News & Views from an Embedded Systems Designer
ACIP voting member Helen “Keipp” Talbot, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, spoke of hospitals crammed with unvaccinated patients sick with COVID-19. “In all honesty, we could give boosters to people, but that’s not really the answer to this pandemic,” Dr. Talbott said. “I feel like we’re putting lipstick on frogs. This is not going to solve the pandemic.”
Source: CDC advisors OK boosters for 65+, those with health risks—not occupational risks | Ars Technica
Earlier in the year I wrote about the fact that we were essentially in a race between achieving herd immunity through vaccination and the appearance of more infectious variants. Well – we lost the race. That is to say, anti-vaxxers and the vaccine hesitant lost the race for all of us. There is no way to sugar-coat this. We had a window of opportunity, and now the window is closed, and it is entirely due to people who refused, against all evidence, to get vaccinated. The delta variant is now surging, vaccine efficacy is waning, and children are now being affected in greater numbers.
First the anti-vaxxers and the vaccine hesitant brought back measles and increased infant suffering and death from pertussis. Now they have very likely guaranteed that there will be suffering and death from Covid-19 variants for decades to come.
Source: Masks Work | NeuroLogica Blog
Enough time has finally elapsed that we can now measure the long term health impacts of DDT. We banned most uses of DDT after decades of ordinary people overusing DDT. A woman I worked with in the 80’s once bemoaned the banning of DDT because by spreading lots of it around her garden she kept the ants off her tomatoes. She did this because in the 50’s & 60’s industry insisted that DDT was completely safe for humans and other mammals. At the time of the banning in the early 70’s we were only seeing the early affects of our overuse in the population declines of birds, raptors in particular. Now that enough time has passed:
Scientists found health effects in grandchildren of women exposed to the pesticide
Source: Consequences of DDT Exposure Could Last Generations – Scientific American
UPDATE June 10th 2021, as I find new articles they’re included in the list below.
Science reporting has always been atrocious. The facts and basics of how science works are more often wrong than right as presented in the media. Reporting on the origins of Covid-19 is no different. Two of the biggest errors that journalists keep making during the pandemic are, confusing possibility with probability, and giving too much weight to hypothesis from non-experts like Nicholas Wade.
Here’s a few of articles from actual scientists which include lots of information from other scientists who have even more actual subject matter expertise.
Source: Sandwalk: Real scientists discuss the lab leak conspiracy theory
Source: The Origins of SARS-CoV-2 | Science-Based Medicine
Source: The origin of SARS-CoV-2, revisited | Science-Based Medicine
Source: Sandwalk: Let’s analyze the Newsweek lab leak conspiracy theory article
Source: The COVID Lab-Leak Hypothesis: What Scientists Do and Do Not know – Scientific American
Dr. Novella has a very good piece up about conspiracy theory thinking.
Source: The Threat of Conspiracy Thinking to SBM – Science-Based Medicine
What do they have in common, they’re all domesticated livestock in North America. This means that other than being great for producing food for humans, they generally harm the environment.
Source: The Problem with Honey Bees – Scientific American
Our native pollinators are what we should be working to conserve as they sustain healthy ecosystems.
Go read this, The “Herd Mentality” is Not a Public Health Strategy, and follow the links especially this one: Former Stanford colleagues warn Dr. Scott Atlas fosters ‘falsehoods and misrepresentations of science’.
Shopping for a Quack Doctor when you don’t like the diagnosis from multiple other doctors with actual expertise in the particular field of medicine is a sure way to increase the chance of death. Doing this for a whole country during a deadly pandemic like Trump has done ensures many thousands on up to millions of unnecessary deaths. Trump is already responsible for thousands, to tens of thousands, of unnecessary deaths, and based on his actions it seems he wants that number to become millions.
Dr. Novella takes a look at the efficacy of face masks.
As I’ve pointed out before, the entire saga shows that, when push comes to shove and a crisis hits, physicians’ dedication to science- and evidence-based medicine is disturbingly weak. So it came as no surprise (to me, at least) when the FDA issued a warning on Friday about chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine:
“The Food and Drug Administration warned consumers Friday against taking malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19 outside a hospital or formal clinical trial setting after deaths and poisonings were reported. …”
Read the rest here: Hydroxychloroquine and the price of abandoning of science- and evidence-based medicine – Science-Based Medicine
One thing is very clear, Dr. Didier Raoult, and David L Brown M.D. should have their licenses to practice medicine revoked, like what happened to former doctor Andrew Wakefield.
The short answer to the question – how do you boost your immune system – is that you can’t. The very concept of “boosting” the immune system is not scientific and does not exist within
Source: Boosting Your Immune System During a Pandemic | NeuroLogica Blog
