CharonY

There is recent evidence that combined testing performs better https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/ns-combined-nose-throat-rapid-test-more-accurate-1.6322961

We also see a gradient in hesitancy among health care workers, with MDs having the lowest and paramedics or related staff having the highest. If anything, hesitancy among healthcare workers shows that informed decisions alone are unlikely to allow us to get universal vaccination levels. Therefore it actually is argument for mandatory rather than voluntary measures. The failure is on the "inform" side, as certain folks will continuously deny information presented to them. Edit: Swansont and TheVat made important points and I would like to add that similar patterns have emerged from other countries with federal and/or local vaccine mandates. Moreover, historically there are always folks resisting mandates, regardless of the level of actual safety data available (again, red herring, it is more related to confirmation bias). But over time the mandate helps to normalize vaccination schedules and compliance almost always increased over time. That being said, public trust is at an all-time low (thanks internet! https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-health/dozen-misguided-influencers-spread-most-anti-vaccination-content-social-media), so the effect might be more muted this time around.

It is funny that in Canada the nurse and medical association were protesting, too. For not making vaccines mandatory in Ontario and Quebec. Some hospitals and care home require them nonetheless.

More so, I would say. I mean, at least in my lab the students generally do not have routine contact with vulnerable individuals. The fact that this does not seem to be universally the case just because of liability reasons is actually quite surprising. But then it might be potentially difficult for affected patients to prove that they got infected by health care personnel and not e.g. by other patients.

The long-term safety data is a bit of a red herring- what one should look for is the rate of adverse effects relative to doses administered. Collecting less data over a longer period does not tell us more.

"Also it is only old people, so who cares? I want to live my life." Which, btw. is an actual quote.

Don't mean to speak on Arete's behalf, but in a way these things have happened to some limited degree. In Indonesia there was a report that folks without masks were ordered to dig graves for COVID-19 victims https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/17/asia/indonesia-coronavirus-grave-diggers-intl-hnk-scli/index.html And apparently there have been many heartfelt messages on social media as well in different news outlets with folks regretting not getting vaccinated. However, the issue here is at least two-fold. There is a big group (typically younger) who simply think that it does not apply to them. I.e. they might think that only old and overweight people will suffer (and die). Then there is a smaller, but somewhat crazier faction who simply don't believe that these deaths are real. Yet another group is simply misinformed, but believe in false information that make them believe that vaccinations carries a higher personal risk than getting sick (and often none of them really think or care too much about the risks for others, a pattern that we also see here). There is a relatively large body research over the last decade that indicate that reaching out individually to people and especially by trusted people seems to be the most effective way to address vaccine hesitancy. But as we can see, it is difficult to implement.

And 5 millions are basically only the lower estimate (i.e. confirmed cases). The overall burden is likely to be higher. Way higher by some estimates: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00104-8 True, given that COVID-19 related deaths have vastly outpaced vehicular deaths. I really could not think of anything even coming close in recent times. Even the opioid crisis has been outpaced and we know how much regulations, laws and punishments have been implemented with regard to illicit drug use.

It is like saying that folks should be allowed to be drunk driving. Y'all got airbags after all. It makes no sense.

Or that maintaining a pool of infected increases the chance of new variants (I mean that has only been the driver of at least three waves...). Or increase the risk of folks for which vaccines won't work, or that filling up hospitals and thereby restricting health care is bad for everyone etc, etc. I keep being astonished that 2 years into a crisis of this magnitude folks are able to learn nothing.

A couple of things: many archaea are difficult to cultivate and therefore presence and diversity of archaea were underestimated for a long time. Cultivation-independent has remedied that somewhat (but only ramped up fairly recently), but without an accessible pure culture it is not easy to study their physiology and pathobiology. There is some evidence that in certain anaerobic dental infections and abcesses archaea are present, but without a good model system it would be hard to figure out whether they caused it, or were just opportunistic. There is at least study where folks tried to infect mouse models with methanogens, resulting in higher mortality compared to controls, but there is not a huge body of evidence out yet. Moreover many of these studies are fairly new (a couple of years, really) and more studies and a better understanding of the role of archaea in our microbiome is needed.

While many certainly have a confirmation bias, the sad thing is that in that climate there are many that appear to be genuinely unclear about what is fact or fiction.

I mean, anti-vaccination has a history basically as long as vaccinations and many of the original arguments still echo today. E.g. safety of vaccines, which in the 19th century were certainly much more valid than today. The internet definitely has allowed the spread of stupid things much more easily for sure, though and I think it is drowning out the information. See if you tell folks something like only 1 in 1 million will have issues, that is a good message. But if you start being more precise like the studies have shown something like 1 in 100k with milder issues, or that some subgroup may have a higher frequency of non-serious complications etc to contextualize the data, you start confusing folks. Thus, science being precise is seen by many folks as science being uncertain. It is something that the medical officers are also facing. Either make simple declarative statements, but then it is an issue if you need to revise them due to new situations. Or you make more complicated, but more precise statements, which leaves many folks confused and hence less trusting.

This is perhaps one of the weirder experiences I had related to the pandemic. We had several discussions with students and members of the public who had concerns about vaccines. We were somewhat prepared to have some crazies and there were indeed questions that were borne out of conspiracy theories (e.g. 5g, vaccines are lethal made with aborted fetuses etc.). Yet, surprisingly we found that engaging with them and explaining it why that was silly did help to assuage their fears. I.e. it seems that some folks are not on the level of a true "believer" but they are utterly confused by the existing information and they apparently have no ability to distinguish between the nonsense in social media and actual facts (and it seems to go though all age categories). It does seem to me that there is a fundamental erosion of trust in public messaging and that individual connections might be believed more. The issue there of course is that everyone can go to youtube, call themselves Dr. so-and-so and create inane narratives that then spread like wildfire. Many of the ideas are so far out that you would assume that one has to be a conspiracy nut to believe them. The positive way to think about it is that even if folks believe crazy things, they might be amenable to education. The negative way to think about it is that apparently not only crazies are susceptible to this internet nonsense.

I think the strength of the scientific endeavor is that it is amenable to mentioned examination. That tricky bit however being that at least in more complicated areas a certain level of expertise is required for cross-examination is needed and this is where a certain level of trust is necessary.

Sorry, I think my comment might have been a bit cryptic. I just meant to say that viral evolution or the development of mobile genetic elements in general are what has been discussed under the catchy umbrella of "Selfish genes" i.e. genetic elements that propagate without conferring selective benefits to their host (or being detrimental to them). Which is a bit of a different line than thinking of virus as reduced organisms (I think that line of thought was mostly fueled by the discovery of "giant" viruses).

One line of thought assumes that they developed from mobile genetic elements (think transposons, plasmids, integrons and so on), which incidentally fits the original thread (Selfish gne) quite well.

Viruses do not have an active metabolism- they use the host to make their proteins but provide the genetic material (RNA or DNA) to do so

You mean this question? I.e. what molecules would likely be the first? As mentioned (I think) this is an open question. I mostly only remember that there is still an ongoing dispute regarding whether there really was a an RNA world predating a DNA world. There is even more uncertainty regarding molecules that may have dominated before that. As you have noted, it is unlikely that RNA itself is a prebiotic molecule. There is a good report here, but it is a oldish and I am not really up to date on the latest findings. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81263-5 I think some work have been focused on thermodynamic models for early molecules and alternative pathways for formation of early carbon bodies.

In my original reading of your it seemed to me that were arguing that the viral RNA was also a ribozyme or somehow a catalyst, but maybe I misread. I am not disputing that RNA can have catalytic functions.

That is not the common definition of a catalyst, though. The closest is a ribozyme, which are a kind of RNA that have catalytic functions. But those that "only" code for a protein for example have not catalytic functions themselves. Proteins certainly came later as there is evidence that even small peptides can have catalytic functions. But as mentioned ribozymes could also have play a role. In addition, there are some who think that we are looking at the thermodynamics wrong and that at the beginning of life certain reactions may have been energetically favourable even without more complex molecules, but I don't know how strong the evidence for that currently is.

Ah I see. Fundamentally redoxreactions are at the core of it. I could have said oxidative phosphorylation, right? And anaerobic fermentation is basically just a means to recycle reducing equivalents. However, they do not need to go through membranes as such. That being said, it is assumed that fermentation might have created excess of acids (as the and proton pumps may have been an early development to deal with it. These are then potentially the precursor of electron transport chains. However, this is based on student-level reading, I don't know how much these assumptions have changed in the last two or so decades. Ancestral metabolism is not my specialty.

As with other forms of categorization it is obviously a bit arbitrary and at least theoretically based on genetic distance and/or fossil similarity. But obviously that is not trivial and fossils do not show linear progression. This article has a nice discussion https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0237.

IIRC they didn't puzzle over it for long. Rather they were worried that found their could interfere with Curiosity's sampling and analyses.

Photosynthesis proteins as well as ATP-synthases arose a fair bit later. A common assumption is that substrate level phosphorylation was at the beginning. There are other hypotheses around which are based on how other reactions were potentially thermodynamic favourable, but i haven't looked at those for a while.