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Health

Team Biden is blowing it on the monkeypox outbreak – HotAir

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On a slow news day like today, why not check in on a topic we haven’t visited in a while?

Tell me if this sounds familiar. A deadly virus begins spreading undetected in the United States, threatening to burst beyond the ability of quarantine and therapeutics to stop it. But the feds are slow to act. They can’t get their act together on testing; the CDC puts out misleading information; commercial laboratories are underutilized in the early effort to spot cases. America ends up flying blind for months about the extent of community transmission until the virus becomes so prevalent that it can’t be contained.

It happened with COVID. It’s happening again with monkeypox, experts tell WaPo. Except this time, the guy in charge is the one who got elected promising to “shut down” that other virus (which he failed to do). The professionals were supposed to be back in charge in Washington as of January 2021.

Yet many of the errors of 2020 are being repeated now, albeit on a mercifully much smaller scale.

Biden doesn’t even have the excuse that Trump did of having to cope with a novel virus about which nothing was known. Scientists know all about monkeypox: They know how it spreads, they know how to stop it. They even have a vaccine ready to go. In circumstances like those, you’d expect a germ to be stopped cold.

But it’s still spreading among Americans. Experts are sounding the alarm, hoping to wake up the powers that be:

Communication about whom to test, when to test them and what monkeypox symptoms look like has been dismal, said Sauer, a public health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center…

Clinicians, patients and some administration officials have faulted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing criteria that they say are too narrow and have resulted in long waits — sometimes multiple days — in identifying positive cases. Under the current framework, physicians who want a test for an individual suspected to have monkeypox must first consult with a state epidemiologist. State public health officials say that protocol helps identify people at highest risk so doctors can recommend isolation and take other steps to prevent community spread…

And just as in early 2020, when the coronavirus first menaced the United States, federal officials at first limited monkeypox testing to a network of several dozen public health laboratories — and did not authorize thousands of commercial laboratories and hospitals to perform their own testing, too…

The response has also been hindered by U.S. physicians’ lack of familiarity with the disease. The CDC initially publicized decades-old photos from more severe outbreaks in Africa, instead of the more subtle rashes detected in the recent global outbreak. The United States was far slower than Britain and Canada to distribute updated education materials, only recently sharing photos showing what the rashes look like on fair skin, said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors.

One patient in New York City showed up to a clinic this month with flu-like symptoms and swollen lymph nodes after returning home from Portugal, having had sex there with other men. If you’ve followed the news about Europe’s monkeypox outbreak, you know that should have triggered alarm bells in his doctor. The virus is primarily spreading among gay and bisexual men and a festival in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Portugal, seems to have been a superspreader event. The patient eventually developed abnormal lesions too — but he had to visit four different providers before one of his doctors finally hit on the idea of testing him for monkeypox. A virologist based in the city told WaPo that “he was aware of a dozen similar cases in which people with possible monkeypox symptoms were being rebuffed.”

Not a great effort by the CDC to put the word out if even doctors in America’s biggest city don’t know what to look for and can’t easily test.

The result is that America’s small number of confirmed monkeypox cases relative to Europe is almost certainly a gross undercount due to poor surveillance, not lesser spread. Known cases in Britain rose nearly 40 percent in the span of five days last week and the WHO is considering declaring a global emergency. Because there’s an extant vaccine for the virus, it’s crucially important to quickly identify patients and then rush the vaccine to their close contacts to stop the spread, i.e. “ring vaccination.” But the more the virus spreads undetected, the more contacts there are to trace, and suddenly it becomes logistically impossible to run down everyone who might have been exposed. You know how this story goes as well as I do.

In fact, it’s anyone’s guess whether the virus has already spread far enough in the population to make ring vaccination momentarily impossible. The U.S. has 36,000 doses of the leading monkeypox vaccine stockpiled; if there are, say, 6,000 people infected right now and each has six close contacts, that’s every last dose accounted for — if we can find those contacts and get it to them immediately. Every day that they have to wait means the pool of infected gets larger.

There’s another thing you know as well as I do, which is that the more people a virus infects, the more chances it has to mutate into something more contagious or more virulent or both. We’ve been living with that reality for two years with COVID. We’re living it now with monkeypox as well:

In the latest study, researchers discovered around 50 genetic variations in the viruses they studied compared to ones from 2018 and 2019. This, they said, “is far more than one would expect considering previous estimates” of the mutation rate of orthopoxviruses of which monkeypox is a type—between six and 12 times more…

“Considering that this 2022 monkeypox virus is likely a descendant of the one in the 2017 Nigeria outbreak, one would expect no more than five to 10 additional mutations instead of the observed about 50 mutations. We hope that now, specialized groups will perform laboratory experiments in order to understand if this 2022 virus has increased its transmissibility.”

It may be that monkeypox has been spreading quietly in western nations for awhile, having stumbled into a key mutation at some point that made it more transmissible, and the result has been the global outbreak we’re now experiencing. In fact, the CDC announced earlier this month that it had discovered a case in the U.S. that *pre-dated* the first cases in Europe in May. Which makes it all the more important to shut this thing down yesterday.

The good news is that the feds are getting their act together, belatedly. Another 300,000 doses of the vaccine are now on order and they just authorized five commercial labs to start performing monkeypox tests in July. There’s also good news in how the virus spreads (for now): Despite its many mutations, it appears that you need skin-on-skin contact or something very close to it in order to contract it. It’s “airborne” in the sense that it shows up in large respiratory droplets but not in aerosols a la the coronavirus, the key to COVID’s spread. Hopefully it’s not too late to slam the brakes here. We’ll know soon.

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Health

Monkeypox might now be spreading exponentially – HotAir

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Not all exponential growth is equal, of course. In the case of monkeypox, we’re not talking about 10,000 cases turning into 20,000 in a matter of days, a la COVID. We’re talking about 10 cases turning into 20.

Even so, if there’s one thing we’ve learned from two years of pandemic misery, it’s that a small number of infections can turn into a big number quickly if growth continues exponentially.

Virologist Trevor Bedford has been tracking monkeypox cases across various countries and spotted a worrisome trend. It’s possible that scientists have detected more cases recently simply because they’re now on the lookout for them. But the fact that growth is so similar in different places suggests the virus really is spreading in the community. This isn’t an artifact of surveillance, he thinks. It’s evidence of transmission.

We’ve all seen this movie before. The ending isn’t great.

There’s some good news. Per CNN, 643 cases of monkeypox have now been recorded in countries outside Africa. As far as I’m aware, not a single person has died. In the first days of the global outbreak we were told that there were two strains of the virus known in Africa, one with a fatality rate of around one percent and the other with a fatality rate of 10 percent(!). The fact that monkeypox is 0 for 643 outside Africa may mean that the African death rate is due to lack of access to basic health care more so than the innate virulence of the virus. Fortunately, the virus is also less likely to mutate aggressively than, say, COVID was. Because its genome is made of double-stranded DNA rather than single-stranded RNA, like SARS-CoV-2, it doesn’t change as rapidly, CNN points out.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to mount that gay men are the subpopulation most at risk of infection. The number of confirmed cases across the U.S. doubled in the past week to 20, but “[o]f the 17 patients that have provided detailed information to the CDC, 16 self identified as men who have had sex with men.” That matches what scientists in other countries have seen. Monkeypox hasn’t traditionally been an STD — in the past it spread through airborne droplets during sustained close contact — but it turns out that an outbreak in Nigeria five years ago also had a sexual component.

In Nigeria, too, doctors first picked up hints of a new pattern that would be repeated around the world. Many of the patients were men, and many had genital lesions, suggesting transmission via sexual contact. Four years later, many of the cases in Europe and the Americas are also in men and also characterized by genital lesions. “It looks like déjà vu to me,” says Dimie Ogoina, a doctor at Niger Delta University Teaching Hospital, which treated the first and many subsequent cases of monkeypox in Nigeria in 2017. The virus was known to spread through droplets and any kind of physical contact with infectious sores and scabs—but sex, specifically, had never been high on the list of transmission risks. (Past cases were usually linked to contact with wild animals or household contact.) The unusual pattern and unusual size of the Nigeria outbreak should have been a signal that something had changed for monkeypox. But the world ignored it until too late, and a global outbreak is now well under way.

Read that again. The same unusual type of monkeypox that appears to be spreading now in the west was spreading in Africa *five years ago.* “What happened in 2017 in Nigeria was absolutely a warning sign,” said one epidemiologist to The Atlantic. But because westerners tend to overlook outbreaks in Africa (“there’s always something spreading there”) resources weren’t rushed in to try to contain the spread before it broke out continent-wide and ultimately into Europe and the U.S.

Scientists have already confirmed a connection between the “new” monkeypox and the one that’s been spreading in Africa for years. “In [new] research, genetic sequences showed that the first monkeypox cases in 2022 appear to have descended from an outbreak that resulted in cases in Singapore, Israel, Nigeria and the United Kingdom from 2017 to 2019,” CNN reports. But that’s not the only surprise the genetic data contains: Apparently the current global outbreak is actually two separate outbreaks, each driven by their own distinct lineage of the virus. Scientists at the CDC analyzed 10 viral samples from patients in the U.S. and found that three of them differ genetically from the samples being gathered in Europe. All three samples came from people who had traveled abroad to different places too — Nigeria, west Africa, and east Africa/the Middle East.

Experts’ best shot at explaining the two-track outbreak for now is that monkeypox has been out there circulating at low levels for much longer than anyone realized. Which is … reassuring, I guess? If it had years to ignite explosive exponential growth and didn’t, that must mean transmission is difficult. On the other hand, it may now have established enough of a foothold in western populations such that there’s no way to get rid of it. New York City has recorded a mere five cases but health officials there believe that’s sufficiently strong evidence of community spread that it may be “too late to contain.” The nightmare scenario is that it’ll jump from people to native animals, which will then become a “reservoir” for an endemic virus in the wild. That didn’t happen in the 2003 monkeypox outbreak in the U.S. but it has happened with other viruses like West Nile.

I’ll leave you with this bit from The Atlantic, which raises the prospect of widespread infection causing the virus to evolve. It may mutate slowly but it does mutate to become fitter. Quote: “Poxviruses tend to accumulate mutations at a fairly slow rate of one or two a year, but the genomes from 2022 have a whopping 47 mutations. Intriguingly, almost all of the changes to the genetic code are TC to TT or GA to AA. This is unlikely to have happened through random copying error; instead it resembles the signature of an immune-system mechanism—found in both humans and animals—that introduces mutations in an attempt to disable the virus.” The more people it infects, the more mutations there’ll be.



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Health

COVID seems to be getting less deadly (and more contagious) – HotAir

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It’s pretty clear why it’s getting more contagious. It’s less clear why it’s getting less deadly.

Yesterday the White House’s new COVID coordinator, Ashish Jha, shared some rare good news about the virus. Cases have been rising in the northeast for almost two months. But deaths haven’t.

The picture is the same nationally. Between April 1 and April 27, cases in the U.S. roughly doubled. Deaths fell by half over the same period. There’s been hardly any increase in deaths since April 27 either despite the fact that cases have continued trending upward. In fact, we may be in the middle of a wave at the moment without realizing it:

Why is COVID killing fewer people now than before?

Two obvious reasons. Virtually everyone in the U.S. has some form of immunity at this point, whether naturally or via vaccine, so our bodies are more prepared for an encounter with the virus. We can fight it off before it turns severe, especially those who’ve been boosted. Therapeutics are also now available to disrupt the course of the illness after infection. It wasn’t long ago that Pfizer’s wonder drug, Paxlovid, was in such short supply that the immunocompromised were being given priority for it, but now it’s sufficiently abundant that scientists are complaining that it’s being underused.

Good vaccines + good medicine = less death. But shouldn’t that also mean fewer infections? If everyone has antibodies now, why are we seeing case numbers rise?

It’s all about evolution, writes David Axe:

More cases but fewer deaths, a phenomenon epidemiologists call “decoupling,” has come to define COVID’s evolution as we muddle through the third year of the pandemic. There are signs decoupling might actually get more extreme. After all, the immunity that leads to decoupling also spurs a virus to mutate more quickly into ever more transmissible lineages.

Immunity encourages mutants, which can increase immunity by seeding antibodies from mild infection. It’s an accelerating positive feedback loop whose products are antibodies and viral lineages.

As the virus circulates among a population in which everyone has some immunity, the only strains that will prosper are the ones lucky enough to gain the ability to evade the human immune response via mutation. The virus is being “honed” through genetic chance to become more transmissible even in a country where nearly everyone has antibodies. But while those antibodies may not be enough to prevent infection by the new strains, the knowledge of the virus that our T-cells and B-cells have acquired through prior exposure is apparently enough to mount an immune response that limits severe illness. Result: Lots of transmission, not much death.

For now. As Omicron continues to spin off new substrains, the feds are worried that the combination of cold weather and continuing viral evolution will produce a mega-wave this winter that could infect up to 100 million people. There already exist lineages of Omicron that are more contagious than the parent strain, which was itself one of the most contagious respiratory viruses ever seen. Something called BA.2.12.1 is now spreading in the northeast and responsible for the recent surge in cases there. And two substrains known as BA.4 and BA.5 are picking up steam in Africa. Those are worth keeping an eye on, as they’re so immune-evasive that even a previous infection by Omicron doesn’t seem to generate much resistance:

A new preprint study, published ahead of peer review, is pointing to why BA.4 and BA.5 are gaining ground: They can escape antibodies generated by previous infections caused by the first Omicron virus, BA.1, the variant responsible for the huge wave of infections that hit many countries in December and January. They can also escape antibodies in people who’ve been vaccinated and had breakthrough BA.1 infections, though this happened to a lesser degree than seen in people who’ve only been infected…

“Our conclusions from this are, first, that Omicron by itself is not a great vaccine, right?” said Alex Sigal, a virologist at the Africa Health Research Institute who led the study. “Just because you were infected does not mean you have a lot of protection from what’s coming next.”…

The BA.4 and BA.5 viruses and BA.2.12.1 have mutations at location 452 of their genomes. This region codes for a part of the viruses receptor binding domain — the part of the virus that docks onto a door on the outside of our cells. The Delta variant and some others have picked up mutations in this location. Researchers believe that changes there help the virus bind more tightly to our cells and hide from frontline immune defenders called antibodies that try to block the virus from invading our cells.

There’s been no spike in deaths lately in South Africa so maybe BA.4 and BA.5 are just another step in the trend towards a more transmissible virus that causes less severe illness. It does leave me wondering about what this means for the next generation of vaccines, though. If Pfizer and Moderna switch over to a vaccine geared towards Omicron, what good will that vaccine do us if BA.4 and BA.5 can break through immunity generated by Omicron itself?

Speaking of mass contagion, America’s most celebrated superspreader event reportedly continues to pile up victims:

Reporters not reporting on mistakes made by reporters is an old tradition in reporting. Fauci has reportedly complained behind the scenes that the White House set a bad example by letting the WHCD go forward when the virus is still spreading so widely, but at last check not a single person who caught COVID there has been hospitalized. More contagious, less severe, even at the White House Correspondents Dinner.



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Business

FTC to “review” Musk’s purchase of Twitter – HotAir

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The liberal panic over Elon Musk attempting to buy Twitter has escalated to the highest levels of the government and every liberal mainstream media outlet. While President Biden hasn’t directly criticized Musk’s ambitions by invoking his name, he has told reporters that he has “long had concerns” over the power of social media and the influence of large corporations. So is he planning to do something about it? Nobody seems to want to comment on this directly, but it may not be coincidental that the Federal Trade Commission has launched a “review” of Musk’s bid to purchase the social media platform. And what reason would they offer to conduct such a review? They want to make sure the purchase wouldn’t run afoul of any antitrust issues. Seriously? (Fox Business)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is reviewing Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $44 billion deal with Twitter, setting up a deadline for a possible antitrust review, according to a Thursday report.

A person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg the agency will decide next month whether to do an in-depth antitrust probe of the Twitter deal – a move that could delay its closing by months.

The FTC declined to comment. Musk could not be reached for comment.

If the FTC wants to examine Musk’s stock sales, loans, and other financial machinations designed to allow him to come up with the price tag for Twitter, that’s fine. Any time that much money starts changing hands and does so in a way that can push a company’s stocks in either direction, they have an obligation to take a look.

But an antitrust rap? SpaceX, Tesla, the Boring Company, and Musk’s other ventures all have one thing in common. They don’t control a social media platform. In other words, the total number of social media platforms that Elon Musk currently owns is zero. If he acquires Twitter, that number will increase to one.

If Musk was trying to purchase Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube along with Twitter, then you might have a case to make about potential antitrust considerations. But even then it would probably be dubious. If one person or company controls too much of the supply of batteries, passenger planes, or other goods and services, they can cause shortages or drive up prices and profits unfairly. How does one go about controlling the supply and demand of people talking online?

Even if the review is destined to fail to find any antitrust concerns as most analysts seem to believe, a full review could tie the sale of Twitter up for months. That might potentially give the rest of the players involved some time to figure out a different way to thwart Musk’s effort. And make no mistake about this. What we’re seeing is a very calculated effort to find some way to stop Musk from taking Twitter private and cutting back on the censorship.

Just to toss out one other observation for your consideration, isn’t it rather odd that nobody seemed to have a problem with how Twitter operated all of this time that it was controlled by a board of directors? The individual stockholders weren’t having any input regarding the company’s policies, at least not to any measurable degree. It’s almost as if the panicking critics currently setting their hair on fire really didn’t have any qualms about the free speech situation on the platform as long as it was only “the right people” who were able to speak. But now that conservatives might be able to avoid being shut down in the digital public square, it’s a totally different story and the monster must be stopped. Funny how that works, eh?

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Health

Hey, the vaccines were never intended to prevent infections – HotAir

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You spoiled Americans need to reset your expectations when it comes to the COVID vaccines. That’s the message coming from a variety of health authorities interviewed by USA Today this week. They also spoke to some patients who expressed their shock and surprise after testing positive despite being fully vaccinated, boosted, wearing masks religiously, and avoiding crowds. But these same health officials were quick to point out that your chances of requiring hospitalization or dying as a result of contracting COVID are still significantly lower if you’ve received the shots. Even then, however, the odds of the worst outcome hitting you are still a non-zero number.

It’s no longer unusual to hear of someone getting COVID-19 even though they’re fully vaccinated and boosted. Yet, many Americans are still shocked when it happens to them.

Early data showed the mRNA vaccines were highly effective against infection, but experts say the virus has changed over time and people need to reconfigure their expectations. The vaccines may not prevent all infection, but they still protect against the worst consequences of the disease.

“That’s what we need to emphasize,” said Dr. Philip Chan, an infectious disease specialist and an associate professor at Brown University. “The fact that these vaccines are still effective against these emerging variants – in terms of severe disease, hospitalizations and death – is definitely a public health win.”

So why are people’s expectations so much higher than they should be? The study suggests that the early clinical trials from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna could be to blame. But another factor has to have been the government’s propaganda campaign and the media’s willingness to go along with it. Perhaps the endless advertisements describing the vaccines as “safe, effective and free” should have been modified a bit to say, ‘mostly effective.’

I suppose there are two ways to look at this. The more snarky among us might initially respond by saying, ‘if I’d gotten four vaccines against smallpox in one year and I still came down with smallpox, I’d have some questions.’ And given the declaration of war on the unvaccinated by the government, a bit of snark could readily be excused.

But at this same time, this analysis doesn’t sound all that unreasonable. Even people who get a flu shot every autumn occasionally come down with the flu anyway. There are a couple of reasons for that according to most epidemiologists. First, the virus that causes the flu is constantly mutating. The pharmacological companies have to come up with a new version of the vaccine every year and some years it turns out to be a better match than others.

Similarly, the novel coronavirus is already mutating significantly since being released into the wild. The original vaccines were probably far more effective against the first strain of COVID that emerged, but not as good against the latest variants. But whether it’s the flu or COVID, both are believed to significantly reduce your chances of both hospitalization or death.

But if the primary concern of these health officials is that Americans’ expectations of the vaccines are too high, they should look in the mirror. It was the CDC, along with elected officials and their media water bearers who painted the vaccines as our last and only hope against extinction or whatever they were saying.

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Business

Why Elon Musk has rattled them – HotAir

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Of course there are plenty of good reasons to be opposed to the world’s richest man owning a portion of the modern public square. As Batya Ungar-Sargon argued on spiked last week, even genuine liberals should be uncomfortable with the fate of free speech online resting solely on which billionaire is in charge. There is also reason to believe Musk isn’t the ‘free speech absolutist’ he claims to be.

But that’s not what Musk’s critics are worried about. They’re terrified that he is the real deal – that this is indeed a kind of ethical venture on his part to free up Twitter from censorship. As Musk put it at a TED conference in Vancouver yesterday: ‘Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square, so it’s really important that people have both the reality and perception that they are able to speak freely, in the bounds of the law.’ This is what curdles his critics’ blood.

Amid all the fume and fury we see that censorship has become a core part of liberal-elite ideology. Politicians, think-tankers and commentators have got it into their heads that the threat to democracy comes not from censorship, but from an excess of freedom of speech – and that the state, Big Tech and corporate media must all do their bit to censor and protect civilisation.

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Science

Activists are still trying to change the name of the new space telescope – HotAir

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Back in October, we looked at the supposed controversy over the name of the new James Webb Space Telescope. LGBT groups were demanding the name be changed because of anti-gay policies in place at NASA during the period when Webb ran the agency. NASA looked into the allegations and found nothing of substance directly related to Webb himself, so they declined to change the name. This led one self-described queer astronomer to grow so frustrated that she resigned her position. That seemed to be the end of the controversy, but that wasn’t the case. (It’s apparently okay to say “queer” now. I honestly can’t keep up with all of the banned and allowed speech these days.) The protests have continued to this day and now supposed “new information” has been released pointing to the allegations made by the activists, suggesting that Webb actually was involved in the persecution of gay and lesbian NASA employees. So activists are renewing their calls for the name to be changed even though the telescope is already on station and performing its mission.

Since early last year, four researchers have been leading the charge for NASA to alter the name of the $10-billion flagship mission, launched in December 2021, which will provide unparalleled views of the universe. The e-mails make clear that, behind the scenes, NASA was well aware of Webb’s problematic legacy even as the agency’s leadership declined to take his name off the project.

“Reading through the exchanges, it seems that LGBTQ+ scientists and the concern we raised are not really what they care about,” says Yao-Yuan Mao of Rutgers University, who maintains the online Astronomy and Astrophysics Outlist of openly LGBTQ+ researchers.

“It’s almost amusing how incompetent the whole thing was,” says Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at the Ohio State University, “and how little they stopped to think of how important an issue this was to the queer astronomical community and how important NASA is for young queer kids trying to find aspirational reasons to just keep going.”

The “new information” that all of this is based on was published at Nature last month. They submitted a FOIA request for NASA emails from the period when they were investigating the allegations. Virtually none of it reveals any new information suggesting that Webb was personally involved with the “lavender scare,” as it’s called. (A period when the government regularly fired people if they believed they were homosexual.)

The only new item of potential interest was a record of Webb having attended a meeting with President Harry Truman in June of 1950 where there was allegedly a discussion of how agencies might ‘work together on the homosexual investigation.’ (That was before Webb took over NASA and was a deputy at the State Department.) There is no further suggestion as to whether or not Webb was ever involved in any such investigations.

The accusers once again brought up the case of an astronomer who was fired from NASA in the 60s (when Webb was in charge) for “immoral, indecent, and disgraceful conduct,” because he was alleged to be gay. He later appealed his case and some court records exist to support that the firing actually happened. But they only recount a conversation that the astronomer had with an unnamed person in the personnel office. Again, there is no suggestion that the Director of NASA even knew this was going on, to say nothing of being directly involved with it.

There was definitely an anti-gay bias in the government in the fifties and sixties, just as there was in much of the private sector. But in 2022, you apparently only had to be in some position of authority during that time period to be labeled as an oppressor of gay and lesbian workers or some sort of demon. If they really want to bring the hammer down on someone who seems to have been directly involved, why not go after Truman? God only knows how many things are still named after him. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be feeding them any ideas.

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Science

NASA is about to broadcast a message to the universe. Should they? – HotAir

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Anyone who has ever watched the Movie Contact is probably familiar with SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and similar scientific endeavors over the past century. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy listening to the cosmos, hoping to catch a signal indicating that there’s somebody else out there, specifically someone at least as technologically advanced as we are. And most of that time, though not all, has been spent listening. A few efforts have already been made to transmit a signal to potential alien races, such as the 1974 Arecibo broadcast, but we’ve mostly waited to see if ET would phone home to us first. But now some of the scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are teaming up with SETI and some astronomers in China to take another shot at broadcasting out into the galaxy. And the message they are sending this time offers very specific information about human beings, the Earth, and our location in the Milky Way. As the Daily Caller reminds us this week, this is precisely the sort of activity that Stephen Hawking tried to warn us against, but what did that guy know, right?

Scientists are planning to beam a radio message into deep space with detailed information on human life that had the late Stephen Hawking worried.

Hawking generally supported any and all efforts to find alien life in the outer reaches of space but had warned scientists about actively reaching out ourselves, according to Newsweek. Hawking was concerned that any aliens who may happen upon our signal might not respond in the most friendly of ways, the outlet reported.

“If you look at history, contact between humans and less intelligent organisms have often been disastrous from their point of view, and encounters between civilizations with advanced versus primitive technologies have gone badly for the less advanced,” Hawking said at the time, noting that any superior forms of life “may not see us as any more valuable than we see bacteria.”

As I mentioned above, this message goes into far more detail than the previous efforts people have made. Once broken down from binary, the message shows pictures of the Milky Way, identifying Earth’s position in relation to recognizable formations of star clusters. It also depicts naked humans, along with a representation of our DNA structure, and the layout of the continents and oceans on our planet. Any intelligent species capable of detecting and decoding the signal would likely have little trouble finding us if they’re capable of interstellar travel.

And therein lies the problem. What if they’re not particularly friendly? What if they would see the appearance of a new, technologically-capable species in their galactic neighborhood as a potential threat and decide to nip the problem in the bud? But NASA scientist and project co-founder Jonathan Jiang dismisses such concerns. “Logic suggests a species which has reached sufficient complexity to achieve communication through the cosmos would also very likely have attained high levels of cooperation amongst themselves and thus will know the importance of peace and collaboration,” he said.

Really? That seems like an awfully big assumption, doesn’t it? We’ve achieved the ability to communicate through the cosmos. Take a look around the planet, pal. Does it really look like humans have “attained high levels of cooperation” and “know the importance of peace and collaboration?” (For only one current example, see Putin, Vladimir.)

Some may argue that if the closest intelligent species is on a planet within twenty light-years of us, it’s no big deal. The message will take twenty years to get there and then another twenty years for a response to arrive. But what if it washes over someone who just happens to be passing by our star system, unaware that we’re here? That might cut down the “response time” dramatically.

Of course, all of these concerns are probably pointless. In addition to the previous broadcast attempts, we’ve been sending out radio programs and television shows into the cosmos since the early part of the last century. Anyone within one hundred light-years of us with the capability to pick up faint signals from the blackness probably already knows we’re here. And all of this ignores what appears to be the increasingly likely possibility that the ETs are already here, at least based on what the Pentagon’s new UFO office has been telling us. If they really wanted to chat they could have picked up a cellphone and called someone by now.

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Health

Scientists are proposing a reboot on vaccinating the world – HotAir

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“We seem to have lost perspective as to what the major goal of vaccines is and where they are going to yield the greatest public health benefit,” says Shabir Madhi, a prominent vaccine researcher at South Africa’s University of Witwatersrand.

Specifically, Madhi argues that governments in countries that still have low vaccination rates should shift their attention to vaccinating those who are most vulnerable to severe disease from the coronavirus. That means people age 50 and above or those with health conditions that put them at particular risk. The aim, says Madhi, should be to get 90% or more of people in this category vaccinated.

Unfortunately, he says, that effort is being hampered by a simultaneous push to meet a different goal – vaccinating 70% of all adults regardless of age or health status. It’s an objective originally conceived by the World Health Organization, then embraced and promoted by the United States. But, says Madhi, it’s a goal that could now be proving a harmful distraction.

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Health

Protection from COVID boosters may last for years, avoiding need for fourth shot near term – HotAir

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Note the word “protection” in the headline, which is different from “antibodies.” Antibodies always fade in time; it takes around four months after a third COVID shot, according to the best data we have. But there’s more to immunity than just antibodies. There are also T cells and B cells, which work together to help the immune system form a “memory” of a particular virus. (Or the spike protein of a particular virus, which is how the vaccines work.) Once you have that “memory,” you can generate new antibodies rapidly to neutralize that virus if you’re infected with it.

And here’s the important part: The clearer the “memory” the immune system has, the more sophisticated the antibodies it can produce. According to new research, someone who’s had three exposures to the spike protein on the Wuhan virus via three doses of vaccine is capable of developing antibodies that can neutralize variants that didn’t exist when they were vaccinated, like Omicron. Just as the virus evolves in the wild as it passes from host to host, the T cells and B cells of someone who’s been boosted will generate more “evolved” antibodies.

And those T cells and B cells don’t fade in a matter of months like antibodies do. The latest data points to them lasting years, which means a person who’s had three doses might be equipped to avoid severe illness from the next serious variant to come down the pike even if that variant doesn’t arrive until 2025 or whatever.

None of which is to say that we’ll never be asked to get a fourth shot. Presumably the CDC will recommend it every fall like they do the flu shot, asking people to prep their immune systems for an expected surge of the virus over the winter by preemptively generating new antibodies. But the era of a new shot every four months or whatever is probably over, per the Times:

Three doses of a Covid vaccine — or even just two — are enough to protect most people from serious illness and death for a long time, the studies suggest…

Antibodies recognize two or three key parts of the spike protein, a protrusion on the outside of the coronavirus that allows it to latch on to human cells. But T cells detect many more parts of the spike, and so are less likely to fail when the virus gains mutations in some of them…

Researchers showed last year that the elite school inside of lymph nodes where the B cells train, called the germinal center, remains active for at least 15 weeks after the second dose of a Covid vaccine. In an updated study published in the journal Nature, the same team showed that six months after vaccination, memory B cells continue to mature, and the antibodies they produce keep gaining the ability to recognize new variants…

In the newest study, another team showed that a third shot creates an even richer pool of B cells than the second shot did, and the antibodies they produce recognize a broader range of variants. In laboratory experiments, these antibodies were able to fend off the Beta, Delta and Omicron variants. In fact, more than half of the antibodies seen one month after a third dose were able to neutralize Omicron, even though the vaccine was not designed for that variant, the study found.

That reminds me of the study from last year about people with “super immunity,” those who’d caught COVID initially and later got vaccinated. The same adaptive effect was seen in their immune systems: Because their T cells and B cells had gotten a look at the full virus and then were further exposed to the spike protein via the shots, they were able to produce antibodies so versatile that they managed to neutralize all six major strains plus a Frankenstein variant of the virus developed in a lab that doesn’t exist in nature. Today’s new data on boosters suggests that the triple-vaxxed are developing a similar ability to anticipate and defeat as-yet-unknown strains.

Six months after a third dose, said one scientist to the Times, the antibodies a vaccinated person produces are “better binders and more potent neutralizers than the ones that are produced one month after immunization.” Essentially, then, the future of COVID is an evolutionary race between the virus, which aims to transmit more and more efficiently, and our immune systems, which aim to produce antibodies versatile enough to counteract them. Hopefully future iterations of SARS-CoV-2 will be less virulent — but there’s no guarantee of that. “In these new hosts, the virus could possibly evolve to a new, more deleterious version that attaches better and infects other organs, like the heart or gastrointestinal tract, instead of the lungs,” writes Eric Topol today. “We have already seen people with simultaneous co-infections of two different variants, which enables the swapping of RNA between them and generating a hybrid, potentially worse version of the virus.”

If we do eventually see something worse, it’s a cinch that people who’ve had three looks at the spike will enjoy more sophisticated defenses than those who haven’t. And don’t count on natural immunity to fill the gap, one scientist told the NYT. While it’s true that some people generate strong immune responses after infection, it’s hit-or-miss, varying “quite a lot, while the vaccine response is much more consistently good.”

As for whether four doses are better than three, we already know from Israel’s data that a fourth dose doesn’t seem to add much near-term against Omicron. Conceivably it adds more long-term by providing even more information about the spike protein to the T cells and B cells but it’s too soon to know that, as Israel’s only been dosing out fourth shots for a few months. There must be some point at which even the long-term components of the immune system understand the virus as well as they’re capable of understanding it, making further shots superfluous.

Bottom line: It’s a cinch that senior citizens will be encouraged to get fourth doses at some point, as their immune systems are slower off the block than younger people’s are, but it may be awhile before the rest of us are asked to line up again. I’ll leave you with this guy, who hasn’t been seen on TV lately for a very good reason, it turns out. Neil Cavuto is extremely high risk from COVID due to preexisting conditions (he recovered from cancer, then developed multiple sclerosis) but he’s still here and kicking after two bouts with the disease.



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