Some info about B.1.1.529 from the South African research community. Thanks so much for sharing.youtube.comHealth Department briefs media about a new so-called super-variantThe Health Department is this hour hosting a briefing about a new so-called super-variant of the coronavirus. South African

so no cases of B.1.1.529 cases in UK as of Mon 22nd Nov? do you know when the S-gene drop out PCR results for 23-25th Nov will be available?

Could they go one better and actually produce a Ritter Sport chocolate with the theme of Germany's longstanding vaccination booklets? That would be amazing.... https://twitter.com/AllerbesteWelt/status/1467921713535070213?s=20…Quote TweetStephan Lewandowsky@STWorg · 7 Dec 2021Very cool ... but this should have happened in early 2021. @CorneliaBetsch @PhilippMSchmid @philipplenz6 @stefanmherzog @SciBeh twitter.com/UnimogCommunit…

agreed- BUT, one of the real things I'm noticing trying to engage with anti-vaxxers in Germany is that they seem to think they are a huge group ("we the people"). So public campaigns that bring together all of Germany's most visible companies actually seem useful to me. We'll see

The boosters aren't stalling though. The problem is refusal of even the first dose. Unfortunately rejection has time to become solidified because there was never a proactive campaign--until now, about 10 months too late.

indeed... but it is still very welcome now, with German vaccination campaign stalling!

Very cool ... but this should have happened in early 2021. @CorneliaBetsch @PhilippMSchmid @philipplenz6 @stefanmherzog @SciBehQuote TweetUnimog Community@UnimogCommunity · 7 Dec 2021A very impressive campaign in Germany: within a few days, 150 companies and organizations have agreed to support the efforts pro vaccination. We support the #vaccination campaign and wishes everybody - vaccinated or not - the best health. Take care! #zusammengegencorona

and every now and then we have to watch a clip like this to be reminded what all of this is really about. This pain and suffering is happening in one of the richest countries in the world at a time in the pandemic when we *know* exactly what to do to avoid it

... and she was on her way to the cemetery and she was angry that nothing was done during the summer in anticipation of this. Populism kills. It's pretty much as simple as that.

because I'm worried they will bring something from school and now I'm on my way to the cemetery. It's outrageous what things are like here, it shouldn't be like this, and if they had just done something about it in the summer it would all be half as bad."

This is horrible indeed. For context: AfD vote share 31% (plurality) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erzgebirgskreis_I…, double vax uptake 44.8%, worst in Saxony https://coronavirus.sachsen.de/ueberblick-coronaschutzimpfungen-in-sachsen-9874.html… @PhilippMSchmid @CorneliaBetsch @SciBehQuote TweetFlorian Krammer@florian_krammer · 27 Nov 2021Das hat mich jetzt grad zum Weinen gebracht. Es tut mir so leid. twitter.com/SvenMobrep/sta…

Agree. But there is a reason for the distrust (AfD first and foremost). And this was knowable and a concerted campaign from Day 1 about vaccines would have made a difference. When I was in Berlin for 3 months this year I never say anything about vaccines being available.

But the German East-West divide in vaccination rates also shows how difficult it is to do something about it because the real issue is not wealth or knowledge but trust23

and every now and then we have to watch a clip like this to be reminded what all of this is really about. This pain and suffering is happening in one of the richest countries in the world at a time in the pandemic when we *know* exactly what to do to avoid it

... and she was on her way to the cemetery and she was angry that nothing was done during the summer in anticipation of this. Populism kills. It's pretty much as simple as that.

this clip got me too- for non-German speakers. She is asked whether she is "concerned". Her response: of course I'm concerned, I'm double vexed, I'm waiting for my booster vaccination, my husband died of Covid, I was in hospital, now I'm avoiding my grand children

This is horrible indeed. For context: AfD vote share 31% (plurality) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erzgebirgskreis_I…, double vax uptake 44.8%, worst in Saxony https://coronavirus.sachsen.de/ueberblick-coronaschutzimpfungen-in-sachsen-9874.html… @PhilippMSchmid @CorneliaBetsch @SciBehQuote TweetFlorian Krammer@florian_krammer · 27 Nov 2021Das hat mich jetzt grad zum Weinen gebracht. Es tut mir so leid. twitter.com/SvenMobrep/sta…

I do not understand the continued narrative that makes it sound as if *extant legal systems* don't already provide the framework for assessing whether rights are unduly infringed by vaxx passports and mandates. This is exactly what constitutions are for.Quote TweetAllyson Pollock@AllysonPollock · 5 Dec 2021Thread below worth a read. Some points and more I raised in my talk at TromsoUniversity this week Re covid passes and mandates. We Need the the human rights specialists to engage with public health science and to work together to show stupidity and folly of vaccine mandates twitter.com/JobbingLeftieH…

What is the Governments vision of "endemic"? #r4todayQuote TweetSir Karam Bales @karamballes · 8 JanAs other countries are ramping up use of LFTs while UK gov want to go the other way Going to guess this comes alongside end of mandatory isolation if you have covid, as current release policy won't work without them UK Gov thinks its got an "Endgame" plan... twitter.com/0bj3ctivity/st…Show this thread

Weekly Massachusetts covid cases per 100,000 population by race/ethnicity https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#demographicsovertime…

quick glance at B.1.640.2 before anyone asks me about it: it's basically B.1.1.7 w/a large Spike NTD deletion. i see no reason to expect this to have a fitness advantage over Delta *or* Omicron. meh.

it seems just yesterday that Twitter was ablaze with "nobody has died of omicron"Quote Tweet(((Howard Forman)))@thehowie · 4 JanWith the large addition of deaths today (139; highest since September), South Africa moving average for this wave is now ~20% and highest since October. It will be hard to translate this into other nations or states, but those who downplay deaths are doing a disservice. twitter.com/nicd_sa/status…

this really is now a disinformation account. I retweeted posts earlier in the pandemic as part of a balanced spread of opinion. But this will be the last one...Quote TweetAllyson Pollock@AllysonPollock · 4 JanLFTs were designed for clinical use in people with symptoms. Government @MHRAgovuk gave repeat emergency authorisation for testing of healthy people with no symptoms and is spending billions. LFTs Have not been shown to reduce transmission or infection or disease. Time to STOPShow this thread

"...rapid antigen tests may not be as fit-for-purpose in routine workplace screening to prevent asymptomatic spread of Omicron, compared to prior variants..." @awyllie13 @DrBlytheAdamson https://medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.01.04.22268770v1.full.pdf…Quote TweetMatthew Herper@matthewherper · 5 JanStudy raises doubts about rapid Covid tests’ reliability in early days after infection. The upshot here: the rapid tests may not catch infection for a few days. There are cases of transmission documented after a false negative. https://statnews.com/2022/01/05/study-raises-doubts-about-rapid-covid-tests-reliability-in-early-days-after-infection/…Show this thread

An entire maternity ward has Covid in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Mass Distribution of “The World’s COVID-19 Vaccine” to be Deployed to India with Other Underserved Countries to Follow

Texas Children’s Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine COVID-19 Vaccine Technology Secures Emergency Use Authorization in India

TV report also says Health Ministry DG may not endorse panel’s recommendation to offer additional booster shots if further data suggests hospitalizations lower from new variant

Israel said delaying rollout of 4th COVID shots amid signs Omicron less severe

RFK jr’s book alleging Bill Gates funded fake negative hydroxycholoroquine studies to rob us of a Covid miracle cure is now #1 on Amazon.Quote TweetEric Nelson@literaryeric · 17 Nov 2021Right now Will Smith has a new memoir, the 1619 project just pubbed, Fox News has a Christmas celebration book, and Jon Karl has a Trump expose breaking news every day. RFK jr’s book on how Bill Gates and Fauci created Covid to sell more deadly vaccines is outselling then all.Show this thread

Every time a new variant with a selective advantage is making the rounds, but especially this time.

We'll know much more about this level of risk in ~2 weeks when we get neutralization results. I'm particularly interested in neutralization titers of individuals with two doses of vaccine vs individuals with three doses of vaccine. 18/18

Note also that high immune escape, lower intrinsic transmissibility is not necessarily a good thing. Higher immune escape places previously infected and vaccinated individuals more at risk. 17/18

Again, based on wildly divergent spike protein, I'm guessing that immune escape will be substantial and so I still suspect that it's quite possible that Omicron will show lower intrinsic transmissibility than Delta. My updated diagram. 16/18

Note the these estimates are sensitive to assumed population immunity. Under a scenario of 85% population immunity, we get the following picture instead that shifts the required level of immune escape upwards for a particular R0 value. 15/18

Under a scenario of 90% population immunity against previous variants, we get the following picture where Omicron could lie anywhere along the dashed line ranging from an intrinsic R0 of 3 and 83% immune escape to an intrinsic R0 of 9 and 20% immune escape. 14/18

We can then use the approach here to factor possible scenarios of intrinsic transmission vs immune escape that would give Omicron Rt of 2.5. 13/18

Having two very different methods give Rt estimates of between 2.0 and 2.5 gives me some (small) degree of confidence. We can triangulate relative fitness with Rt so that Delta in South Africa is at Rt of ~0.8 and Omicron is at about three times this with Rt of ~2.5. 12/18

This also gives a median estimate of doubling time of 4.9 days, which we can convert to an estimate of Rt assuming a generation interval of 5.1 days (https://eurosurveillance.org/content/10.2807/1560-7917.ES.2020.25.17.2000257…). Doing so gives a median estimate of Rt of 2.0 with a 95% credible interval of 1.6 to 2.6. 11/18

This updated analysis gives a median estimate of the common ancestor to Omicron viruses of Sep 30 with a 95% credible interval of between Sep 9 and Oct 13. 10/18

Secondly, I'm now masking spike which has issues of spurious within-Omicron diversity due to amplicon dropout during sequencing. I've adjusted molecular clock rate from 8×10^-4 to 5.5×10^-4 to compensate (determined from sequences taken over the course of the pandemic). 9/18

I've revised my own phylodynamic estimates of rate of spread with a couple improvements. First off, I'm now using 206 Omicron genomes generously shared by researchers through @GISAID. 8/18

Work from @seabbs and colleagues gives a similar result of Rt increasing from ~0.8 to above 2 over the course of November in Gauteng (https://epiforecasts.io/covid/posts/subnational/south-africa/gauteng/…). 7/18

In work from @lrossouw we get a rapid rise in Rt in Gauteng from ~0.8 to ~2.5 over the course of Nov corresponding to the take off of Omicron (https://unsupervised.online/static/covid-19/estimating_r_za.html#54_Gauteng…). 6/18

In addition to changes in relative frequency, we can look at what's happening with case counts, which have been rising rapidly in Gauteng and South Africa. We can measure the exponential growth in cases via Rt (the number of secondary cases caused by an index case). 5/18

But as stated previously, I believe this estimate is likely to drop somewhat as more data comes in. But I wouldn't be surprised if this drops to something still significant, say 3X or 4X the transmission rate of Delta in South Africa. 4/18

Key datapoints include rapid displacement of existing Delta viruses by Omicron in Gauteng and South Africa. Estimates of logistic growth rate here by @TWenseleers imply Omicron has ~5X current transmission rate of Delta. 3/18

Monday's post was mainly meant to emphasize that observed rapid spread of Omicron can be influenced by both intrinsic transmissibility and immune escape. Here, I'll try to put (speculative) numbers on this rate of spread. 2/18

Following up here with speculative estimates of the rate of spread of Omicron and a stab at how to apportion this rapid rate of spread between intrinsic transmissibility and immune escape. 1/18

I guess Omicron is not going anywhere with already >5% of sequences in Belgium and Netherlands #Omicron

this is very high for a Monday

This is what it feels like again https://xkcd.com/2278/

I’m trying to reconcile Pfizer’s optimistic statements about 3rd dose protection against omicron https://nytimes.com/live/2021/12/08/world/omicron-variant-covid/pfizer-says-blood-samples-showed-a-third-dose-of-its-vaccine-provides-significant-protection-against-omicron… vs data from Germany showing that while 3rd dose (booster) protects it may not be very durable? We really need to hear from CDC/FDA/WhiteHouse on this…

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is an absolutely awful study filled with issues and numeric mistakes https://twitter.com/GidMK/status/1471320819817058304?t=lL7bvKxMz7XGrLeB2FiSzw&s=19…Quote TweetPierre Kory, MD MPA@PierreKory · 5 JanResults of the world’s largest study of ivermectin in COVID have just been posted. Meticulously collected data from hundreds of thousands of patients find massive reductions in hospitalization & death. “Controversy” over. Join us tomorrow for discussion with study investigators twitter.com/Covid19Critica…

With proved technology and no-frills tech transfer, CORBEVAX is poised to reach hundreds of millions in the coming weeks

A COVID Vaccine for All

Correlates with cases 4-10 days after.

Boston wastewater makes all the past waves seem almost flat. It is hard to comprehend.

I also dislike the choice of axis scales. I don’t mind line graphs with axes that don’t go to zero (https://callingbullshit.org/tools/tools_misleading_axes.html…) But choosing the scale on the right hand graph so that the values appear “low” in the frame and the vast majority of the graph is empty—that’s problematic.

School & university administrators, as you grapple with this week’s decisions, spare some time to think about how to delay *next* January’s start date to Jan 16 2022. Do you need to extend into summer? Change course lengths? Figure it out because this is going to happen again!Quote TweetDr Ellie Murray, ScD@EpiEllie · 6 JanOne thing that really makes me frustrated about the current school discussion is that everyone is acting like this was a surprise. We have been in a pandemic for 2 years!Show this thread

UPDATE: It seems @GBNEWS' other resident crank @thecoastguy didn't get the memo. Almost a year after Michael Yeadon was exposed as a racist and started raving about plots to depopulate the Earth, he's STILL platforming him. Unbelievable. h/t @mellowmark

Both @talkRADIO and @GBNEWS have a terrible track record of platforming quacks. Their one-sided and often demonstrably false coverage of the pandemic has even included letting anti-vax campaigners make unfounded claims about vaccine safety unchallenged. Will @Ofcom ever act?

Another of @TVKev's favourites seems to be Clare Craig, who told HART friends they should "seed the thought that vaccines cause covid". She's been on his show several times, and even tried to scare pregnant women off getting vaccinated by falsely claiming that it may not be safe!

Meanwhile back at @talkRADIO, presenters like @TVKev O'Sullivan, @Cristo_radio Foufas and @thejamesmax have also kept putting Ros Jones on air to talk nonsense about covid vaccines, even letting her falsely claim that vaccinating children is somehow against international law!

Not everyone's a fan of @gbnews though. Liz Evans described them as "fake alternative media", and suggested Del Bigtree's anti-vax show The Highwire instead! Clare Craig called them "worse than the BBC in many ways", despite them putting her on the channel multiple times.

Indeed, @gbnews tried to get Ros Jones back just a couple of days after her first appearance, this time inviting her to their studio. But this required a PCR test and, hilariously, she was so paranoid about false positives she turned them down! One member suggested faking a test.

And @gbnews invited Ros Jones back several times after that to make increasingly wild attacks on the idea of vaccinating children. This continued until at least September, long after we knew she'd spent all year secretly working with anti-vaxxers to stop kids getting vaccinated!

HART and UsForThem's Ros Jones has also frequently appeared on @GBNEWS, even after the channel asked "how I can possibly say that children will die of vaccine damage who would not die from covid". She can't, but other members gave her various false figures and claims as "proof".

Another @talkRADIO host who moved to @gbnews, @PatrickChristys, also platformed HART members' wild claims on both channels. Even months after #hartleaks revealed the group's true colours, Christys had Gary Sidley and Clare Craig on his GB News show.

When @mrmarkdolan jumped ship to @GBNEWS he soon picked up where he'd left off. On his second week he and HART's Gary Sidley ganged up on Dr David Strain in a debate on masks (on which Mark's own views are very clear), and the next week HART's Rev William Phillip was on his show.

They aren't kidding. Barely a week went by without @mrmarkdolan giving HART members a platform, sometimes two in one day! Members used it to demand that children "must not" be vaccinated, claim lockdowns would kill more people than covid, and call the Delta variant "over hyped".

More popular with HART members is @JuliaHB1's former @talkRADIO colleague @mrmarkdolan. They call him "a strong ally" who gives "HART the respect we deserve" [sic] and is "as anti-mask as we are". They even joke that he "gives more opportunity to speak than Ms Hartley-Brewer".

And anti-vax HART members were *really* upset when @JuliaHB1 got vaccinated. Members said she "crumbled" and was "another huge disappointment". When she spoke favourably about others getting vaccinated, Harrie Bunker-Smith asked "can we get a HART member on to correct her?"

Ironically though, HART don't even like @JuliaHB1. Members constantly complain about her talking over them, and call appearing on her show "a waste of bloody time". One called her "a huge help to the cause but quite annoying", saying she likes to "deliver a lecture". #awkward

But the most worrying episode was in January 2021, when @JuliaHB1 is reported to have got "a sympathetic Cabinet minister" to ask the Chief Whip to tell @NeilDotObrien MP to stop "smearing" HART members ahead of the group's launch! A shocking abuse of democracy.

It's not like @JuliaHB1 can feign ignorance either. Yeadon tells a HART colleague that @talkRADIO "know what I fear but they can't broadcast it". What Yeadon feared was that covid booster shots might be programmed to kill billions of people! Hardly a credible source then...

Earlier in 2021, @JuliaHB1 was still using Michael Yeadon as a source weeks after he was exposed as a racist and started ranting about plots to depopulate the Earth! Yeadon admitted he was "no longer broadcast-able". But JHB still came to him for background info for her show.

Even after #hartleaks showed HART to be a bunch of cranks, @JuliaHB1 continued to platform the group's members. Including Ros Jones falsely claiming that children were more at risk from vaccination than covid, and Tony Hinton comparing vaccine passports to the holocaust!

Despite this appalling track record, after HART launched in January 2021 @JuliaHB1 regularly gave members a platform to speak out against testing, masks, and vaccination. And their predictions didn't get any better either, as they consistently underestimated the Delta wave...

In 2020, @JuliaHB1 and other @TalkRadio hosts gave airtime to future HART members like Michael Yeadon, Clare Craig and Anthony Brookes. They predicted there wouldn't be a second wave (there was), it wouldn't be as bad as the first (it was), and we had herd immunity (we didn't).

One of the most prolific spreaders of misinformation over the last two years has been @talkRADIO's @JuliaHB1. When she asked someone "what disinformation" she had spread, it didn't take me long to find plenty of examples involving prominent HART members:Quote TweetJohn Bye@_johnbye · 31 Oct 2021Replying to @JuliaHB1 and @AlisonGeorge10Michael Yeadon claiming young healthy people don't get severely ill, and questioning the safety and effectiveness of covid vaccines. https://twitter.com/talkRADIO/status/1334438493909610496?t=PsUsYDgxSFcFE5JAWVhq6A&s=19

Despite repeatedly being proven wrong by subsequent events, covid disinformation groups like HART have constantly been given a platform on TV and radio throughout the pandemic. Even after #hartleaks revealed many of their members to be anti-vax conspiracy cranks. 2: broadcast

HK has another lay of swiss cheese. Testing waste water to identify COVID positive buildings, following by mandatory testing on occupants. It can find some silent spreaders.sciencedirect.comThe first case study of wastewater-based epidemiology of COVID-19 in Hong KongEarly detection and surveillance of severe acute respiratory syndrome-coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) virus are key pre-requisites for the effective contro…

Absolutely. And neither myself nor others should invite challenging conversation and then be resistant to it being positioned in a reasonable and considered way. That's how we learn. Not sure I agree that Tim's position is all that different to my own. But that's not for me

2/2 what prompted me to respond in these threads, however, were in principle arguments that seemed relevant to the scope and depth of such inquiry11

I think there might be a difference here between what you are putting forward and what @timcolbourn is arguing any rational individual should be *for* analysing the expected costs and benefits of a course of action, and I assume we all agree on that. 1/2

No. Saying there's a trade-off to ascertain is different to knowing said trade off. Different skill sets/knowledge etc. If I was stating that the balance doesn't stack up, fair enough.But I'm not. I have a view.But I know enough to know my view is subjective at this point.

isn't it somewhat undermining for any position purporting to be about disinterested cost benefit analysis to have *not* been trying to study costs and benefits of the Asian response in detail?

I get this point. However I think there are three flaws in the whole Japan/Korea/etc argument. Which to be clear doesn't mean we can't learn anything from these countries. 1) impact of mitigations. As per the main point, we don't know (or I don't) the "cost" of the mitigations.

if I compare South Korea with the UK, that's not the conclusion I am going to reach, is it...

The key question is what’s actually reducing most of the disease burden? Seems like it’s vaccines, and soon drugs. NPIs in contrast only delay cases given waning immunity. I think we can get to ~95% reduced burden just through the PIs:Quote TweetProf Tim Colbourn@timcolbourn · 21 Dec 2021* COVID THREAD ON BEST WE CAN DO LONG TERM * Yes we’re in an acute crisis with Omicron and that needs dealing with, but it has actually made me want to think a lot about how this horrible pandemic ends, maybe you too? Let’s go through it… 1/35 (sorry, but this is troubling me)

how many countries in the world presently have *no* NPIs during an omicron wave?

Fair enough - then I disagree it's an empirical fact

I never said it was a logical truth that NPIs needed- I said it is presently an empirical fact, and likely remains true for foreseeable future

And this is where we differ. So to go back to the original point...it's not a logical truth that lowering disease burden requires NPIs. We've already lowered the burden. The question is HOW low does it need to be. Only then can we conclude whether mitigations are needed.

and vice versa- lowering disease burden presently still requires use of NPIs and likely will for foreseeable future given new variants

likewise, what is required for reducing disease burden- in particular vaccination- also overlaps with elimination

not convinced of logic here as the kinds of mechanisms needed for elimination (air control, waste water surveillance, masks, devising flexible response schedules etc) also extend naturally to other pathogens

And I think this is important. Not only is there a possible trade off in the goals, but there are tradeoffs in assessing the goals. The more effort spent assessing zero COVID is possibly therefore a reduction in effort in assessing or implementing mitigation of impact of COVID.

Of importance to Covid goals I think is an acceptance that there might still be lots of cases but that outcomes can be dramatically improved with vaccines & drugs so that 95% of burden can be reduced. Strategy therefore needs to be very different to go after all cases too.

Thanks, but seems too different to the actual impossibility of zero Covid. A relevant stretch goal for Covid might actually be 95% reduction in all countries of the world. That’s extremely unlikely but actually possible? Going further still likely to do harm as needs restrictions

I think you are an economist? This literature might be of interesthbr.orgThe Stretch Goal ParadoxAudacious targets are widely misunderstood—and widely misused.

Maybe, though it seems intuitive to me that continued single minded focus on achieving a truly impossible goal will have net harms (even just in terms of opportunity costs - not focusing on other things) after some point?

obviously you won't be able to count the goal itself as a benefit (as impossible) but that doesn't preclude the costs and benefits of the actions taken in pursuit of that goal outweighing those of some alternative

Thanks. Does that hold for truly impossible goals though? at some point doesn’t continued pursuit of such clearly impossible goals do more harm than good? In any case I think continued pursuit of Covid elimination will do more harm than good, as explained here:Quote TweetProf Tim Colbourn@timcolbourn · 21 Dec 2021* COVID THREAD ON BEST WE CAN DO LONG TERM * Yes we’re in an acute crisis with Omicron and that needs dealing with, but it has actually made me want to think a lot about how this horrible pandemic ends, maybe you too? Let’s go through it… 1/35 (sorry, but this is troubling me)

that also doesn't follow logically. As human beings we *pursue* many goals we fail to attain without that meaning that the costs of the pursuit necessarily outweighed the benefits.

Thanks and yes except if elimination is actually impossible (and there is a very strong case for that being so) then continuing to try to achieve it will always be too costly as you'll have very high costs for no marginal benefits at some point.

it's not actually a logical truth that such a point exists- it is logically entirely possible that the costs of trying to live with the virus outweighs those of elimination. Which is more costly is thus an empirical question

There can, and should, be a discussion about where the point of diminishing returns is. But to simply believe it doesn't exist is hardly a starting point for a reasonable discussion.

There HAS to be a level where there are diminishing returns-eg eliminating last (say) X cases per week/year would harm more than it prevents. My fundamental issue with zero COVID isn't the aim but "single issue" approach. You can't look at zero COVID ignoring its non CV impact.

Agreed. I've noticed an increasing amount of entrenchment the last few weeks. This should be a discussion. Not an emotive and angry debate but a genuine discussion (which people may not all meet in the middle on) about the "least bad" route. For society as a whole.29

The lack of critical discussion and reflection on Covid twitter is starting to get really upsetting (I might take a break). Seems like people are doubling down rather than opening up to engaging with different points of view. Short Thread: 1/7

This looks very interesting, and several of the speakers have contributed to our Covid coverage https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-33/april-2020/coronavirus-psychological-perspectives… and / or the @BPSOfficial response https://bps.org.uk/coronavirus-resources…Quote TweetJohn Drury@ProfJohnDrury · 24 JanA Joint Symposium: What psychology can contribute to pandemic response? March 15th Sponsored by @ADPHUK & @BSPHNetwork Confirmed speakers: @DrBrookeRogers @DrAngelChater @ReicherStephen @DrRichardAmlot https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_24BAGla3R4Kqaqe5YN1qEA… Please share

this is the most in depth treatment of the impact of equalities law on pandemic policy that I've been able to find- it would seem to underscore that there is a legal need for impact assessments that ask (some) of these questions https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1358229120969611

Interesting. Yes, a lawyer's input would be good @syrpis ?

had also just retweeted this- thought it excellent, and, for what it's worth, on my understanding of the 2010 UK Equalities Act, some consideration of these questions is actually legally mandated (would love to hear lawyer's input here)

Very good points. The "who" is such an important question that is rarely asked. Many of the freedom loving "risk takers" do not take much risk themselves--they want others to take the risk for them. @SciBeh @ProfColinDavis @rpancost @chrisdc77Quote TweetDr Ellie Murray, ScD@EpiEllie · 24 JanFour questions to ask about every COVID response decision: “will it reduce transmission, infections, hospitalization, chronic disease, &/or death?” “who will it reduce these for?” “who will be left out &/or bear the burden or cost?” “what can we add or do to help them too?’

.....those were the daysQuote TweetAlitis@Alitis__ · 26 JanReplying to @truthshamesthe6 and @Unusual_TimesYou guys mean there's still a pandemic going on?

Link to the meeting:journalismcourses.orgWEBINAR: How to improve COVID-19 coverage - Journalism Courses Knight Center      View a recording of this webinar on YouTube in English,

This is the first step in making this a reality. After this proof of concept in mice, this strategy needs to be tested for safety and efficacy in larger animals and in clinical trials. Similar strategies can be used to combat other mucosal viral pathogens in the future. (End)

This work was led by two brilliant colleagues, @tianyangmao and @BenIsraelow, along with @wmsaltzman and his lab members, and @marioph13 @rjhomer57 (17/)

The intranasal spike protein booster will also be much easier to administer (via nasal spray), quite stable (just protein) and is much more likely to be accepted by people who are hesitant of mRNA or those with needle phobia. (16/)

Because Prime and Spike also establishes tissue-resident memory T and B cells, this strategy is likely to confer long-lasting and cross-reactive memory that can be quickly restimulated to prevent viral spread. (15/)

This study shows that unadjuvanted recombinant spike or PACE-mRNA-spike can be used to safely boost mucosal immunity in hosts primed with conventional mRNA vaccine to reduce infection and prevent disease. A heterologous spike boost can induce variant-specific T and Ab. (14/)

Remarkably, when SARS-CoV-1 spike was used as booster IN (red), mice developed lots of TRM (reactive to both CoV-1 and CoV-2) as well as boosted mucosal and systemic IgA and IgG against both CoV-1 and CoV-2 without suffering original antigenic sin. (13/)

@tianyangmao @BenIsraelow took it one step further. Can Prime and SpikeX (a heterologous Spike) generate cross-reactive immunity against SpikeX? They set up Prime (mRNA IM) boost (mRNA IM) vs. Prime (mRNA IM) and Spike (protein IN) groups and compared. (12/)

Similarly, Prime (mRNA IM) and PACE-Spike (mRNA in PACE IN) (green) also protected mice from death and disease, when challenged 42 days post boost. (11/)

Prime (mRNA IM) and Spike (protein IN)(blue) protected all mice from disease and death. Moreover, Prime and Spike reduced both nasal and lung viral load. Prime alone (gray) was not able to protect mice from infection, disease or death. (10/)