I recognize all of that, but I'm saying it's also a failure of two major issues - no national strategy and misinformation from the top. A virus that moves exponentially means that every small thing count. We can't think of this in linear perception. To be clear, I'm not saying we wouldn't have major death, but that we would be in a much better shoe. I would be comfortable saying we might be facing 200k death instead of 600k death. That's a HUGE difference, but it's still extremely deadly and one of the worst in the world.
I was thinking the other day - can the world come in and do something? Ticking bomb needs to be diffused.
Salient points, great post. Ok, the question everyone is really wondering....You're a martial artist from HK? You know Jackie Chan? Wu Tang Clan? What movies you been in?
Confirming what many people knew; unfortunately, they didn't speak up when it was most needed... Trump’s former pandemic coordinator suggests a restrained response may have cost hundreds of thousands of lives. In interviews broadcast on CNN Sunday night, former President Donald J. Trump’s pandemic officials confirmed in stark and no uncertain terms what was already an open secret in Washington: The administration’s pandemic response was riddled with dysfunction, and the discord, untruths and infighting most likely cost many lives. Dr. Deborah L. Birx, Mr. Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, suggested that hundreds of thousands of Americans may have died needlessly, and Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the testing czar, said the administration had lied to the public about the availability of testing. The comments were among a string of bombshells that emerged during a CNN special report that featured the doctors who led the government’s coronavirus response in 2020. Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accused Mr. Trump’s health secretary, Alex M. Azar III, and the secretary’s leadership team of pressuring him to revise scientific reports. “Now he may deny that, but it’s true,” Dr. Redfield said in an interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent. Mr. Azar, in a statement, denied it. Dr. Stephen K. Hahn, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said his relationship with Mr. Azar had grown “strained” after the health secretary revoked the agency’s power to regulate coronavirus tests. “That was a line in the sand for me,” Dr. Hahn said. When Dr. Gupta asked him if Mr. Azar had screamed at him, Dr. Hahn replied: “You should ask him that question.” But it was Dr. Birx, who has been pilloried for praising Mr. Trump as being “so attentive to the scientific literature” and for not publicly correcting the president as he made outlandish claims about unproven therapies, whose disclosures may have been the most compelling. As of Sunday, more than 548,000 Americans have died from infection with the coronavirus. “I look at it this way,” she said. “The first time, we have an excuse. There were about 100,000 deaths that came from that original surge.” “All of the rest of them,” she said, referring to almost 450,000 deaths, “in my mind, could have been mitigated or decreased substantially” had the administration acted more aggressively. In what was in one of her first televised interviews since leaving the White House in January, she also described a “very uncomfortable, very direct and very difficult” phone call with Mr. Trump after she spoke out about the dangers of the virus last summer. “Everybody in the White House was upset with that interview,” she said. After that, she decided to travel the country to talk to state and local leaders about masks and social distancing and other public health measures that the president didn’t want her to explain to the American public from the White House podium. Dr. Gupta asked if she was being censored. “Clearly someone was blocking me from doing it,” she said. “My understanding was I could not be national because the president might see it.” Several of the officials, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci — who unlike the others is a career scientist and is now advising President Biden — blamed China, where the virus was first detected, for not being open enough with the United States. And several, including Dr. Redfield and Admiral Giroir, said early stumbles with testing — and the attitude within the White House that testing made the president look bad by driving up the number of case reports — were a serious problem in the administration’s response. And the problems with testing went beyond simply Mr. Trump’s obsession with optics. Admiral Giroir said that the administration simply did not have as many tests as top officials claimed at the time. “When we said there were millions of tests — there weren’t, right?” he said. “There were components of the test available but not the full deal.” https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/28/world/cnn-birx-fauci-giroir-interviews-trump.html
Yep me and The RZA are best buds. You might've caught me in such Shaw Brothers movies: Vengeful Van Gundy Dunk of the White Lotus AKA Chandler Parsons Hero The Unknown Center (I hear it's Mike D'Antoni's favorite) The Iron Cat and Three Franchise Shaolinsanity The Deadly 99'ers
A leaked report from WHO points to the virus originating in animals and downplays a possible lab origin. Critics are saying the report is too deferential to the PRC. https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/0...ht&pgtype=Homepage#coronavirus-bats-who-china A leaked W.H.O. report points to animals as the source of the pandemic. The coronavirus most likely emerged in bats before spreading to humans through another animal, according to a report to be released by the World Health Organization on Tuesday, offering some clues on a question that has become politically fraught amid accusations of interference from Beijing. According to the report on the origin of the pandemic, which was obtained by The New York Times in advance of its release, a team of experts who recently visited the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus was first detected in late 2019, also dismissed the idea that the virus might have leaked accidentally from a Chinese laboratory as “extremely unlikely.” Officials in the United States and elsewhere have expressed concern about China’s efforts to reshape the narrative about the outbreak in Wuhan, which the authorities initially tried to conceal. Critics have assailed the inquiry by the W.H.O. team as insufficient, saying the global health agency has been too deferential to Beijing. Chinese scientists, many of whom are affiliated with the government, helped oversee the inquiry, and the report was repeatedly delayed amid delicate negotiations with Chinese officials. For months, China sought to delay the visit of the investigators in an apparent attempt to avoid scrutiny of its early mistakes in handling the pandemic. The Chinese government has defended its approach, saying it is fully cooperating with the W.H.O. In the 123-page report, the scientists outlined several theories that might explain how the virus first spread to humans. The findings in the document were first reported on Monday by The Associated Press. The report was written jointly by a team of 17 scientists from around the world and 17 Chinese scientists. The experts led a fact-finding visit to Wuhan for 27 days in January and February. During the visit to Wuhan, Chinese officials refused to share raw data about some of the earliest possible virus cases with the W.H.O. team, frustrating some of the visiting scientists. China’s lack of transparency as well as other concerns prompted a small group of scientists not affiliated with the World Health Organization to call this month for a new inquiry into the origin of the pandemic. They said such an inquiry should consider the possibility that the virus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan or infected someone inside it. The lab leak theory has been promoted by some officials in the Trump administration, including Dr. Robert Redfield, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in comments to CNN last week. He offered no evidence and emphasized that it was his opinion; the theory has been widely dismissed by scientists and U.S. intelligence officials.
It's amazing that we keep defaulting to not looking overseas, and I include myself in this. I knew it was going to be potentially global and maybe "sorta bad," but was in denial that a Wuhan-like spread could hit other countries just as badly. And now most people are waving their hands at Europe -- "oh, that's their problem. Their vaccination program sucks" and acting like we can't ever see another surge here. In SF this weekend, I was blown away by everyone crowding the eateries and bellowing like wart hogs again, back to normal. Yikes-o-rama.
Yea, sociology has a lot of interesting data to study. Outside of the 12% week to week case increase here, two things got my attention. 1- B.117 (UK strain) went from 5% to 20% of the US cases in 3 weeks. This could be what's driving the increase and is winning the race against vaccination race. 2- P.1 (Brazil strain) is now here but just a few detected cases. New and we don't know much about it yet except that it is now the dominant strain in Brazil. Brazil is seeing more infection and death among their younger population and they don't know why... are we seeing a mutation that is more deadly for younger age groups??
The Antiscience Movement Is Escalating, Going Global and Killing Thousands Rejection of mainstream science and medicine has become a key feature of the political right in the U.S. and increasingly around the world By Peter J. Hotez on March 29, 2021 Antiscience has emerged as a dominant and highly lethal force, and one that threatens global security, as much as do terrorism and nuclear proliferation. We must mount a counteroffensive and build new infrastructure to combat antiscience, just as we have for these other more widely recognized and established threats. Antiscience is the rejection of mainstream scientific views and methods or their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories, often for nefarious and political gains. It targets prominent scientists and attempts to discredit them. The destructive potential of antiscience was fully realized in the U.S.S.R. under Joseph Stalin. Millions of Russian peasants died from starvation and famine during the 1930s and 1940s because Stalin embraced the pseudoscientific views of Trofim Lysenko that promoted catastrophic wheat and other harvest failures. Soviet scientists who did not share Lysenko’s “vernalization” theories lost their positions or, like the plant geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, starved to death in a gulag. Now antiscience is causing mass deaths once again in this COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning in the spring of 2020, the Trump White House launched a coordinated disinformation campaign that dismissed the severity of the epidemic in the United States, attributed COVID deaths to other causes, claimed hospital admissions were due to a catch-up in elective surgeries, and asserted that ultimately that the epidemic would spontaneously evaporate. It also promoted hydroxychloroquine as a spectacular cure, while downplaying the importance of masks. Other authoritarian or populist regimes in Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, Philippines and Tanzania adopted some or all of these elements. As both a vaccine scientist and a parent of an adult daughter with autism and intellectual disabilities, I have years of experience going up against the antivaccine lobby, which claims vaccines cause autism or other chronic conditions. This prepared me to quickly recognize the outrageous claims made by members of the Trump White House staff, and to connect the dots to label them as antiscience disinformation. Despite my best efforts to sound the alarm and call it out, the antiscience disinformation created mass havoc in the red states. During the summer of 2020, COVID-19 accelerated in states of the South as governors prematurely lifted restrictions to create a second and unnecessary wave of COVID-19 cases and deaths. Then following a large motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.Dak., a third surge unfolded in the fall in the Upper Midwest. A hallmark of both waves were thousands of individuals who tied their identity and political allegiance on the right to defying masks and social distancing. A nadir was a highly publicized ICU nurse who wept as she recounted the dying words of one of her patients who insisted COVID-19 was a hoax. Now, a new test of defiance and simultaneous allegiance to the Republican Party has emerged in the form of resisting COVID-19 vaccines. At least three surveys from the Kaiser Family Foundation, our study published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, and the PBS News Hour/NPR/Marist poll each point to Republicans or white Republicans as a top vaccine-resistant group in America. At least one in four Republican House members will refuse COVID-19 vaccines. Once again, we should anticipate that many of these individuals could lose their lives from COVID-19 in the coming months. Historically, antiscience was not a major element of the Republican Party. The National Academy of Sciences was founded in the Lincoln administration; NASA in the Eisenhower administration, and PEPFAR (U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), PMI (President’s Malaria Initiative) and the NTDs (neglected tropical diseases) program were launched in the George W. Bush Administration. I was a professor and chair of microbiology at George Washington University, based in Washington, D.C., during the 2000s and worked closely with members of the Bush White House to shape these programs. I trace the adoption of antiscience as a major platform of the GOP to the year 2015 when the antivaccine movement pivoted to political extremism on the right. It first began in Southern California when a measles epidemic erupted following widespread vaccine exemptions. The California legislature shut down these exemptions to protect the public health, but this ignited a “health freedom” rallying cry. Health freedom then gained strength and accelerated in Texas where it formed a political action committee linked to the Tea Party. Protests against vaccines became a major platform of the Tea Party; this then generalized in 2020 to defy masks and social distancing. Further accelerating these trends were right wing think tanks such as the American Institute of Economic Research that sponsored the Great Barrington Declaration, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the home of physician Scott Atlas, who became a senior advisor to the Trump White House coronavirus task force. The full antiscience agenda of the Republican Party has now gone beyond our national borders. In the summer of 2020, the language of the antiscience political right in America was front and center at antimask and antivaccine rallies in Berlin, London and Paris. In the Berlin rally, news outlets reported ties to QAnon and extremist groups. Adding to this toxic mix are emerging reports from U.S. and British intelligence that the Putin-led Russian government is working to destabilize democracies through elaborate programs of COVID-19 antivaccine and antiscience disinformation. Public refusal of COVID-19 vaccines now extends to India, Brazil, South Africa and many low- and middle-income countries. We are approaching three million deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, and it is increasingly apparent that the SARS CoV2 alone is not responsible. Facilitating the spread of COVID-19 is an expanded and globalizing antiscience movement that began modestly under a health freedom banner adopted by the Republican Tea Party in Texas. Thousands of deaths have so far resulted from antiscience, and this may only be the beginning as we are now seeing the impact on vaccine refusal across the U.S., Europe and the low- and middle-income countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Containing antiscience will require work and an interdisciplinary approach. For innovative and comprehensive solutions, we might look at interagency task forces in the U.S. government or among the agencies of the United Nations. Given the role of state actors such as Russia, and antivaccine organizations that monetize the internet, we should anticipate that any counteroffensive could be complex and multifaceted. The stakes are high given the high death toll that is already accelerating from the one-two punch of SARS CoV2 and antiscience. We must be prepared to implement a sophisticated infrastructure to counteract this, similar to what we have already done for more established global threats. Antiscience is now a large and formidable security issue. https://www.scientificamerican.com/...scalating-going-global-and-killing-thousands/
