CharonY

I get that way when I see folks too lazy to to check their own sources and as a result promote dangerous misinformation. Especially when the claims are ridiculous. PhaseI is never dropped as it is a requirement to recruit a larger cohort (especially if preclinical data is lacking) From your link: How does it square with your claim that: It is bad (but perhaps not fatal) to misunderstand something. But it is worse to spread misinformation and then put in a link that contradicts the assertion, apparently hoping that folks would not read. Heck, here is a graph showing the timeline and the overlap between I/II/III. There is misunderstanding, which I am happy to help clear up and there is willful misrepresentation. This is not an example of the former. I also note that you entirely missed the issue of endpoints and rather seem to develop an own idea how trials should be rather how they are in reality. Edit: It is a bit rich in accusing someone of using outdated data and then present papers to delta. That aside the percentage in the paper refer to the secondary attack rate (SAR), which is basically the ratio between numbers of new cases among contacts to the total number of contacts. A SAR of 25% would indicate one new infection after four contacts, whereas a SAR of 38% would indicate one infection after 2.6 contacts (i.e. vaccination resulted in a reduction by ca. 34%). There are a couple of more studies out there but fundamentally they roughly show that vaccinations in delta reduce transmission roughly by half (some show more, some less). The authors do describe why they had overall SAR, and this is because they measured most of it in household settings, where SAR is higher due to ongoing contact with an infected person. With regard to omicron, studies found that two shots do not confer much of immunity anymore, but a booster shot still reduces transmission by half (i.e. comparable to two-shots with delta). The immunity does go down with time, but is still protective for at least 6 months. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1050721/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-4.pdf See page 14. I will reiterate, we are entering a new phase where proper risk assessment is going to be increasingly relevant. Spreading misinformation has contributed significantly to the disease burden and deaths we have seen so far and we have to take a strong stance against it. I do get that being anti-consensus can make one feel like something special, but here we are not talking about something theoretical ideas. Here, our actions have immediate impact on those around us and we have seen that misinformation kills. I am happy to address and discuss things that may be confusing, as frankly the whole mess is not necessarily straightforward. However disseminating outright misinformation is dangerous and should be treated like spread of similar dangerous information. I am pretty sure that at this point more folks died from misinformation related to COVID-19 than from trying to do dangerous experiments, for example, and we have a policy against the latter.

I would appreciate it if you would conduct at least do some basic fact checking before stating falsehoods as facts. All clinical trials are listed and you can easily look them up on clinicaltrials.gov. There, you can easily see that the BioNTech has set the trial up in two parts. One PhaseI and one PhaseII/III. Phase I started April 2020 and moved into Phase II/III in July. Again, that is publicly available information. As noted, the endpoint is not length, but whether a sufficiently large cohort of individuals got infected to evaluate efficacy, and in November an interim report indicated that they were hitting those numbers. Again, all of that is available and documented. Why are you making things up? It is not like that the virus is going to pay you anything, yo know?

That would be a huge jump in assumption. A lot of syndromes are associated with the immune system and a lot stimuli and drugs influence it. In order to ascertain that any of that has a direct impact on the course of a specific infection very specific studies are needed.

The reason why trials take so long is not because they need to be so long, but it is because they phases are traditionally done one after the other. In large part because they are expensive. Safety is assessed predominantly in Phase I. Phase II is looking for efficacy and III is generally used to assess whether it works better than e.g. existing treatments. So one way to accelerate the process, is to increase the recruitment and basically conduct II and III at virtually the same time, rather waiting for a result and then decide on making a decision to go forward. The fact that countries threw money at them clearly helped in the process. The length is often determined by the type of treatment (i.e. how long has it to be taken to show an effect) and time required to recruit sufficient number of people. Moreover, each trial has specific endpoints being monitored, which determines the length of the trial. In case of vaccinations, an important point is to get a certain amount of people infected, so that you can compare how many of the infected were in the placebo vs the treatment arm. For some diseases this can indeed take years. If they are are rare, it is very unlikely that any of the participants will get infected within a short time frame. The companies were "lucky" as during the trials there were several COVID-19 surges and they hit their endpoint fast. As StringJunky pointed out Phase 4 are after-market observations (which includes aspects like manufacturing quality, impurities and other issues). But again, it is not looking at an individual for a long time, but it is looking at side effects in a large population. For vaccines a typical Phase 4 would be a follow-up for side effects for three months and analysis of efficacy over 2 years (e.g. involving antigen/antibody tests, surveys etc.). Others have already commented on the other aspects that are misunderstood. To go back on-topic: the the vaccination mandate was scrapped for fear of losing workers.

You don't take vaccines over several years. Can you show me the article for details? The vaccine components are eliminated from the body in a fairly short time frame. What effects are you looking for and how would you ever now it was because of the vaccine rather than what happened to you between taking the vaccine and the point when it happened? In typical trials folks are not monitored for years after taking a vaccine. What is generally monitored are acute side effects, but those normally manifest while components of the vaccines are still present. So the typically monitoring time is roughly 2 months. You can find examples here: https://www.chop.edu/news/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-vaccine Fundamentally the number of folks vaccinated is still the best way to get safety data. The longer you look back, the fuzzier the sources becomes. Moreover, we also already know that COVID-19 causes long-term issues. So you have the choice between high risk of immediate and long-term issues up and including death and then another option of minimal risk.

Red herring again. The same information as for other trials are available. There is no long-term data for other vaccines as those are not long-term treatments. If you have issues somewhere in your life, how would you trace it back to a vaccination you got as a child? Most has been addressed by Arete:

I think this is one of the questions where one would need to do a reality check. I am pretty sure one can construct a situation where somehow torture is justified, as long as you recast it in way where the outcome is inevitably positive. There are likely also scenarios in which one can imagine genocide somehow to be acceptable. But in mind that would only allow us to explore the limits of morality in general and not the ethical concerns of the acts themselves. For the latter one would need to take reality into account. FBI interrogators have objected to interrogation tactics because a) they found it ineffective and b) they found out that non-toture methods (e.g. building rapport) was more effective in getting actual intel. I.e. they got more information from insurgents before they tortured, rather than after. Here is one of such interviews to this effect: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/08/910640336/former-fbi-agent-addresses-post-sept-11-torture-in-newly-declassified-book There are also theoretical considerations and a more complex review of interrogation methods (https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/law0000136) concluding that torture is simply not a good interrogation method. A review specifically of the "enhanced interrogation program" came to the same conclusion as mentioned already but essentially it does state that the whole program, i.e. the logic behind the method and the training program (spearheaded by contracted psychologists, IIRC), were ultimately devoid of scientific evidence and evaluation. However, a key finding was that psychological theory does suggest that high-pressure coercion and torture and increase the resistance of an individual not to comply. And there is no evidence (outside of Hollywood movies) that it can yield useful information from uncooperative sources. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/OathBetrayed/Intelligence Science Board 2006.pdf In summary, I do not think that one can disassociate the moral argument from torture, for the simple fact that we have evidence that it actually works.

Peterson is saying whatever creates the most outrage so that he can remain relevant and line is pockets.

That is certainly true. Unfortunately these issues are not simple academic discourse, but also intersects with politics, public discourse and so on. It is unfortunate that (internet) celebrities tend to take away much of the oxygen for much needed debates. Unfortunately the internet, but also conventional media thrive from dissent. So uninformed radical takes get the front page, whereas folks investigating these issues are rarely even mentioned (especially not the difficult ones). In certain areas advances have been made, though up to a certain level there are still barriers. One issue is that it can vary quite a bit depending on are and system. In Germany, for example in the last decade the percentage of female professors increased from 10 to about 20%, which might sound like a steep increase. Yet, if you look closer, women are more likely to be on non-tenure track positions (i.e. these are non-permanent positions). What basically happened is that in order to address gender imbalance a system of what some might call "virtue signaling" has been implemented, which basically creates an illusion of catering for minorities but effectively being ignored where it counts. The good news is that when folks get used to such systems, some actually take them seriously. I still do not see it happening in Germany, but in parts of the US and Canada, it has been starting to make a dent, but it will take at least another decade to see whether these changes take hold. Obviously if we talk about a longer time span, say the fifties, yes attitudes have permanently changed. Though I would add that the baseline was pretty low to begin with.

Here, intersectionality comes into play. There is a long history where fights for equal rights resulted in infights. In the US, the civil rights movement experienced quite a significant amount of gender discrimination. I.e. fighting for black rights, often was exclusionary to women's right, and especially black women's rights. Fundamentally. as a society we need to take a careful look at our attitudes and structures to see where we are exclusionary and why and how that ultimately impacts us from the individual to the societal level. There can be disconnect between the ideals and of, e.g. the civil rights movement, and how individuals within in act and focus on. Fundamentally, that is also the idea with regard to diversity. There is the (potentially somewhat naïve) assumption that if leadership is sufficiently diverse, one would be more cognizant of conscious and unconscious exclusionary biases and issues. That, unfortunately requires that everyone involved has significant knowledge on the issue, which quite often requires more than personal experiences. But I do see it as a problem to use these fractures in order to discredit the principles of a given movement. I.e. even if there are feminists who are exclusionary, should we stop striving for a system where men and women have equal access to power? That being said, the society as a whole is clearly still created and dominated with a male-focused element when it comes to power and influence. Things like abortion rights but even maternity/paternity leave show limits of equality and are still elements that limit transition of women into leadership roles.

It is the fear of change. I have been learning quite a lot how different and challenging navigating competitive careers for women is from my wife as well as (former) bosses. I am mentoring quite a few women, too and it is obvious that there are still ongoing challenges. Yes, it is getting a bit harder for men, but this is because there is a desire to create a system that does not caters to them almost exclusively. We are still working with a patchwork system and it is certainly not perfect as attitudes have not really shifted that much among the powerful. But it might be changing. Conservatives don't like it as, well conservatism almost by definition likes to stick to things they were and folks like Peterson love culture wars because that is how they make their money nowadays.

In addition to the test itself, there are no guarantees regarding spread. It depends a lot on the viral load in the infected individuals and there is evidence that in vaccinated folks the viral load is lower on average (though not consistently so) and the risk of a boosted individual to get infected is cut down roughly by half (on average, there is a lot of variability here, too). It is also possible that it was a different variant that they were exposed to, where the vaccination is even more effective against. The whole host-pathogen interaction is subject to many stochastic factors (also including innate immune responses) so it might be impossible to figure out what ultimately happened. But if I were to hazard a guess I would think that having several doses of the vaccine would have played a significant role in it.

Well the issue is that these judges are ultimately supposed to interpret the US constitution, so fundamentally the required skillset is somewhat narrow. Moreover, it seems to me that in this area, there are few hard skills that one could scale them on. Due to the nature of the court, the personal background is likely going to play a significant role. Looking at e.g. Ruth Bader Ginsburg here. I.e. skill-wise there is little to distinguish them, but much of the vetting is based on personality. Kavanaugh was under fire after his partisan outburst during the hearings, where some of his legal supporters thought that this is unbecoming of a supreme court judge.

Eiot has been uninvited to the party due to ongoing abusive behviour. That is not nice, eh?

Looking for the best is an illusion for basically all even slightly complex jobs. One can define a set of suitable candidates, but ultimately figuring out the "best" within that pool is based more on gut guess than anything else. The real issue here is that traditionally we have the ominous "fit" as an important criterion. I.e. does a given person fit the role and the corporate culture. This has typically resulted in rather monolithic entities as someone who might have the same qualifications but somehow sticks out might result in a poor fit. Even perhaps 20 years back, a woman was seen as a poor fit for an academic career (in Germany). It was considered demanding and competitive and it was assumed that having a child would kill productivity. As a result we had and still have a 3:1 ratio of professors (M/W). In the US and Canada there was at least a discussion about that and the idea to boost gender equality has resulted in more parity. As a result, when I talk to students on either side of the pond, I see a big differences in how they see their ability and likelihood to pursue academic career. Moreover, increasing female faculty has not reduced overall productivity. And at least from anecdotes I have seen Germany lose quite a few talented female researchers due to the system who went on to have stellar careers overseas (I worked with some of them). In other words, the desire to find the "best" is often just a gatekeeping systems that selects not for the best in terms of abilities, but more in terms of conformity.

Just for clarification, boiling does not activate spores, they are just not killed. They germinate once they are in favourable conditions. It is actually also not that straightforward with other pathogens, easier. We found that some Salmonella survive heating as done in certain food processing protocols. Many toxins are heat resistant, so once the bacteria start producing it, heating might not render it safe. But you are also right that individual risks vary and these rules are to minimise risk.

Ah sorry, I think I went off a tangent and kind of forgot your original comment and its context. I apologize for that. If you are referring to the quote from the paper regarding randomness I would agree that they were overselling it a bit using that terminology. It is a way to make the manuscript "sexier" I guess.

No I get that, but it is also important to note that depending on context there are different levels of accuracy that one might want to apply. I suppose saying that mutations are non-directional rather than random would be more accurate (and now that I think about it, I would probably prefer it). At the same time though, the question is whether talking to laypersons it is necessary or even helpful to provide all the caveats and details. If we get to the point when talking about mechanisms or the concept of hot-spots, epigenetic regulation and so on, then certainly. But if someone just wants a short answer it might be overkill. Just changing "random" to another adjective is likely to be inaccurate, depending on context and how precise we want to be. In other words, I think that in common conversation we have to figure out how accurate we want or can be while still being understood.

It is a double-edged sword, though. There is evidence that if there is platform for these extremists ideas, rather than being isolated, they get normalized. I.e. spread can then accelerate to the point where folks want to force teachers to discuss the "both sides" of Nazi Germany.

I think I see your point. I think one would be very clear about the specific context to make sure which distinction one wants to make. Typically, the "random" is used as the opposite to "directed" mutations, where as a response to an environmental effect, genes are mutated towards a specific phenotype (such as in a Lamarckian model). However, if we discuss specific targets (say likelihood of one locus vs another) the "random" aspect might only be useful as a mentioned null.

Yes, so individually it is highly unlikely to be traced back to a specific source in this case. Exposure-related cancer is generally based on larger association studies, i.e. looking at groups that for whatever reasons have higher than normal exposure to the agent in question (an outbreak in Kenya was one of those studies providing much evidence for liver cancer) and/or in vitro or animal studies. Even with viral causes the discovery is often (at least intiially) based on associations (e.g. rate of a given form of cancer among infected vs non-infected folks), rather than tracking back the cause within a given individual.

I think the mechanism itself can be called "mutation" without an adjective. E.g. if you just refer to a change in the genetic sequence. Whether you want to add something else, would depend on the context. If you refer to random mutation, you might refer to a model where the mutation rates are uniform (which would be a null-hypothesis situation). An alternative use of random mutation is not based on site-specificity (it has been long known that there are e.g. hot spots, i.e. areas with higher mutation rates, for example), but on outcomes. I.e. mutations are random with respect to whether the result is beneficial, detrimental or neutral to the host. I think this is where OP might be a bit confused about.

I do not see studies associated with it, but there is an article from 2013 that a catering company was sued after several hundred folks got food poisoning. E. coli and Bacillus cereus were implicated, but no deaths reported. But B. cereus associated deaths are very rare. Similar to Shigella and STEC, the toxins are also heat stable, but tend to be less lethal (if memory serves). I was curious and wanted to see whether there are statistics on B. cereus but it seems that they are likely underreported because they are so commonly mild and folks often confuse them with other infections. Estimates for the US are around 25-60k annual cases (and estimates of ~20 hospitalizations and 0 deaths). Salmonella in comparison causes about 1.4 mio infections, 25k hospitalizations and about 400 deaths per year. Camplylobacter hovers around similar values in terms of infections, but around half the deaths. That is not to say that one should not keep an eye on B. cereus infections but it pales quite a bit to other common food-borne pathogens.

You have a number of misconceptions here. First, random mutations do not define evolution. As Arete pointed out, most mutations are neutral. Second, in the paper the beneficial or essential genes are actually protected from mutations. How about you read the paper you quoted? You can start with the header "Epigenome-mediated mutation bias" and go from there. There is some lit indicated there that you want to catch up on, too. And I doubt anyone serious considers a cell making conscious decisions. If you define consciousness that way, it becomes remarkably meaningless. Or rather, you would imply that you as a whole organism do not experience things much different than the individual cells in your body which is rather a bold statement. Assuming I am actually communicating with you rather than you hair follicles.

It is likely Bacillus cereus as StringJunky mentioned and not a mold. Bacillus is able to sporulate. However symptoms are mostly somewhat mild to moderate food poisoning. That being said, the same bacterium can also be found in pasta and wheat products. In either case, deaths are exceedingly rare (and I believe some of the prominent reports were traced back to pasta). Either product should not be kept at room temperature for prolonged time, but it is not quite as dramatic as some might believe (considering how common it is as a food staple). With regard to risk, Bacilllus growth moderately fast (a bit slower than E. coli) with an ideal temperature of around 37C. However, after cooking most bacteria would be dead and it takes a while until spores germinate and they start to replicate. Growth ceases once you hit ~10C, however they can produce two types of toxins even at suboptimal temps (as low as 10C, but at very low rate). With regard to outbreak frequency, it is one of the rare food-borne illnesses (E. coli and Salmonella are far more frequent) and it seems that at least major outbreaks were mostly associated with things like spaghetti with tomato sauce stored for a week (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3232990/), vegetable sauces and couple of others. So rice-related illnesses are potentially more common but too small-scale to be noticeable. There have been reports of contaminated rice with certain molds that produce aflatoxins (which are carcinogenic) but that is also rather rare (and resulted in recalls).