Glenn Kirschner (Jonathan Capehart) – “The Supreme Court Can’t Be Trusted to Police Itself.” (and 2 more shorts)
American Bridge – Ron DeSantis Breaks Law to Shield Appointee Tied to Sex Crimes Investigation
VoteVets – Profiteers
Now This News – Why the Filibuster Has to Go, By Adam Jentleson
Ojeda Live – Top 5 Most Evil Televangelists
Randy Rainbow – GAY! – A Randy Rainbow Song Parody
Beau – Let’s talk about gas, insulin, and republican strategy….
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
In 1929, “Ellery Queen” began “his”* mystery-novel-writing career with “The Roman Hat Mystery,” just eight years after tetrsethyl lead started to be used in fuel for automobiles. The weapon his villain used to kill his victims in this book was tetraethyl lead. The deaths were quite gruesome. If “Queen” expected the novel to draw people’s attention to the dangers of using the stuff in gasoline and having it come out of the exhaust, it didn’t work. Ethanol existed then, but could not be patented, whereas tetraethyl lead could. It was not until the 1970’s that “Unleaded” gas appeared on the market, and “regular” was available alongside it for quite a while. I don’t currently have a source for this, but I remember reading that studies sone around this time and a bit later showed a direct correlation between the amount of ethyl gas used in an area and the amount of violent crime taking place in the same area. Big corporations making big money simply do not have the best interests of their customers in mind. But we are partly to blame for not forcing them to.
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Bill Kovarik, Radford University
On the frosty morning of Dec. 9, 1921, in Dayton, Ohio, researchers at a General Motors lab poured a new fuel blend into one of their test engines. Immediately, the engine began running more quietly and putting out more power.
The new fuel was tetraethyl lead. With vast profits in sight – and very few public health regulations at the time – General Motors Co. rushed gasoline diluted with tetraethyl lead to market despite the known health risks of lead. They named it “Ethyl” gas.
It has been 100 years since that pivotal day in the development of leaded gasoline. As a historian of media and the environment, I see this anniversary as a time to reflect on the role of public health advocates and environmental journalists in preventing profit-driven tragedy.
By the early 1920s, the hazards of lead were well known – even Charles Dickens and Benjamin Franklin had written about the dangers of lead poisoning.
When GM began selling leaded gasoline, public health experts questioned its decision. One called lead a serious menace to public health, and another called concentrated tetraethyl lead a “malicious and creeping” poison.
General Motors and Standard Oil waved the warnings aside until disaster struck in October 1924. Two dozen workers at a refinery in Bayway, New Jersey, came down with severe lead poisoning from a poorly designed GM process. At first they became disoriented, then burst into insane fury and collapsed into hysterical laughter. Many had to be wrestled into straitjackets. Six died, and the rest were hospitalized. Around the same time, 11 more workers died and several dozen more were disabled at similar GM and DuPont plants across the U.S.
The auto and gas industries’ attitude toward the media was hostile from the beginning. At Standard Oil’s first press conference about the 1924 Ethyl disaster, a spokesman claimed he had no idea what had happened while advising the media that “Nothing ought to be said about this matter in the public interest.”
More facts emerged in the months after the event, and by the spring of 1925, in-depth newspaper coverage started to appear, framing the issue as public health versus industrial progress. A New York World article asked Yale University gas warfare expert Yandell Henderson and GM’s tetraethyl lead researcher Thomas Midgley whether leaded gasoline would poison people. Midgley joked about public health concerns and falsely insisted that leaded gasoline was the only way to raise fuel power. To demonstrate the negative impacts of leaded fuel, Henderson estimated that 30 tons of lead would fall in a dusty rain on New York’s Fifth Avenue every year.
Industry officials were outraged over the coverage. A GM public relations history from 1948 called the New York World’s coverage “a campaign of publicity against the public sale of gasoline containing the company’s antiknock compound.” GM also claimed that the media labeled leaded gas “loony gas” when, in fact, it was the workers themselves who named it as such.
In May 1925, the U.S. Public Health Service asked GM, Standard Oil and public health scientists to attend an open hearing on leaded gasoline in Washington. The issue, according to GM and Standard, involved refinery safety, not public health. Frank Howard of Standard Oil argued that tetraethyl lead was diluted at over 1,000 to 1 in gasoline and therefore posed no risk to the average person.
Public health scientists challenged the need for leaded gasoline. Alice Hamilton, a physician at Harvard, said, “There are thousands of things better than lead to put in gasoline.” And she was right. There were plenty of well-known alternatives at the time, and some were even patented by GM. But no one in the press knew how to find that information, and the Public Health Service, under pressure from the auto and oil industries, canceled a second day of public hearings that would have discussed safer gasoline additives like ethanol, iron carbonyl and catalytic reforming.
By 1926, the Public Health Service announced that they had “no good reason” to prohibit leaded gasoline, even though internal memos complained that their research was “half baked.”
Leaded gasoline went on to dominate fuel markets worldwide. Researchers have estimated that decades of burning leaded gasoline caused millions of premature deaths, enormous declines in IQ levels and many other associated social problems.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the public health case against leaded gasoline reemerged. A California Institute of Technology geochemist, Clair Cameron Patterson, was finding it difficult to measure lead isotopes in his laboratory because lead from gasoline was everywhere and his samples were constantly being contaminated. Patterson created the first “clean room” to carry on his isotope work, but he also published a 1965 paper, “Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man,” and said that “the average resident of the U.S. is being subjected to severe chronic lead insult.”
In parallel, by the 1970s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency decided that leaded gasoline had to be phased out eventually because it clogged catalytic converters on cars and led to more air pollution. Leaded gasoline manufacturers objected, but the objections were overruled by an appeals court.
The public health concerns continued to build in the 1970s and 1980s when University of Pittsburgh pediatrician Herbert Needleman ran studies linking high levels of lead in children with low IQ and other developmental problems. Both Patterson and Needleman faced strong partisan attacks from the lead industry, which claimed that their research was fraudulent.
Both were eventually vindicated when, in 1996, the U.S. officially banned the sale of leaded gasoline for public health reasons. Europe was next in the 2000s, followed by developing nations after that. In August 2021, the last country in the world to sell leaded gas, Algeria, banned it.
A century of leaded gasoline has taken millions of lives and to this day leaves the soil in many cities from New Orleans to London toxic.
The leaded gasoline story provides a practical example of how industry’s profit-driven decisions – when unsuccessfully challenged and regulated – can cause serious and long-term harm. It takes individual public health leaders and strong media coverage of health and environmental issues to counter these risks.
[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]
Bill Kovarik, Professor of Communication, Radford University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, as a race, we humans are not terribly good at doing what is best for us. Up until the 1920’s, for instance, arsenic was still used in skin lotions. And before that it was white lead (lead carbonate), which still shows up in some paints and some ceramics. People did not want to give them up. Women did not want to give their cosmetics up. I’m not old enought o remember the pushback on arsenic or white lead, but I am definitely old enough to remember the pushback on unleaded gas. If people are so terrified of change that they become violently opposed to giving up poisons, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised at the lengths they will go to in order not to take a vaccine. Well, give us long enough and we will make ourselves extinct – and maybe more sensible creatures will evolve to take our place.
The Furies and I will be back.
*”Ellery Queen” was actually two dudes, Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee – hence the two cross strokes in the “Q” on the book titles, at least the early ones. There’s no unicode for it so I can’t use it here.)
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
Well. TFG, QAnon, and assorted Nazis just got a lot more to answer for. Not that it hasn’t been staring us in the face, but it’s only now that someone knowledgeable has put it into clear and simple language so we can see it.
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Andrew Kolodny, Brandeis University
For the past 20 years, I have been engaged in efforts to end the opioid epidemic, as a public health official, researcher and clinician. And for every one of those years I have looked on as the number of deaths from drug overdoses has set a new record high.
Yet even knowing that trend I was surprised by the latest tally from the CDC showing that for the first time ever, the number of Americans who fatally overdosed over the course of a year surpassed 100,000. In a 12-month period ending at the end of April 2021, some 100,306 died in the U.S., up 28.5% over the same period a year earlier.
The soaring death toll has been fueled by a much more dangerous black market opioid supply. Illicitly synthesized fentanyl – a potent and inexpensive opioid that has driven the rise in overdoses since it emerged in 2014 – is increasingly replacing heroin. Fentanyl and fentanyl analogs were responsible for almost two-thirds of the overdose deaths recorded in the 12 months period ending in April 2021.
It is especially tragic that these deaths are mainly occurring in people with a disease – opioid addiction – that is both preventable and treatable. Most heroin users want to avoid fentanyl. But increasingly, the heroin they seek is mixed with fentanyl or what they purchase is just fentanyl without any heroin in the mix.
While the spread of fentanyl is the primary cause of the spike in overdose deaths, the coronavirus pandemic also made the crisis worse.
The geographical distribution of opioid deaths makes it clear that there has been a change during the pandemic months.
Before the COVID-19 health crisis, the skyrocketing increase in fentanyl-related overdose deaths in America was mainly affecting the eastern half of the U.S., and hit especially hard in urban areas like Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City. A possible reason behind this was that in the eastern half of the U.S., heroin has mainly been available in powder form rather than the black tar heroin more common in the West. It is easier to mix fentanyl with powdered heroin.
COVID-19 resulted in less cross-national traffic, which made it harder to smuggle illegal drugs across borders. Border restrictions make it harder to move bulkier drugs, resulting in smugglers’ increased reliance on fentanyl – which is more potent and easier to transport in small quantities and as pills, making it easier to traffic by mail. This may have helped fentanyl spread to areas that escaped the earlier surge in fentanyl deaths.
Opioid-addicted individuals seeking prescription opioids instead of heroin have also been affected, because counterfeit pills made with fentanyl have become more common. This may explain why public health officials in Seattle and elsewhere are reporting many fatalities resulting from use of counterfeit pills.
Another factor that may have contributed to the soaring death toll is that the pandemic made it harder for those dependent on opioids to get in-person treatment.
More than anything else, what drives opioid-addicted individuals to continue using is that without opioids they will experience severe symptoms of withdrawal. Treatment, especially with buprenorphine and methadone, has to be easy to access or addicted individuals will continue using heroin, prescription opioids or illict fentanyl to stave off withdrawal. Some treatment centers innovated in the face of lockdowns, for example, by allowing more patients to take methadone unsupervised at home, but this may not have been enough to offset the disruption to treatment services.
And maintaining access to treatment is crucial to avoid relapse, especially during the pandemic. Research has shown that social isolation and stress – which became more common during the pandemic – increase the chances of a relapse in someone in recovery.
In the past, one slip might not be the end of the world for someone in recovery. But given the extraordinarily dangerous black market opioid supply, any slip can result in death.
[You’re smart and curious about the world. So are The Conversation’s authors and editors. You can read us daily by subscribing to our newsletter.]
Andrew Kolodny, Co-Director of Opioid Policy Research, Brandeis University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, pharma CEOs pricing addicts out of treatment (and failing to make it widely avaiable) are Republicans. The people standing in the way of our having a public health system which works for everyone are Reublicans. So are the voters who believe Democrats are a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles. It’s not like we haven’t seen this movie before – in real life – long before movies even existed. It has been Jews libeled, it has been Knights Templar libeled, and now it;s Democrats. And people are dying in large numbers. I wouldn’t call the number of overdoses last year alone and the number of people who subscribe to The Conversation’s newsletters (140,000) “close” exactly, but they are definitely in the same order of magnirude.
The Furies and I will be back.
Glenn Kirschner – Michael Cohen Tells CNN that New York and Federal Prosecutors are Working Toward Indictments
politicsrus – Insulin
Thom Hartmann – Why Won’t Social Media Stop “Tokyo Roses” From Destroying Our Democracy?
Vox – Why you don’t hear about the ozone layer anymore. How did we manage to not get this dismissed as a hoax? And how can we do it again?
MSNBC – There’s Still Work To Do’ Says Rev. Al Sharpton On Arbery Trial Guilty Verdict
Rocky Mountain Mike – Auto Con-Bot 3000 (not a song. But funny.
Beau – Let’s talk about hot takes, the Christmas parade, and intent….
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
So, this is what happens when people don’tpay attention toevery little detail. I was intrigued by the title (and certainly suspected something else.) It certainly never occurred to me that the answer would lie in obscure budget practices and requlations.
I’m not allowed to republish phpts from ProPublica, and the ones I could find on Google were too gruesome to even consider … so no pictures.j
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by Caroline Chen
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Examining the News
In public health, a “sentinel event” is a case of preventable harm so significant that it serves as a warning that the system is failing. The alarms are now blaring.
A growing number of babies are being born with syphilis after their mothers contract the sexually transmitted disease and the bacteria crosses the placenta. These cases are 100% preventable: When mothers who have syphilis are treated with penicillin while pregnant, babies are often born without a trace of the disease. But when mothers go untreated, there is a 40% chance their babies will be miscarried, be stillborn or die shortly after birth. Those who survive can be born with deformed bones or damaged brains, or can suffer from severe anemia, hearing loss or blindness.
I’ve spent the past few months trying to understand why countries including Belarus, Cuba, Malaysia and Sri Lanka have managed to wipe out congenital syphilis while the United States faces its highest incidence in nearly three decades: Last year, 2,022 cases were reported, including 139 deaths. That’s a shocking reversal from 1999, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared that the United States was on the verge of eliminating the centuries-old scourge for adults as well as babies.
What went wrong here?
My reporting led me to one major factor: the unusual and — according to various experts I spoke with, problematic — way that the CDC is funded, which has not only hampered the response to a rise in sexually transmitted diseases, but also has left us ill-prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic.
State and local health departments get much of their money from the federal agency, which has the best birds-eye view of all of the bugs, viruses and illnesses circulating in America. But CDC scientists don’t have the power to decide how much money to spend fighting each one.
Instead, Congress dictates to the CDC, in an uncommonly specific manner not seen with many other agencies, exactly how much money, by line item, it can spend to combat any single public health threat, from broad categories like emerging infectious diseases and Alzheimer’s disease, to more niche conditions like interstitial cystitis, neonatal abstinence syndrome and Tourette syndrome. Though prevention tactics for HIV and other STDs significantly overlap, HIV prevention has a separate line item and is allocated about six times as much money as the category for sexually transmitted infections.
The decisions can be politically driven and detached from bigger-picture health needs, as lobbyists and patient advocates descend on Washington to make the case to lawmakers that their specific disease of interest should get a bigger piece of the pie. Causes that don’t have large armies of compelling spokespeople can get ignored. Sexually transmitted diseases, which have an extra layer of stigma to contend with, have few dedicated advocacy groups. The small number of lobbyists focused on STDs sometimes can’t even get a meeting with lawmakers.
“The CDC needs to have more money and more flexible money,” former CDC director Dr. Tom Frieden told me. The political nature of the agency’s funding is part of what led the country to neglect virus surveillance before the coronavirus pandemic. The 2014 Ebola epidemic was supposed to be a “global wakeup call,” yet in 2018, the CDC scaled back its epidemic prevention work as money ran out.
That means public health in the U.S. is constantly in what Frieden calls “a deadly cycle of panic and neglect” — scrambling to throw money at the latest emergency, then losing the attention and motivation to finish the task once fear ebbs. In May, President Joe Biden’s administration announced it would set aside $7.4 billion over the next five years to hire and train public health workers. But some officials worry about what will happen when those five years are up. “We’ve seen this movie before, right?” Frieden said. “Everyone gets concerned when there’s an outbreak, and when that outbreak stops, the headlines stop, and an economic downturn happens, the budget gets cut.”
Jo Valentine, former program coordinator for the CDC’s 1999 push to eliminate syphilis, says one of the reasons the campaign failed is because public health is usually working “in rescue mode, parachuting in and fixing things.” That’s effective in acute situations, like stopping a new outbreak from exploding, but it doesn’t address long-term structural issues like economic stability, safe housing and transportation, which are all key factors in chronic and preventive care. The last fraction of cases in any public health effort can be the hardest to solve because they often involve vulnerable populations experiencing these barriers to accessing care. They are also the easiest populations to ignore.
Local health departments don’t have nearly enough resources to investigate cases of syphilis with contact tracing, which involves tracking down patients, inquiring about sex partners and making sure everyone is treated. One disease intervention specialist I shadowed in Fresno, California, has made six trips to a rural town, driving an hour each way, trying to prevent a single case of congenital syphilis. The patient is unhoused and itinerant, and so far has been hesitant to visit the community clinic for treatment.
With interest in public health now at an all-time high, it is worth reexamining how much money public health gets to take on these unpopular but necessary challenges, and how much authority the CDC gets to set its priorities. I hope that, five or 10 years from now, I’m not still reporting about COVID-19 hot spots left behind after attention wanes, creating places where the disease still flares because testing or treatment is hard to come by. And I also hope I’m not still writing about babies dying from syphilis.
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AMT, It’s hard enough – next to impossible, I would say – to get people to pay attention even to the biggest of governmental trends. I really have no clue how to get people to pay attention to something like this. We really need any help whatsoever you can give us. Particularly when safe and legalabortions are becoming harder and harder to obtain, we do not need a problem like this one.
The Furies and I will be back.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
I know everyone is wondering whether – not when – the current coronavirus, including the Delta variant, will ever go away. Well, the answer to that is no, it won’t. It wll likely become easier to deal with, but it’s unlikely to go away. The most likely outcome is that it will become like seasonal flu in that it will continue to change a little and new vaccines will be needed every year. And, as now happens with the flu, every year people will die from it – although not in the kind of numbers we are currently looking at.
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Sara Sawyer, University of Colorado Boulder; Arturo Barbachano-Guerrero, University of Colorado Boulder, and Cody Warren, University of Colorado Boulder
Now that kids ages 5 to 11 are eligible for COVID-19 vaccination and the number of fully vaccinated people in the U.S. is rising, many people may be wondering what the endgame is for COVID-19.
Early on in the pandemic, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect that SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) might just go away, since historically some pandemic viruses have simply disappeared.
For instance, SARS-CoV, the coronavirus responsible for the first SARS pandemic in 2003, spread to 29 countries and regions, infecting more than 8,000 people from November 2002 to July 2003. But thanks to quick and effective public health interventions, SARS-CoV hasn’t been observed in humans in almost 20 years and is now considered extinct.
On the other hand, pandemic viruses may also gradually settle into a relatively stable rate of occurrence, maintaining a constant pool of infected hosts capable of spreading the virus to others. These viruses are said to be “endemic.”
Examples of endemic viruses in the United States include those that cause the common cold and the seasonal flu that appear year after year. Much like these, the virus that causes COVID-19 likely won’t die out, and most experts now expect it to become endemic.
We are a team of virologists and immunologists from the University of Colorado Boulder studying animal viruses that infect humans. An essential focus of our research is to identify and describe the key adaptations that animal viruses require to persist in the human population.
So why did the first SARS virus from 2003 (SARS-CoV) go extinct while this one (SARS-CoV-2) may become endemic?
The ultimate fate of a virus depends on how well it maintains its transmission. Generally speaking, viruses that are highly contagious, meaning that they spread really well from one person to the next, may never die out on their own because they are so good at finding new people to infect.
When a virus first enters a population with no immunity, its contagiousness is defined by scientists using a simple mathematical term, called R0, which is pronounced “R-naught.” This is also referred to as the reproduction number. The reproduction number of a virus represents how many people, on average, are infected by each infected person. For example, the first SARS-CoV had an R0 of about 2, meaning that each infected person passes the virus to two people on average. For the delta variant strain of SARS-CoV-2, the R0 is between 6 and 7.
The goal for public health authorities is to slow the rate by which viruses spread. Universal masking, social distancing, contact tracing and quarantines are all effective tools to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses. Since SARS-CoV was poorly transmissible, it just took a little bit of public health intervention to drive the virus to extinction. Given the highly transmissible nature of the delta variant, the challenge for eliminating the virus will be much greater, meaning that the virus is more likely to become endemic.
It’s clear that SARS-CoV-2 is very successful at finding new people to infect, and that people can get infected after vaccination. For these reasons, the transmission of this virus is not expected to end. It’s important that we consider why SARS-CoV-2 moves so easily from one person to the next, and how human behavior plays into that virus transmission.
SARS-CoV-2 is a respiratory virus that is spread through the air and is efficiently transmitted when people congregate. Critical public health interventions, like mask use and social distancing, have been key in slowing the spread of disease. However, any lapse in these public health measures can have dire consequences. For instance, a 2020 motorcycle rally brought together nearly 500,000 people in Sturgis, South Dakota, during the early phases of the pandemic. Most of the attendees were unmasked and not practicing social distancing. That event was directly responsible for an increase in COVID-19 cases in the state of South Dakota and nationwide. This shows how easily the virus can spread when people let their guard down.
The virus that causes COVID-19 is often associated with superspreading events, in which many people are infected all at once, typically by a single infected individual. In fact, our own work has shown that just 2% of the people infected with COVID-19 carry 90% of the virus that is circulating in a community. These important “supercarriers” have a disproportionately large impact on infecting others, and if they aren’t tracked down before they spread the virus to the next person, they will continue to sustain the epidemic. We currently don’t have a nationwide screening program geared toward identifying these individuals.
Finally, asymptomatically infected people account for roughly half of all infections of COVID-19. This, when coupled with a broad range of time in which people can be infectious – two days before and 10 days after symptoms appear – affords many opportunities for virus transmission, since people who don’t know they are sick generally take few measures to isolate from others.
The contagious nature of SARS-CoV-2 and our highly interconnected society constitute a perfect storm that will likely contribute to sustained virus spread.
Given the considerations discussed above and what we know about COVID-19 so far, many scientists believe that the virus that causes COVID-19 will likely settle into endemic patterns of transmission. But our inability to eradicate the virus does not mean that all hope is lost.
Our post-pandemic future will heavily depend on how the virus evolves over the coming years. SARS-CoV-2 is a completely new human virus that is still adapting to its new host. Over time, we may see the virus become less pathogenic, similar to the four coronaviruses that cause the common cold, which represent little more than a seasonal nuisance.
Global vaccination programs will have the greatest impact on curbing new cases of the disease. However, the SARS-CoV-2 vaccine campaign so far has touched only a small percentage of people on the planet. In addition, breakthrough infections in vaccinated people still occur because no vaccine is 100% effective. This means that booster shots will likely be needed to maximize vaccine-induced protection against infection.
With global virus surveillance and the speed at which safe and effective vaccines have been developed, we are well poised to tackle the ever-evolving target that is SARS-CoV-2. Influenza is endemic and evolves quickly, but seasonal vaccination enables life to go on as normal. We can expect the same for SARS-CoV-2 – eventually.
Four seasonal coronaviruses circulate in humans endemically already. They tend to recur annually, usually during the winter months, and affect children more than adults. The virus that causes COVID-19 has not yet settled down into these predictable patterns and instead is flaring up unpredictably around the globe in ways that are sometimes difficult to predict.
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Once rates of SARS-CoV-2 stabilize, we can call it endemic. But this transition may look different based on where you are in the world. For instance, countries with high vaccine coverage and plentiful boosters may soon settle into predictable spikes of COVID-19 during the winter months when the environmental conditions are more favorable to virus transmission. In contrast, unpredictable epidemics may persist in regions with lower vaccination rates.
Sara Sawyer, Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Colorado Boulder; Arturo Barbachano-Guerrero, Postdoctoral Researcher in Virology, University of Colorado Boulder, and Cody Warren, Postdoctoral Fellow in Virology and Immunology, University of Colorado Boulder
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, could this virus have been prevented from becoming endemic? The authors are careful not to address that or even allude to it. But from what they do say about the handling of the 2002-2003 outbreak, my guess is yes, it could have. Our president at that time was George W Bush. I seriously doubt he knows or knew more than Trump** about science ot public health or viruses. But what he did know was how to shut up and let his people do their jobs, and to back them up, and to not make everything about himself. I am inclined to believe that, if we had had President H. Clinton in 2020, the handling of the pandemic would have been such that the virus could have been made extinct. Of course, that is not provable – hypotheticals seldom are.
The Furies and I will be back.
Yesterday, I slept in a couple of hours – no cool dreams, but I awoke to a day cool enough to shut off all the fans again. Of course. I surely could have used that kind of weather Sunday. Today is supposed to stay cool-ish, and then back to the fans for another week. Of course that’s not carved in stone. Incidentally, today is the day the US celebrates the Chinese Moon Festival (China celebrates for 3 days). If there is an Asian grocery near you, you might want to see whether they have any extra Mooncakes. Yum.
Cartoon – 21 21Cartoon.jpg
Short Takes –
Crooks and Liars – Eric Trump Has A Fit On Fox News Over Getting Subpoenas ‘Every Single Day’
Quote – Eric Trump complained on Sunday that the Trump Organization and the Trump family is facing an onslaught of investigations and that they are forced to respond to subpoenas “every single day.”
Click through for complete whine. No extra charge for projection. But, if he’s telling the truth about receiving tham, that os good news indeed.
The Hill – Drug companies on verge of sinking longtime Democratic priority
Quote – The bill at the center of the fight, H.R. 3, would allow Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs by tying them to the lower prices paid by other high-income countries. The measure is projected to free up around $700 billion through the money it saves on drug purchases — covering a big chunk of the Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending plan.
CLick through for background. This is the kind of story that often geets overlooked, but shouldn’t.
The 19th – ‘We’re seeing shock.’ Texas abortion clinics are now operating as trauma centers
Quote – When patients arrive at [Whole Woman’s Health in Fort Worth], she said, they are aware of the realities of the new law: Abortion past six weeks is now illegal, with no exceptions for rape and incest. Still, they can hardly process that there’s little the clinic can do to help them…. For patients they can’t treat, clinic staff offer to schedule appointments with providers out of state. To date, not a single patient at Whole Woman’s Health in Fort Worth has taken them up on it. Most are taken aback by the offer, Sadler said. They’ve already had to take time off of work, find child care and transportation, even leave meals for family at home just to make it through the door at her clin
Click through for more. The 19th is (as you might guess by reading the 19th Amendment) woman-centered, and this article puts a face on the issue which most publications don’t.
Food for Thought –
Yesterday, I piddled around with a bunch of small household tasks. Can’t say as I really accomplished much, but sometimes getting a bunch of little stuff out of the way does feel like accomplishment.
Cartoon – Incidentally, I own a framed copy of the print made from this rendition by Bryan Moon of that occasion. I love his work.
Short Takes –
Crooks and Liars – Pathetic Arizona Manbabies Cosplay Gomer Pyle At Elementary School
Quote – Now, I could write a normal article, citing The Washington Post and Daily Beast, outlining the absurd and outrageous details of this dangerous nonsense. Frankly, these three don’t deserve the national attention or my resultant rise in blood pressure. Instead, I shall vent my spleen, and open a good, old-fashioned can of Brooklyn whoop-ass on them, as god and my DNA intended.
In case you missed this, click through. The principal is physically fine, as is the other staff member, but both were naturally terrified. Since, she has received so much support from the community, she can’t talk about it without tearing up with gratitude
CNN (H/T Carrie B) – Like Washington and Jefferson, he championed liberty. Unlike the founders, he freed his slaves
Quote – It was 230 years ago Sunday that Robert Carter III, the patriarch of one of the wealthiest families in Virginia, quietly walked into a Northumberland County courthouse and delivered an airtight legal document announcing his intention to free, or manumit, more than 500 slaves. He titled it the “deed of gift.” It was, by far, experts say, the largest liberation of Black people before President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Emancipation Act and Emancipation Proclamation more than seven decades later.
Click through for the full (and virtually unknown) story. It deserves to be known far and wide. (Without going into detail, it appears possible that Carter Burwell, composer of the music for many films, especially Coen Brothers films, is a descendant.)
Common Dreams – House Dems Introduce Bill to Lower Medicare Age to 60
Quote – Researchers have found that there is a massive increase in the diagnosis of cancer among Americans who reach the age of 65 that could have been detected much earlier if they had access to Medicare.
Click through for some whats, whos, and whys. If we have to do it five years at a time, then that’s the way we will have to do it.
Food for Thought (Good news for mw) –
