Day 520 – Some viral stuff

Not “wildly popular on the internet” stuff.
Sorry if you came here for that. (But then, why on earth would you?)

No. Just some links to recent Coronavirus-related stories and studies.

Why did Ivermectin become so popular?
Ben Collins finds a tangled web of horse wormer and… er… cash.

Teeny-tiny study suggests Pfizer jab is good for 12-15 year olds.

Clearing up the confusion on Israel’s hospital figures.

The bottom line is there is very strong evidence that the vaccines have high efficacy protecting against severe disease, even for Delta, and even in these Israeli data that on the surface appear to suggest the Pfizer vaccine might have waning efficacy. This is clearly evident if the data are analyzed carefully, and agrees with all other published results to date from other countries.

Terrifying story of a teacher spreading Covid in California. Study.

A total of 27 cases were identified, including that of the teacher. During May 23–26, among the teacher’s 24 students, 22 students, all ineligible for vaccination because of age, received testing for SARS-CoV-2; 12 received positive test results. The attack rate in the two rows seated closest to the teacher’s desk was 80% (eight of 10)

If you are sick, stay at home. Isolate.
And “isolation” doesn’t mean “go for a hike on the mountain because you are bored”.
Yeah. if you’re reading, I saw that.

How respiratory viruses get spread. A nice back-to-basics overview.

Who knew?!?
Risks of nasty things happening after vaccination pale into insignificance when compared to risks of nasty things happening after is you get Covid-19.
Big study in Israel.

Oh, and finally, please say hi to C.1.2 – South Africa’s new variant!

Leading the world in terrible things once again. So proud.

Day 377 – Wizard Poison

I spotted this on Twitter and it made me smile.

“Wizard poison” – what a lovely turn of phrase.

The latest anti-vaxxer (for it is they that Patton is referring to under his “idiots” tag) arguments demonstrate a couple of their usual methods very nicely. I thought I’d run through them.

Firstly, there’s their claim that the vaccines amount to “gene therapy”. Nope.
What they’ve done here is looked at the vaccine, seen the acronym “mRNA”, extrapolated the N and the A to give themselves the phrase “nucleic acid” which they then associate with genes (even though genes are actually made up of DNA, not RNA) and then somehow leapt to the assumption that the vaccine will in some way replace the genes within their and your DNA, thus altering their and your genetic code. wut?
This is plainly incorrect, but – as we’ve discussed many times on here and everywhere else – that simple fact will not stop the rumours from being spread far and wide across the internet.
There’s a further point to this as well, though: the suggestion the gene therapy is a bad thing. Not so. Gene therapy will save countless lives, but that’s very much a secondary issue here, because none of the Covid-19 vaccines are gene therapy.

So that’s the one tactic: getting things completely wrong without any care or repercussion. The second one is cherry-picking the data to suit their narrative.

There may be a problem with the AZ vaccine in that there seems to be a link between it and instances of blood clots in patients. That’s clearly not a good thing, and because of that, the anti-vaxxer brigade have joyfully leapt all over it.

The thing is that we’re looking at 30 suspected cases in the UK, after 18 million doses of the vaccine in question. That amounts to 1 case for every 600,000 doses administered. Those are the numbers, and that’s what’s prompted a full investigation.

However…

Blood clots are also a side-effect of Covid-19, possibly by triggering an autoimmune antibody. The instance of this is approximately 1 in 6,000 cases (nice number). So while you might – possibly – suffer from blood clots as a result of having the AZ vaccine, if you get Covid-19 as a result of not having the AZ vaccine, you’re about 100 times more likely to have problems with blood clots.

Surprise surprise, this is the bit that the anti-vaxxers choose to omit from their shitty monologues.

You can’t believe everything you hear. Or indeed anything that comes from their mouths.

Take it from me: the vaccines are far safer than running the risk of getting Covid, which is very much not safe.
And they contain very, very little wizard poison. Promise.

Day 180 – Covid stuff

I’ve been hard at work all day and I’m likely to be hard at work until I go to bed, so here are a couple of Covid-related things I have found recently.

First off, this image, which describes the mentality of each of these four groups of people perfectly. I mean, there are other terms that you could also use for three of them, but I think that this approach works nicely for a family-friendly blog post.

And then, rather more seriously, this thread which I spotted on Twitter and has loads of information on the latest scientific research and discoveries about you know what and especially how it gets around.

Lots of practical advice in there.
Go and have a read.

Judge

It’s been a fun day at the kids’ school, where I was helping to judge science projects this morning.

I have great news: the future of the scientific world is in safe hands. Whether it is adopting a certain diet to aid concentration in examinations (chocolate seemed to work well), testing to see how batteries deal with thermal stress (limited ill effects despite being deep frozen), or finding out how best to kill plants with household chemicals (vinegar > bleach, apparently), they’ve got it all covered.

There was no shortage of novel ideas and a great deal of enthusiasm around how to practically apply the work that they had done – especially the chocolate one. And I was really very impressed by the confidence of the kids during their interviews: well prepared, good clear answers, excellent eye contact, willing to elaborate. These guys were only 12 years old. It bodes well.

Tomorrow, my daughter takes her project in for display, but obviously, I don’t get to judge that one. Still, since it didn’t involve any chocolate, I don’t feel that I’m missing out too much.

How long can a bacterium live?

Note: This is not a 5-second rule thing.

It’s ages. Really – an awfully long time.

But – can it manage to get to the ripe old age of 500 years?

Well, pop back in 2514 and researchers at Edinburgh University will be able to tell you. If there is still such a thing as a researcher by then. Or indeed a University in Edinburgh. Or indeed, an Edinburgh.

Who knows what the future holds? Other than our friend the Asparamancer, of course?

The experiment itself is really rather simple: at a given timepoint, take one of the hermetically sealed vials and crack it open, rehydrate the contents and plonk them onto an agar plate, incubate and see what grows.

A 10 year old could do that.

But not for 500 years. Because humans don’t live that long.

So the problem becomes not doing the experiment, but how to tell other people how to do the experiment. Paper won’t last. A fancy carved metal sheet might get nicked by some marauding invaders at some stage over the next 5 centuries: and technology?

The team left a USB stick with instructions, which Möller realizes is far from adequate, given how quickly digital technology becomes obsolete.

And if you think that is a bit over the top, please note that no-one had even heard about USB 25 years ago, because it hadn’t been invented then.

So, the idea is to keep up to date by charging a human (a good choice because if there are no humans around, then there’s really no-one interested in the results anyway) to update the instructions every 25 years to some suitable format that will last until the next update.

I’ve done experiments that have lasted a couple of years, but they don’t have the same difficulties as this one, because I fully expected (correctly, as it happens) to still be alive when I finished it. There were occasional issues with remembering time points, but Google Calendar helped out with them. Will Google Calendar be around in 25, 50 or 500 years? I doubt it.
And it’s not like the lab staff will be working on this 24/7. This is an entirely  occasional thing.

I’m not sure how often data from this experiment are going to be shared, but I’ll keep an eye out, if only to give them a nudge if I think that they’ve forgotten to do their plating that year.