada and 40% in the US. The risk of dying from it is about half that, respectively.