Does the coronavirus merit investment, or personal, concern or consideration?

Unless we spend ourselves broke and turn to Communism. At that point, I’m sure there will be a lot of support to build a wall … to keep us in. :wink:

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Uh, oh! My definition of healthy has changed over the years. Currently, I’m healthy if I’m above room temperature. :slightly_smiling_face:

I don’t know how you just now realized it, given that experts have been saying this for like a year. It’s probably the main goal of COVAX – give everyone access to vaccines and quickly, regardless of their ability to pay.

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Which we weren’t involved in (and thus had no say in or input in the direction). Until February this year. I wonder why. Nothing happened at the end of January.

It’s probably the main goal of S̶k̶y̶n̶e̶t̶ COVAX. :smile: Yeah, that’s the ticket. :smile:

Edited to correct spelling of main. Hey, I didn’t learn four letter words.

Skynet wants to fight diseases?

I realize now that my post went over your head. I’m not surprised in that you readily admit to your short attention span and inability to digest detail. But your mention of COVAX is appreciated. It is good and noteworthy for others here:

COVAX is being marketed as a typical liberal “do gooder” bleeding heart initiative. Everyone should, on basis of compassion and caring for others, support inoculation of the world’s poor and disadvantaged This is a serious mistake. I have looked at COVAX websites. Those I am seeing miss the point entirely, the one I made in my earlier post, above.

Instead of pushing the customary liberal drivel, it is COVAX advantages for the developed world which should be, and need to be, focused upon… And that is not happening, certainly not with any emphasis. People will act far more readily when something, in this instance COVAX, is seen to be in their own self interest. You get a lot more mileage that way than with short legged bleeding heart crapola.

Finally I declare that scripta is a pantywaist. I’m safe writing that here, at the bottom, since he also has the attention span of a gnat, probably will stop reading this post after the second paragraph as he did my last, and hence will never even see this insult hiding in plain sight.

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This is certainly possible. However, I think you may well be overstating the risk associated with the scenario. For example, the S. Africa variant seems to be a fair bit different enough that at least some people can get covid again from it even if they had the original strain, including at least one serious case.

PFE seems to work pretty well against it, 90% vs 95% non-variant efficacy
AZN seems not to, 10-20% efficacy

The UK strain seems to only be a bit different and most vaccines work, perhaps with a 10% or so reduced efficacy relative to their ability against the original.

Compare this covid situation to the flu. We have a “pandemic” of flu for the last century and presumably it’s still ongoing. The virus mutates, every year they make partially effective vaccines, and every year tens of thousands die from it in the US, mostly the very young or old in weakened conditions. That’s just life. However most people, having gotten the flu in some form over their lives, have some partial immunity to the new strains and while it can suck, it generally isn’t a life threatening condition.

If covid goes this way, maybe we have a similar situation where it’s an endemic disease in the world, just like how we have 4 common cold causing coronaviruses at large generally (but who cares, because they just cause a cold). But between getting a vaccine for and/or getting sick with one or two of the variants, pretty soon everyone still alive will have a pretty broad spectrum immune response to anything similar to covid and if/when it mutates to something slightly different, you might get a cough and feel crappy for a week but probably won’t need medical care. This certainly seems like a plausible scenario.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Flu in some sense is a very tricky and elusive virus for our immune system, in some very general way like HIV, and for these reasons our vaccines and our immune systems aren’t super good at stopping it. But look at chicken pox. One exposure and your body remembers it forever. Who’s to say covid is more like flu than a pox? People who had SARS-1 almost two decades ago have their immune system still remember it and are presumably are still immune if it was still around.

To turn around your scenario, let me ask why in the case of chicken pox, we haven’t seen ongoing mutations, new more deadly and transmissible variants, evasion of our immune system, and generally the world’s human population being decimated by it? (Admittedly we probably would have heard this if it could have been spun as Trump’s fault last year, but just because the media talks something up doesn’t make it true, and more likely the opposite these days) It’s not for lack of trying on the part of evolution to be sure, and chicken pox continues to spread in the world. It doesn’t happen because not everything is possible, just like it’s not possible to dribble a football :wink: .

Since covid is new to the human population, there are probably some small optimizations that it can find by tweaking its structure a bit here and there. But after those are done, it may be as bad as it can get and further changes neither 1) make it more transmissible or dangerous, nor 2) make it sufficiently different from prior versions for purposes of immunity. In short, there’s likely going to a period of time, going on now, where covid evolves to be the best virus it can be. And people who get it (or a vaccine) during this transitory period, might end up getting a different version again in a bit, hopefully with partial or significant immunity from the first time. But then it’s basically done and most people get immunity from the updated vaccine and it either goes away or becomes a non-issue for pretty much everyone.

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Conceded . . . . . . . . in the natural world.

However, I didn’t even mention ability of the CCP, in their labs in future, to concoct a new virus sufficiently akin to COVID-19 so as plausibly to be perceived a natural variant, while at the same time being deadly as hell and outside protective ability of (then) current vaccines. :wink:

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I agree with you that the marketing may be concentrating on the wrong thing. But the underlying scientific current behind COVAX is that we need to vaccinate as many people as quickly as possible. But the vaccines are not free, and at $10 a pop or whatever is the cheapest one, they’re unaffordable for many nations.

This reply certainly went over my head. Don’t know why you’d think that my reply about COVAX means that “your post went over my head”.

I read your entire post. Nothing I wrote contradicts that. I accept your apology.

No disagreement. It is an important initiative.

It is Easter, a time for miracles.

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I think you may have me confused with someone else. I always read the posts to which I respond.

Could somebody in Britain be monitoring my posts here! :grinning:

Seriously, this story was published a day or two after I posted, above. But it hits every point I made and is currently front page at Drudge:

Covid ‘super mutation’ may cause ‘devastating’ new outbreak & beat vaccines

On background

I had heard Dr. Fauci, during one of his many interviews, make the (what they’re calling) super mutation argument within a domestic context only. But I never, prior to posting above, expanded it to an international context or connected that to the impossibility of restraining travel by American citizens after our situation at home (I hope) improves. Some American nitwit is always gonna just have to visit Madagascar, or whatever other Godforsaken foreign venue, to complete his vital tsetse fly research. So he goes there and brings back more than just his tsetse fly specimens. :unamused: :crazy_face:
.
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Gates on variants. The end was the most interesting on screening / planning.

All this because a guy refused to have his temperature taken. When he refused to have his temperature taken, he then refused to leave when he was asked to.

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Hopefully we can get enough people vaccinated before the new wave sets in.

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Andy Cuomo: The hell he can tell me how to vaccinate NYS residents! We will do it our way, on our timeline, as we see fit!

This was his immediate reaction, right? Right? Ummm…

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. . . . and also before some deadly variant emerges which can evade eradication by our current vaccines.

Have you considered that perhaps the White House has already received a buy-in from all the states before the announcement? Many states have already opened it to all adults. CA announced 2-3 weeks ago that it will open to all on 4/15. Or perhaps they don’t even need a buy-in, since this sounds like a “goal”, not a mandate.