(2022-10-27) ZviM Covid 10/27/22 Another Origin Story

Zvi Mowshowitz: COVID-19 10/27/22: Another Origin Story.

Executive Summary
New preprint on potential origins of Covid-19, not updating much.
Gain of Function research continues.

The Numbers

Situation seems straightforward enough. Variants are picking up speed, so we might see cases start to head back up a bit for a time

Booster Boosting

A mono-valent booster would have been a better choice. Given that the vast majority of what a booster activates are the existing (original strain) defenses, I don’t see the argument for why we went bi-valent other than The Fear

HHS to run ads to promote boosters, customized to target minority groups. I do not expect this to be a worthwhile use of taxpayer funds

ACIP unanimously formally approves new child vaccine schedule that includes Covid. (As a recommendation, like the Flu Vaccine - not as requirement.)

I am willing to believe that bribing people is no longer a useful opportunity here.

Variants

Physical World Modeling

Sinovac does not protect against infection for level 5+ Omicron variants. Zero Covid policy continues anyway. (China)

In Other Covid News

Can We At Least Ban Gain of Function Research?

not only can we not stop doing it, we cannot even do the mandated cost-benefit analysis testing first.

Bloom Lab weighs in on the ‘BU Chimera’ gain of function case from last week.

To repeat, they engineered avian H5N1 flu to be airborne transmissible in mammals.

New Preprint on Origins of Covid-19

New preprint paper claims to show Covid-19 was made in a lab (preprint) by identifying the places it was ‘stitched together,’ this thread has further thoughts. Prof Francois Balloux confirms replication of the findings

Those threads:

can be falsified by recalling freshman molecular biology.

I find the argument here unconvincing, in either direction

Other Medical and Research News

Pandemics are bad. We should prevent them. They could happen at any time

‘The next pandemic’ will arrive on essentially a Poisson distribution. There’s a chance each day/month/year that it arrives, which we can reduce via various prevention methods, or we can radically increase by doing Gain of Function Research.

Here are Spencer’s proposed solutions:

Are we going to talk about vaccine research? About streamlining production and approval processes? About plans to impose proper travel restrictions and quarantines? About what you’d actually do to prevent a pandemic if you cared about that, once you discovered it with the surveillance? No. Well, then.

FDA Delenda Est, did you know that all available-in-America IUDs are too big for a large percentage of women because the FDA decided to regulate IUDs as if they were drugs which has resulted in it taking clinical trials and on average 12 years to get approval? So we only have 5 choices available instead of 22, often all too big.

With that in mind, the FDA is planning on ramping up its War on Knowledge. Diagnostic tests are its latest enemy. They want Congress to pass a law explicitly allowing them to prevent such tests

Claim that OTC medicines combined with IT tech are disrupting healthcare and greatly lowering costs, estimates 5%-10% drop in medical visits already from drugs being moved from prescription to OTC even under FDA’s rules

Claim that NIH is denying access to its genetic data to those it believes will use that data to look for differences between groups or find a link between genetics and intelligence. They do not want people to look

FIRE says that University of Minnesota is issuing a Hippocratic Oath that, among other things, promises to “honor all Indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by Western medicine.” That means either your doctor will violate that oath, or they won’t.

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Getting more efficient information filtering systems, and figuring out how to scale by incorporating the efforts of others, will be key to the success of Balsa Research.