COVID-2019 in America, effect on politics and economy

[TopHatter]

Trump's vaccine promises meet reality

President Trump’s optimistic promises that a vaccine for COVID-19 would be ready either before the election or by the end of the year seem increasingly unlikely to be fulfilled.

In a Wednesday interview with the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Anthony Fauci adjusted the administration’s timeline for when a vaccine would be ready.

“Could be January, could be later. We don’t know,” Fauci, the leading expert on infectious diseases on the president’s coronavirus task force, said.

In early October, shortly after he was treated for his own COVID-19 infection at Walter Reed medical center, Trump repeatedly said on the campaign trail that “vaccines are coming momentarily.” But when pharmaceutical manufacturer Pfizer announced on Oct. 16 that it would delay applying to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization to distribute the vaccine it was developing, Trump softened his declarations, saying a vaccine would be coming “within weeks.”

On a corporate earnings call on Tuesday, Pfizer revealed it had so far been unable to conduct an analysis of a phase III clinical trial to determine whether its vaccine is safe and effective, STAT reported. Without that analysis, the FDA will not grant an emergency use authorization.

“I can tell you our decision at FDA will not be made on any other criteria than the science and data associated with these clinical trials,” FDA Director Stephen Hahn told CBS News in September.

He was responding to accusations from the president days earlier that the FDA had been coopted by the “deep state,” delaying the release of a vaccine so as to hurt his reelection chances.

The clash prompted Health and Human Services Secretary and Trump loyalist Alex Azar to seek to have the FDA director replaced, Politico reported.

But Trump’s assertion that a vaccine could be ready by Nov. 3 was always improbable. While Operation Warp Speed has made notable initial progress in the production of a vaccine, reality has set in over recent weeks, as manufacturers like AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson were forced to pause their vaccine trials after participants became ill.

Such setbacks are common in vaccine development and don’t necessarily mean that the compound being tested caused the illness, but researchers have to investigate to rule it out.

Health experts have always known that the odds were long that a vaccine could be available for the public by the end of the year. When he testified before Congress in mid-September, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said a vaccine would not be widely available until late spring or early summer of next year.

“If you’re asking me when it is going to be generally available to the American public so we can begin to take advantage of a vaccine to get back to our regular life, I think we’re probably looking at late second quarter, third quarter 2021,” Redfield said, a prediction that Trump felt it necessary to correct.

“I think he made a mistake when he said that,” Trump said at a testy White House press conference the next day. “It’s just incorrect information, and I called him and he didn’t tell me that, and I think he got the message maybe confused — maybe it was stated incorrectly.”

Trump’s optimism rests on his plan to enlist the U.S. military to distribute the vaccine, which in turn assumes that a safe and effective product is available.

“We have a vaccine that’s coming, it’s ready,” Trump said during the final presidential debate. “It’s going to be announced within weeks, and it’s going to be delivered. We have Operation Warp Speed, which is the military, is going to distribute the vaccine.”

But Trump’s own military officials may not be on board with this plan.

“Our best military assessment is that there is sufficient U.S. commercial transportation capacity to fully support vaccine distribution,” Charles Pritchard, a spokesman for the Department of Defense, said in an interview in late September. “There should be no need for a large commitment of DOD units or personnel to support the nationwide distribution of vaccines.”

To date, COVID-19 has killed more than 228,000 Americans and infected more than 8.9 million people in the U.S. The pandemic is worsening, with new cases rising across the country by 41 percent over the last 14 days. Over the last 24 hours alone, 81,457 new cases and 1,016 deaths from COVID-19 were reported in the U.S.

Phase III vaccine trials are ongoing, and it is conceivable that a company could approach the FDA in the weeks following the election seeking an emergency use authorization. Even so, that doesn’t mean a vaccine will be granted approval before the end of the year, or that, if it is, it will be available to most Americans until after the “dark winter” that Trump’s opponent, Joe Biden, says is coming.
__________

“We have a vaccine that’s coming, it’s ready. It’s going to be announced within weeks, and it’s going to be delivered. We have Operation Warp Speed, which is the military, is going to distribute the vaccine.”

Lie after lie after lie after lie.

And his followers lap it right up.

[Officer of Engineers]

I have been following Dr. John Campbell - YouTube on COVID-19. He's old school in that he uses paper to present his ideas. He presents a daily briefing on COVID-19 from around the world and he bases his views on scientific papers and not ancedotic evidence.

His views are that there is long term immunity. We have over 40 million infected and only at best less than 100 cases of re-infection. We need to be seeing 1000s of cases to state this is short term immunity.

Those who recovered from SARS (SARS-COR-1) showed remarkable resistence to COVID-19 (SARS-COR-2) showing only a small number of COVID-19 antibodies and were asystematic. This meant the SARS immunity were able to kill most of the COVID-19 infection before the need to develop specific COVID-19 antibodies.

He believes in COVID-19 areosol spread since SARS is also areosol BUT there is a critical mass requirement. 1 COVID-19 germ is not going to get you COVID-19. Thus social distancing and masks are still effective protective measures.

About 35% of the infected population suffers from long term COVID-19 (24% in the 18-39 age group).

A vacine is coming (it exists for SARS) and COVID-19 will disappear from history.

[astralis]

A vacine is coming (it exists for SARS) and COVID-19 will disappear from history.

that would depend on the effectiveness of the vaccine, though. most of the stuff I've seen says the vaccines that will likely get rolled out by next year will only be 50-70% effective. that's good enough for a semblance of normalcy, but not good enough to return to a mask-less/social-distancing free lifestyle.

[TopHatter]

‘A whole lot of hurt’: Fauci warns of covid-19 surge, offers blunt assessment of Trump’s response

President Trump’s repeated assertions the United States is “rounding the turn” on the novel coronavirus have increasingly alarmed the government's top health experts, who say the country is heading into a long and potentially deadly winter with an unprepared government unwilling to make tough choices.

“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt. It’s not a good situation,” Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s leading infectious-disease expert, said in a wide-ranging interview late Friday. “All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

Fauci, a leading member of the government’s coronavirus response, said the United States needed to make an “abrupt change” in public health practices and behaviors. He said the country could surpass 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day and predicted rising deaths in the coming weeks. He spoke as the nation set a new daily record Friday with more than 98,000 cases. As hospitalizations increase, deaths are also ticking up, with more than 1,000 reported Wednesday and Thursday, bringing the total to more than 230,000 since the start of the pandemic, according to health data analyzed by The Washington Post.

Since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, President Trump has repeatedly said that the virus will disappear. (Video: JM Rieger/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
Fauci’s blunt warnings come as Trump has rallied in states and cities experiencing record surges in infections and hospitalizations in a last-ditch effort to convince voters he has successfully managed the pandemic. He has held maskless rallies with thousands of supporters, often in violation of local health mandates.

Even as new infections climb in 42 states, Trump has downplayed the virus or mocked those who take it seriously. “Covid-19, covid, covid, covid,” he said during one event, lamenting that the news media gives it too much attention. In another rally, he baselessly said that U.S. doctors record more deaths from covid-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, than other nations because they get more money.

“I mean our doctors are very smart people. So what they do is they say, ‘I’m sorry but everybody dies of covid,’ ” Trump said Friday at a rally in Waterford Township, Mich., without offering any evidence.

Fauci said former vice president Joe Biden’s campaign “is taking it seriously from a public health perspective.” Trump, Fauci said, is “looking at it from a different perspective.” He said that perspective was “the economy and reopening the country.”

Fauci, who once took a starring role in the response and briefed the president almost every day as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, described a disjointed response as cases surge. Several current and former senior administration officials said the White House is almost entirely focused on a vaccine, even though experts warn it is unlikely to be a silver bullet that ends the pandemic immediately since it will take months under the best of circumstances to inoculate tens of millions of people to achieve herd immunity.

Officials told governors on a call Friday that they hoped to begin distributing a vaccine by the end of the year, giving some specific guidance on how states would receive their first doses. Fauci focused on the rise in cases, according to people familiar with the call.

Fauci said the White House coronavirus task force meets less frequently and has far less influence as the president and his top advisers have focused on reopening the country. “Right now, the public health aspect of the task force has diminished greatly,” he said.

Fauci said he and Deborah Birx, coronavirus task force coordinator, no longer have regular access to the president and he has not spoken to Trump since early October. “The last time I spoke to the president was not about any policy; it was when he was recovering in Walter Reed, he called me up,” he said. Fauci said he phones into meetings of other staffers but largely avoids the West Wing because “of all the infections there.”

He also lamented that Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist and Trump’s favored pandemic adviser, who advocates letting the virus spread among young healthy people and reopening the country without restrictions, is the only medical adviser the president regularly meets with.

“I have real problems with that guy,” Fauci said of Atlas. “He’s a smart guy who’s talking about things that I believe he doesn’t have any real insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn’t make any sense.”

Fauci said he actually appreciated chief of staff Mark Meadows saying last weekend on CNN that the administration was not going to control the pandemic. “I tip my hat to him for admitting the strategy,” he said. “He is straightforward in telling you what’s on his mind. I commend him for that.”

At one point during the interview, Fauci said he needed to be careful with his words because he would be blocked from doing appearances in the future.

Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, offered blistering criticism of Fauci for his comments in a statement to The Washington Post on Saturday. Deere said Fauci “knows the risks [from the coronavirus] today are dramatically lower than they were only a few months ago.”

“It’s unacceptable and breaking with all norms for Dr. Fauci, a senior member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force and someone who has praised President Trump’s actions throughout this pandemic, to choose three days before an election to play politics,” Deere said. “As a member of the Task Force, Dr. Fauci has a duty to express concerns or push for a change in strategy, but he’s not done that, instead choosing to criticize the President in the media and make his political leanings known by praising the President’s opponent — exactly what the American people have come to expect from The Swamp.”

Deere added that the president “always put the well-being of the American people first,” citing his decision to cut off travel from China, his early shutdown of the country and his mobilization of the private sector to deliver critical supplies and develop treatments and vaccines.

Fauci’s candid warnings about the threat of the virus have angered the president, who has mocked the scientist for his prognostications early in the outbreak — for instance, saying that masks were not necessary — and even for his baseball pitch. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong,” Trump said during one rally in October.

Some White House advisers have been leery of a public fight with Fauci — knowing his popularity is higher than that of the president. But they’ve also grown frustrated by his media appearances and complain he is too focused on his personal reputation and is “not on the team,” said one senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment. The doctor has become loathed among many Trump supporters, and Fauci has told others that he has experienced a surge in harassment and threats.

White House spokespeople did not offer comments from either Atlas or Birx despite being asked several times.

Several senior administration officials and outside advisers described a White House overwhelmed by the pandemic, with a feeling of helplessness over the inability to curb its spread without also throttling the economy or damaging the president’s reelection chances.

“People need to take a step back and be humble about this,” said Joe Grogan, the former head of the domestic policy council under Trump. “Nobody, regardless of political party or ideology, should be getting arrogant about how they have this figured out.”

However, the campaign trail message that life is returning to normal underscores how little the president and White House have focused on the pandemic beyond pushing for development and approvals of vaccines and treatments. With the clearance of a vaccine unlikely until year’s end, that raises questions about what happens after Election Day, during what is projected to be the worst stretch yet of the pandemic. The Trump administration will be in charge of managing the pandemic until at least Jan. 20, no matter who wins.

“We need to plan now for how we turn the corner in 2021, and one thing we should be doing is laying the foundation to get public schools reopened in the late winter or early spring,” said Trump’s former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, Scott Gottlieb. “If we don’t plan now, we’ll lose the opportunity to prioritize opening what should be most important to us, just as we lost that chance in the fall because we didn’t plan appropriately this summer.”

Without the ear of the president or other top White House officials, Fauci and other health experts believe the most effective thing they can do is get the public health message out through local and national television media interviews. Birx, the coronavirus coordinator, has traveled across the country in recent weeks delivering blunt advice to state and local leaders grappling with surges of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.

“The thing we can do is to try to get the message out,” Fauci said.

Earlier in the pandemic, Fauci said he and Birx would agree on a message that Birx, who works out of the White House and once met with the president almost every day, would deliver to Trump.

“All of a sudden, they didn’t like what the message was because it wasn’t what they wanted to do anymore,” he said. “They needed to have a medical message that was essentially consistent with what they were saying.

“And one of the ways to say the outbreak is over is [to say] it’s really irrelevant because it doesn’t make any difference. All you need to do is prevent people from dying and protect people in places like the nursing homes,” Fauci said. “And because of that, Debbie almost never ever sees the president anymore. The only medical person who sees the president on a regular basis is Scott Atlas. It’s certainly not Debbie Birx.”

Although Trump, Atlas and other top officials say their strategy is to “protect the vulnerable,” health experts say the administration has not done enough to protect those in nursing homes. The administration has sent tests to nursing homes and other hard-hit communities, but not nearly the number that experts say are needed. Many nursing homes are also experiencing shortages of personal protective equipment, personnel and other critical supplies that the administration has not sufficiently addressed.

While Atlas has publicly rebutted assertions that he promotes a herd immunity strategy, he recently endorsed the Great Barrington Declaration — a document named after the town in Massachusetts where it was unveiled on Oct. 4 at a libertarian think tank — that calls for allowing the coronavirus to spread freely at “natural” rates among healthy young people, while keeping most aspects of the economy up and running.

“He insists he’s not somebody who’s pushing for herd immunity,” Fauci said of Atlas. “He says, ‘That’s not what I mean.’ [But] everything he says — when you put them together and stitch them together — everything is geared toward the concept of ‘it doesn’t make any difference if people get infected. It’s a waste of time. Masks don’t work. Who cares,’ and the only thing you need to do is protect the vulnerable, like people in the nursing homes,” Fauci said.

Fauci said that many people who catch the virus recover “virologically” but will have chronic health problems.

“The idea of this false narrative that if you don’t die, everything is hunky dory is just not the case,” he said. “But to say, ‘Let people get infected, it doesn’t matter, just make sure people don’t die’ — to me as a person who’s been practicing medicine for 50 years, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”

A similar assessment was offered by Tom Bossert, the former homeland security adviser in the Trump administration. “It sounds alluring,” Bossert said. “It sounds so seductive. It’s not possible. Math makes it irresponsible to even try and say it.”

Fauci and other top health experts applauded the substantial growth in expertise about how to treat covid-19 since last spring that has led to a dramatic reduction in death rates.

“Even though we’re getting challenged with more cases,” he said, “the medical system is much better prepared to take care of seriously ill people, so that’s the reason why I think the surge of cases is going to be counterbalanced by better experience.”

Nonetheless, he and others said they are worried about regions of the country that may be ill-prepared to deal with a winter surge of infections, including Midwestern and Western states because they have limited intensive care beds, as well as nurses who can treat growing numbers of covid-19 patients.

“It’s much more about some of the states like Utah, Nevada, South Dakota, North Dakota, where … they never had a pretty good reserve of intensive care beds and things like that. I hope they’ll be okay, but it’s still a risk that, as you get more surging, they’re going to run out of capacity,” Fauci said.
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[Officer of Engineers]

that would depend on the effectiveness of the vaccine, though. most of the stuff I've seen says the vaccines that will likely get rolled out by next year will only be 50-70% effective. that's good enough for a semblance of normalcy, but not good enough to return to a mask-less/social-distancing free lifestyle.

But you could protect the weak and vulnerable by surrounding them with the immune. Those unaffected by the vacine (and we have the ant-vaxers) but can fight off the virus will fight off the virus and gain their immunity that way. In fact, I cannot see how we will not achieve herd immunity even with a 50% effective vacine. The caretakers will be immunized and thus cannot spread the virus to the weak and those who can fight off the virus will fight off the virus.

[Albany Rifles]

Colonel, while I respect Dr Campbell keep in mind he is a DNP...Doctor of Nursing Practice in Emergency Medicine. He no doubt has quite a bit of medical knowledge but is neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist.

If he is getting his data from those professionals and passing them on then that is better. But if he is freeballing here he may be doing more harm than good.

[Officer of Engineers]

Colonel, while I respect Dr Campbell keep in mind he is a DNP...Doctor of Nursing Practice in Emergency Medicine. He no doubt has quite a bit of medical knowledge but is neither a virologist nor an epidemiologist.

If he is getting his data from those professionals and passing them on then that is better. But if he is freeballing here he may be doing more harm than good.

He's presenting studies up the ying yang and some of it is contradictory (which he freely admits but also puts into context how both could exist in the same time). He's quoting the CDC, WHO, Health Canada, the UK's NHS, India's NHAM, even Pakistan, Lybia, Iraq though he states that those numbers are grossly understated.

Keep in mind that he's posting a new video everyday with a global update about once a week. If you look at his posting pre-COVID, it was about once a week, three times if he was busy. There is so much material that is coming out everyday that I bet for every hour he spent filming his video that he spent 12 hours going through the material and put it in context that we can understand. I'm even sure that there are studies that are left out simply because events have surpassed them which he stated in a few videos.

[Albany Rifles]

He's presenting studies up the ying yang and some of it is contradictory (which he freely admits but also puts into context how both could exist in the same time). He's quoting the CDC, WHO, Health Canada, the UK's NHS, India's NHAM, even Pakistan, Lybia, Iraq though he states that those numbers are grossly understated.

Keep in mind that he's posting a new video everyday with a global update about once a week. If you look at his posting pre-COVID, it was about once a week, three times if he was busy. There is so much material that is coming out everyday that I bet for every hour he spent filming his video that he spent 12 hours going through the material and put it in context that we can understand. I'm even sure that there are studies that are left out simply because events have surpassed them which he stated in a few videos.

All good. I just wanted folks to understand he is a DNP and not an MD.

Not knocking DNPs...I am married to one.

But unless it's a DNP in infectious diseases, etc., not an expert but more an aggregator.

[TopHatter]

Counties with worst virus surges overwhelmingly voted Trump
U.S. voters went to the polls starkly divided on how they see President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. But in places where the virus is most rampant now, Trump enjoyed enormous support.

An Associated Press analysis reveals that in 376 counties with the highest number of new cases per capita, the overwhelming majority — 93% of those counties — went for Trump, a rate above other less severely hit areas.

Most were rural counties in Montana, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Iowa and Wisconsin — the kinds of areas that often have lower rates of adherence to social distancing, mask-wearing and other public health measures, and have been a focal point for much of the latest surge in cases.

Taking note of the contrast, state health officials are pausing for a moment of introspection. Even as they worry about rising numbers of hospitalizations and deaths, they hope to reframe their messages and aim for a reset on public sentiment now that the election is over.

“Public health officials need to step back, listen to and understand the people who aren’t taking the same stance” on mask-wearing and other control measures, said Dr. Marcus Plescia of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.

“I think there’s the potential for things to get less charged and divisive," he said, adding that there’s a chance a retooled public health message might unify Americans around lowering case counts so hospitals won’t get swamped during the winter months.

The electoral divide comes amid an explosion in cases and hospitalizations in the U.S. and globally.

The U.S. broke another record in the 7-day rolling average for daily new cases, hitting nearly 90,000. The tally for new cases Thursday was on track for another day above 100,000, with massive numbers reported all around the country, including a combined nearly 25,000 in Texas, Illinois and Florida. Iowa and Indiana each reported more than 4,000 cases as well.

The AP’s analysis was limited to counties in which at least 95% of precincts had reported results, and grouped counties into six categories based on the rates of COVID-19 cases they’d experienced per 100,000 residents.

Polling, too, shows voters who split on Republican Trump vs. Democrat Joe Biden differed on whether the pandemic is under control.

Thirty-six percent of Trump voters described the pandemic as completely or mostly under control, and another 47% said it was somewhat under control, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 110,000 voters conducted for the AP by NORC at the University of Chicago. Meanwhile, 82% of Biden voters said the pandemic is not at all under control.

The pandemic was considered at least somewhat under control by slim majorities of voters in many red states, including Alabama (60%), Missouri (54%), Mississippi (58%), Kentucky (55%), Texas (55%), Tennessee (56%) and South Carolina (56%).

In Wisconsin, where the virus surged just before the election, 57% said the pandemic was not under control. In Washington state, where the virus is more in control now compared to earlier in the year, 55% said the same. Voters in New York and New Hampshire, where the virus is more controlled now after early surges, were roughly divided in their assessments, similar to voters nationwide.

Trump voters interviewed by AP reporters said they value individual freedom and believed the president was doing as well as anyone could in response to the coronavirus.

Michaela Lane, a 25-year-old Republican, dropped her ballot off last week at a polling site at an outdoor mall in Phoenix. She cast her vote for Trump.

“I feel like the most important issue facing the country as a whole is liberty at large,” Lane said. “Infringing on people’s freedom, government overrule, government overreach, chaos in a lot of issues currently going on and just giving people back their rights.”

About half of Trump voters called the economy and jobs the top issue facing the nation, roughly twice the percentage who named the pandemic, according to VoteCast. By contrast, a majority of Biden voters — about 6 in 10 — said the pandemic was the most important issue.

In Madison, Wisconsin, Eric Engstrom, a 31-year-old investment analyst and his wife, Gwen, voted absentee by mail in early October.

Trump’s failure to control the pandemic sealed his vote for Biden, Engstrom said, calling the coronavirus the most immediate threat the nation faces. He and his wife are expecting their first child, a girl, in January and fear “the potential of one of us or both of us being sick when the baby is born,” he said.

Engstrom called Trump's response to the virus abysmal. “If there was any chance that I was going to vote for Trump, it was eliminated because of the pandemic,” he said.

The political temperature has added to the stress of public health officials, Plescia said. “Our biggest concern is how long can they sustain this pace?” he said.

Since the start of the pandemic, 74 state and local public health officials in 31 states have resigned, retired or been fired, according to an ongoing analysis by AP and Kaiser Health News.

As the election mood dissipates, rising hospitalizations amid colder weather create “a really pivotal moment" in the pandemic, said Sema Sgaier, executive director of the Surgo Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that worked with Harvard University-affiliated Ariadne Labs to develop a tool for estimating vaccine needs in states.

“We really need to get our act together. When I say ‘we’ I mean collectively,” Sgaier said. Finding common ground may become easier if one of more of the vaccine candidates proves safe and effective and gains government approval, she said.

“The vaccine provides the reset button,” Sgaier said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci may be another unifying force. According to VoteCast, 73% of voters nationwide approve of the way Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has been handling the pandemic.

Even among Trump voters, 53% approve of Fauci's performance. About 9 in 10 Biden voters approve.

___

Shocking. Utterly shocking.

[tantalus]

Its actually a dream for scientists that the election happened now. They can study the electoral map, how the virus behaved through the summer and fall of 2020 and into the winter of 2021 and anchor into to the november elections. A huge social experiment with a massive election turnout. Almost a unique data set for them to pick through.

Also a human catastrophe.

And this data source will probably be the best hard data to look back upon trumps admin and show the kind of damage he can do. Its not a lock of cause and effect, but nothing is when it comes to the nature of these things.

[Officer of Engineers]

This is something extremely scary

Mutation in Denmark - Youtube

[tbm3fan]

This is something extremely scary

Mutation in Denmark - Youtube

My background in biology was genetics so this sort of thing is less of a surprise and more of anything is possible when reproduction rates are fast. I have always equated their ability to use guanine, cytosine, adenine, and uracil to someone endlessly playing a slot machine with just lemon, orange, cherry, and strawberry. It is only a matter of time and chance.

[Albany Rifles]

My background in biology was genetics so this sort of thing is less of a surprise and more of anything is possible when reproduction rates are fast. I have always equated their ability to use guanine, cytosine, adenine, and uracil to someone endlessly playing a slot machine with just lemon, orange, cherry, and strawberry. It is only a matter of time and chance.

To quote Ian Malcolm....Life finds a way.


(yeah and I know viruses aren't technically alive but work with me here!)

[tbm3fan]

To quote Ian Malcolm....Life finds a way.


(yeah and I know viruses aren't technically alive but work with me here!)

When you distill it down everything is based on four nucleic acids including us. If you look at it that way then you can see that some "lower" forms of animation do a far better job than us creatures at the top of the food chain. A virus is a wonder of simplicity and efficiency compared to us. So, yes, I can work with you...

[tantalus]

To quote Ian Malcolm....Life finds a way.


(yeah and I know viruses aren't technically alive but work with me here!)

Ha kind of debatable on the alive part.

My understanding is that coronaviruses arent very fast mutaters by virus standards. So the hope is that we dodge unlucky and dont get meaningful mutations, and first generation vaccines get a couple of years of efficacy.

But there is still a possibiity of a getting bad luck, and having the virus jumping back and forward through another mammailian immnune system is hardly a casino we should visit.