Yeah, Eric Feigl-Ding has somehow landed in the extremely small Venn overlap between “people who know much more about a thing that I care about than I do” and “people who I am comfortable completely ignoring”.
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Yeah. I assume everyone ITT is already rolling their eyes at the sight of this guy’s weird last name, but yeah. If you don’t know, now you know.
BTW, the Pfizer + infection in their assay was people who had been infected with ancestral COVID and then subsequently been double-vaxxed. I think this lends even more credence to the idea that a booster will be just as good than if it was double-vaxxed and then infected.
He’s good as a newsfinder, you just have to curate what he is concluding because he paints the darkest side of everything. Hence why I asked here.
Eric’s always been on the extreme doom side, but not so extreme that he’s a crank. I kinda roll my eyes when I see his posts but also I can’t get too mad at people who are thinking about worst-case scenarios.
Yeah. Eric loves him some Eric and is too doom and gloom to take at face value, but I put him in a different category than someone like Yaneer Bar-Yam who just posts flat out made up stuff.
Who else is in there?
I think he may be riding solo - I couldn’t think of anyone else.
Sarah Kendizor for me. The politics doom and gloom. She may even be right but I just couldn’t take it anymore.
Also Seth Abramson who I assume knows a lot about beltway politics but is FOS a lot of the time.
And Kurt Eichenwald for the same reasons.
Really most of political twitter - which I hardly ever look at anymore. I just stick to my sports list. A little bit of politics filters in through that - which is just the right amount.
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Booster fucked me up. Had chills and arm hurts. Had heat on 80 and my sleeping bag on my bed lol. Now to fly.
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Seems bad.
EDIT: Probably not that informative. MA cases detected through normal means are pushing towards record heights as well, so this isn’t obviously noteworthy.
Cliffs: People who are boosted probably have strong protection against infection by Omicron. People who only have two doses probably have strong protection against severe disease but not against infection. In line with some of the stuff Wookie posted upthread.
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COVID vaccine requirements for schools:
Only California has done this so far. Seems like an absolute no-brainer, regardless of politics. Every state mandates vaccination against chickenpox, a nuisance disease. COVID has been killing 10,000 people a week every week since September.
The NPR piece is kind of funny, because they had an important topic to write about, but there’s no actual policy arguments to discuss, and NPR is not the kind of outlet to demand political action, so it’s this weird farrago of historical trivia, useful idiots from the nonprofit world yammering about equity, and this ghoul:
“I don’t think that it would be the right time to [mandate the COVID vaccine at a state level], especially if we look in the context of the entire pandemic,” says Dr. Thomas Dobbs, Mississippi’s state health officer. “Patients trust their own physician more than anybody else and especially where we are right now in the pandemic, that’s the best place for that conversation.”
Maybe there’s a time and place for forceful action to combat infectious disease, but I think we can all agree that the middle of a deadly pandemic is not that time. That’s the closing quote for the article!! (Interestingly, Mississippi is, or at least was, a national leader on childhood vaccination back in the days when anti-vaxxery had a crystal-enamored-leftie valence, because they were among the first to eliminate religious/philosophical objections as an excuse. sigh)
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This is good stuff, but this is a little vague for my comfort:
But the blood samples obtained from people one month after they had received a booster shot showed neutralizing antibodies against the Omicron variant comparable to the levels of antibodies against a previous version of the virus after two doses, the companies said in a statement.
How much waning does this take into account? The reason boosters were rolled out in the first place was that protection was insufficient, especially for more vulnerable groups. It would actually be a pretty dire outcome if Omicron nullifies the effect of boosters for those that got them while making things worse for everyone else. Even among those 65+, a bare majority of people haven’t gotten boosted yet. For all the other flaws in our response to the virus, we were at least fighting Alpha and Delta with really strong protection among the most vulnerable. If that’s less true in the face of Omicron and infection levels are way up due to weak protection against Omicron infection, things could get bad.
This part seems optimistic though:
At the same time, the tests suggested that the mutations in Omicron do not appear to significantly affect T cells — another critical part of the immune system’s response. That suggests “vaccinated individuals may still be protected against severe forms of the disease” after only two doses, the companies said.
From Matty G’s newsletter today. Not sure whether anything here is new information, but :
The government should be recommending Fluvoxamine
It never got the hype of ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine, but back in the early “throw shit against the wall and see what sticks” phase of the pandemic, another old generic drug that some clinicians thought might help was fluvoxamine.
Fluvoxamine (marketed as Luvox) is an SSRI normally prescribed as an antidepressant. It’s similar to Citalopram (Celexa), Escitalopram (Lexapro), Fluoxetine (Prozac), etc. I think it’s not normally psychiatrists’ go-to choice because the gastrointestinal side effects that you see with all SSRIs are somewhat more common with fluvoxamine. But it is used for depression, and to some extent for OCD and social anxiety. Apparently compared to other SSRIs, it also has a more potent anti-inflammatory impact. According to an article in Frontiers of Pharmacology, this is because it “has been shown to have the strongest activity of all SSRIs at the sigma-1 receptor (S1R) with low-nanomolar affinity,” but I’m not a doctor and I don’t know what that means.
What I do know is that some doctors thought this meant it might help with Covid, so they tried it, and some of them thought it was helping their patients. That’s exactly the HCL/dewormer zone and is not convincing on its own, but when subjected to a rigorous RCT, fluvoxamine turns out to actually work and generates a 30% reduction in hospitalizations.
That’s the same efficacy as Merck reported for its much-hyped new antiviral candidate molnupiravir. But fluvoxamine is cheaper and more widely available. What’s more, some scientists are worried about molnupiravir because its mechanism of action is that it induces fatal mutations in the virus. The concern is that if people don’t complete the full course of treatment, this could end up inducing non-fatal mutations which might worsen the pandemic. Largely for this reason, the FDA advisory committee vote on molnupiravir was closely divided with 13 in favor of approval and 10 against.
I’d be inclined to side with the 13 on the grounds that the downsides here are pretty hypothetical, if not for the fact that an equally effective alternative treatment — fluvoxamine — is already available. That consideration, to me, tilts things in the direction of the 10. But I think it’s a tough call. What’s not a tough call is that we should be recommending fluvoxamine as a safe and somewhat effective treatment. Unfortunately, the federal government’s official treatment guidelines on this have not been updated since April so they don’t include the results of the big RCT and don’t recommend the treatment.
The referenced RCT is here:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(21)00448-4/fulltext
Yeah, that’s my worry for the most likely outcome. This isnt very likely an end days variant, but enough at this point to have real worries about making the current wave worse and we were already headed to record hospitalization levels here in the northeast. I think there’s enough there that we should be starting to add mitigation. Not like everyone stay home or anything, but dont think we need like 15,000 people together at a concert or basketball game in cloth masks even if everyone has had two shots.
Eric is a hack. Everything I see from him is OMG THE SKY IS FALLING in tweet form. It all ends up bullshit.
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Yeah, you see what I use him for. I read a news story he posts and then ask other smart people whether I should care or worry about it or not. Obviously you cant use his conclusions, too many of them get walked back. I dont think they all end up bullshit though, and he tends to flag these things pretty early. When you flag everything in a pandemic filled with bad news, some of it turns out to be accurate.