CharonY

There are more folks on this forum who do not live in the US (or do not live there anymore) besides you two and I think their perspective matters, too. I myself have lived in various systems and still see a lack of symmetry in many claims here (and I think it is because I have experienced very different overton windows throughout my life). As such I would say it is not only the Rep vs Dem issue here, but also personal experiences.

Actually in the modern era it has been more accessible than anytime else in history. For the longest time, philosophical and scientific pursuit were exclusively in the hand of the rich and powerful. Access to higher education is uneven, but increasing. Some countries have lowered the financial limitation more than others, by e.g. having no significant tuition fees (though there is still the challenge of supporting oneself while studying). There are also other means of self-improvement such as free online courses that one can take to enrich one's knowledge and so on. If you are saying that benefits are also concentrated among the rich, then it is more of an economic problem and inherent to capitalist societies, not a science problem per se.

Sometimes (but invention is not necessarily science), no, no, yes (but again invention is not science), yes and no, not a full sentence, yes and no, yes and no, yes. Also, unfocused questions typically do not yield very useful answers.

I will also say that if the internet is the only place where you exchange ideas, you might want to try to get into a more stimulating environment. One of the reasons to go to college is to get exposed to peers and researchers so that one is not mired in one's own thoughts only. Dozens of ideas are conceived and dismissed whenever you catch up with someone over a coffee. At some point you will realize that ideas are abundant and cheap and the real tricky bit is to make them reality.

While I think this is an interesting point, it is necessary to look at things more fine-grained than that. The reality is of course a mix of effects, some of which we have talked about earlier (e.g. voter suppresssion, status threat of white voters etc.). In that context I think two key questions are important. First, what are the proportion of voters who voted for Trump because they felt unheard, and second, why did they felt so? One issue as brought up earlier and which seems numerically the most predictive factor was status threat by non-whites. Folks felt that their way of living was threatened by immigrants. The swamp is just nebulous enough to include folks that are not doing what they want to see happening (e.g. fewer immigrants, a wall and similar things) as part of the swamp. In that regard Trump actually delivered. And in fact far from being disillusioned, Trump actually got more votes than in 2016. I feel that a part of the whole mess is that certain folks like to see themselves as victims, even while being in power. Issues like status threat arise from such a viewpoint, and I have heard repeatedly that especially white men think that they are not take seriously anymore, just because there is a push to have POC's also being heard. Personally, I find it very hard to navigate these situations for a number of reasons.

Actually no, the mechanism to how they are generated are so vastly different that it has severe impact on their effect and production. In short a RNA vaccine holds the promise of rapid vaccine development. Once you sequenced a virus you could just identify an unique stretch, synthesize it and put it into a lipid shell. An attenuated vaccine requires to cultivate and purify the virus, inactivate them in a way to render them harmless but still retain immunogenicity (which is tricky and takes a long time). Using parts of the virus requires again a genetic step but then you still have to express the protein in vivo or in vitro, purify it and then use the resulting product as a vaccine. Think about it that way, instead of raising a pork and roasting it, or even just cut off pieces of it (which is actually not a a good example, it is more like raising just a leg instead of a whole pork) you just take a picture of a hog, and then use the digitized information to print out something that you can just eat (yes, stupid analogy, but it is that different). All antigen production happen within your body now, instead of requiring to produce them.

I stand by my comment, if you track down data, you do have to check the source and figure out on what they are based on. If you are curious about things like food supply dominance, there are various sources you can look at. Believing your gut without doing research is just plain lazy. Edit: to make it more concrete. Say I assume that I think that Wal-Mart has a monopoly in groceries. So I would think that the first thought would be: is it really true? Shortly followed by how can I find it out? What is the right metric to look at? E.g. revenue, market share and so on. If I was at least bit curious about the matter I would look at what data is out there and whether my assumptions are true. If I start with the assumption of being right it would mean that I am more concerned about being right or pontificate my points rather than being curious about how things are and how my thoughts line up with reality.

Then my info is outdated, I only have heard of two more serious UK cases (but it was a few days back and I have not kept a close eye on it). But as you said, they all recovered. I am not sure about the flu vaccination, especially as not that many have been vaccinated yet. Aside from the mRNA the the ingredients are: Lipids (including ((4-hydroxybutyl)azanediyl)bis(hexane-6,1-diyl)bis(2-hexyldecanoate), 2 [(polyethylene glycol)-2000]-N,N-ditetradecylacetamide, 1,2-Distearoyl-sn-glycero-3- phosphocholine, and cholesterol) And finally some salts and sugars: Potassium chloride Monobasic potassium phosphate Sodium chloride Dibasic sodium phosphate dehydrate Sucrose In addition, the FDA has now released a report one the Moderna vaccine (which is also RNA-based) and is expected to be approved soon under emergency rules.

Worse than that, though. A cult has formed that actually think that the rampant corruption is for unfathomable reason great and justified.

I find your lack of curiosity very unnatural.

So far there have been two cases of anaphylactoid reactions (i.e. similar display as anaphylaxis, but different mechanism) from which they have recovered. So folks with severe allergies are asked to discuss risks with their healthcare provider.

Especially if arguments are based on things that one can simply look up. In this case one would look for e.g. market share for groceries, which is somewhere between 50-60%. If one is not willing to anchor ones argument on any facts, one is basically just making this up.

! Moderator Note Only one thread per topic, please.

I suspect that is difficult to predict and depends on what type of company it is (e.g. startup vs larger company). I will say that it is a bit unusual to a hire a new technician to establish a lab, usually that would be the job of the lab lead. I would probably take a close look at the contract and what stipulations might be in there. If you work out methods together with the lab lead (or equivalent) I'd be much less worried. As a technician your job is typically to continue running methods, and if you are trained to do things, it would be a waste to have to train someone else. The only scenario I can think of where it might make fiscal sense is to hire a PhD level expert to establish methods and then hire a cheaper technician (MSc, for example) to do the work. This is what sometimes happens in industrial Postdocs.

Yes, outside of vaccines, I was thinking about the fact that folks would promote unproven treatments and deride simple but effective measures. And technically, if we kept or distance for, say two months on a global scale, we would be effectively burning the virus out, too. But again, it is worthwhile to remember that even during the rollout, distancing and protection measures must continue in order to keep deaths down. We do not have sufficient evidence that immunized folks are unable to transmit the disease, for example.

! Moderator Note Please dial it down a couple of notches. This level of posting does little to improve the discussion.

Yes, potentially. The big issue is that there is often a disconnect between the biological effect size of genetic factors and how folks (including medical professionals and scientists) interpret the data. It has been hammered into our brain that genetic effects are huge, whereas in truth most of our knowledge now indicates that things are way more subtle, and/or way overshadowed by non-genetic factors. In fact, this pandemic has shown us that social efforts (including simple things such as washing hands and keeping distance) are far more effective in reducing death than putting hopes into miracle cures, which I feel is a somewhat related mindset.

The way your immune system memorizes an antigen happens on several levels and elements like strength and frequency of exposure play a role. However, there are also certain genetic factors (i.e. what types of antibodies you are actually producing) that might play a role as well as your overall status when being infected and/or receiving the vaccine. In other words, there is nothing fundamental in the mechanism of vaccination vs disease exposure that would allow a priori assumptions about length of protection other than empirical evidence. I.e. vaccines are applied under controlled conditions and based on trial (and further observation after release) we can provide rough answers about how long it will protect (and since the COVID-19 vaccine is so fresh, the maximum time we know anything about is the length of the trials at max). Exposure to a disease is undefined, however. You do not know the dose you have been exposed to or for how long or even when and how many times. So unless the disease is known to elicit a very strong memory effect (again, something we don't know enough about COVID-19) we cannot do any predictions. You have to remember, for most diseases and vaccinations we have decades of data. Here, we have less than a year's worth. Actually it is part of a new generation of vaccines which so far were not terribly effective. Instead of having an inactivated (or attenuated) virus, the BioNTech (as well as the Moderna) system uses just a bit of the genetic material (bits of mRNA coding for the spike protein of the virus). The idea is to introduce this RNA into our cells, they will produce and present the antigen for our immune system to recognize (i.e. it is a bit of a shortcut to for a process that is termed antigen processing and presentation). The big issue is that RNA is very unstable and is often degraded before delivered to our cells and therefore immunogenicity was very low. This is why folks think that the efficacy of the current mRNA vaccine is astounding.

The paper I had in mind was from Gietel-Basten et al. published in Plos one (2019). I think you should be able to find it by googling the name and journal. It is open access, but let me know if you have trouble getting it. I should add that there other papers trying to assess the potential environmental impact of the policy but I think most are making rather rough assumptions and have been criticized for that. This does not mean that there is no other lit around, I just did not come across it, which should not be very surprising as these is way outside my area of expertise.

First, I want to preface that often it is often problematic to assess policies on a single dimension. However, I cam across a paper a while ago, indicating that overall the population growth pattern in China might have not been that affected in composite. I should add that there is not a singular policy in China, but there were several approaches. The first in the early 70s encouraged later marriage and fewer children, which had almost immediate impact on fertility, and then the one-child policy enacted at the end of the 70s. The study that I have in mind argued that the latter had little impact on fertility and that overall the trajectory would have been very similar even without that particular (i.e. one-child) policy. If interested, let me know and I can try to dig out the reference.

Yes a number of facilities with -80C freezers (including universities) are preparing to receive and store shipments.

The idea of booster shots is to re-immunize after the initial response goes down. If applied too early the issue is that either it does not prolong immunity and in some cases can result in hypersensitivity in rare cases. Waiting too long can also result in reduced level of protection if the priming effect wears off. I suspect that the time is what has been used during the trials as I suspect there was not enough time to optimize the interval.

In cases of complications patients often get unblinded as it can inform on treatment of the patient.

First of all I will say that COVID-19 should not be lumped together with other known seasonal diseases. The reason is that for the latter the susceptibility is massively lower than for a novel disease. Ultimately, COVID-19 might eventually become seasonal, depending how immunity against it pans out in the population. The next question would then to look at known diseases and inspect their pattern of seasonality before we go any deeper in specifics. A lot of diseases not only have different patterns, but also different causes, for examples the properties of the causative agent (e.g. mutation rate, sensitivity to temp or humidity etc.), the way it is transmitted (e.g. seasonality of vectors such as tics) and/or human behaviour (e.g. travel pattern). Measles transmission cycles have been connected to congregation of children during school terms (see Fine and Clarkson, Int. J. Epidemiol. 1982;11:5-14). If we go for influenza, for example, Vitamin D is one of the factors that have been discussed in terms of seasonality (which falls under host health status) that is potentially one element. But while the seasonality in tropical and subtropical areas does not follow seasons, it still has (short) cycles, which could for example be related to immune responses (e.g. new mutations, followed by infection/vaccination cycles). But indoor heating and ambient temperature have also been linked to contribute to seasonality (or cycles in outbreaks in general). There are quite a few papers and reviews out there looking especially at these issues. But again, COVID-19 (or spread of SARS-CoV-2) is a special case and would need more time to figure out whether there is seasonality or not. But perhaps a concise answer to OP, we know to some degree, certainly not for all diseases, and chances are is no universal pattern.

One should add that this is also an ethical question that as of yet (to my knowledge at least) has not been resolved yet. Especially in long-term studies the placebo group is often not revealed in order to collect data for as long as possible. This, of course leads to an ethical dilemma. On the one hand, participants are informed that they might receive a placebo and, in the case of vaccine trials, might not be protected (though of course, there was no guarantee that the vaccinated group was protected, either). On the other hand, after efficacy is established, one needs to balance the need for data collection with protection of the participants. This is an ongoing discussion in the community and I am not sure where the decision will ultimately land.