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Nope, and hopefully it stays that way.
There is good evidence that early in the pandemic when COVID was less contagious and our vaccines actually targeted the circulating strain that spread was significantly (though not completely) reduced in vaccinated populations. Here I wrote a brief summary of some of the evidence available in August 2021. I still believe the COVID-19 vaccines are very safe as written here, and reiterated in this space more recently. Overall I stand by most of what I've written, although I was too slow to update on how low-risk COVID was for younger folks and the implications that should have had on our public health response.
The other interesting angle to this that doesn't seem to come up very often is the idea that COVID actually was similar in severity to a cold/flu, but this is just what that looks like for a virus we've never been exposed to before. Namely, if you had somehow avoided exposure to influenza/rhinovirus/other coronaviruses before being exposed at the age of 70-80, would you have the same CFR as COVID-19 circa 2020-2021? Or did the evolution of COVID from 'less-transmissible, more-deadly' to increased contagiousness and decreased pathogenicity just happen on much faster timescales that we expected? My money is on mostly (1) with a small degree of (2), but I'm not an expert and I stopped caring about the literature over a year ago.
As for the vaccines, if they don't update them I'm not planning to bother unless forced to by my employer. Even if they do update them, I'd probably treat it the way I do the flu vaccine: If they run a clinic at my workplace and I just have to walk downstairs and wait for a few minutes I'll do it, otherwise not going out of my way.
Since @desolation asked: I still think Fauci is fine and well-intentioned. The public health response was bad at first due to obstructionists/defectors and bad later on in service of either stupidity or the gerontocracy - i.e. a fairly accurate reflection of the political factions with power in our system, and I likely made a mistake carrying water in support of it at least in some cases. Lab leak still seems like a toss-up, but China has acted fairly sus the whole time.
If Lab Leak is a toss-up, shouldn't that mean there's at least a 50% chance he's neither fine nor well-intentioned?
Lab leak is shorthand for half a dozen scenarios I've seen bandied about. Off the top of my head:
Secret Chinese bioweapons program inadvertently released.
Secret Chinese bioweapons program intentionally released to depopulate an aging population and wreak havoc in the soft Western countries.
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus study program that released it through negligence/misconduct (stuff like Chinese researchers historically eating research animals after experiments conclude)
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus program that inadvertently made it more pathological via humanized mice or other experiments.
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus program in some small part funded in collaboration with NIH (In which I've previously argued Fauci has little personal responsibility and you should primarily be upset with the study section which approved the grant).
Globalist plot by Fauci and NWO to [use your imagination lest I be accused of strawmanning or partisan hackery].
In the majority he bears no responsibility, in some cases he bears (I would argue) some small amount of blame relative to a number of other actors and in only one is he ill-intentioned. I maintain that even if you strongly believe in the lab leak and malfeasance, most of the animus towards Fauci is based on the fact that his face is on TV and telling people things they didn't want to hear while leaving most of the people who made those decisions to get off scot-free.
edit: fixing numbering scheme
Why are 2, 3, and 4 separated? Regardless of how it got out, it did get NIH funding, no? He was pushing his weight around trying to discredit the Lab Leak theory, wasn't he?
Because the total annual budget for a research institute will be in the tens of millions of dollars (bit of a rough guess as it's hard for me to tran, and the ecohealth alliance given to WIV was in the low 6 figures per annum if I remember correctly - most of the funding goes to American researchers. That's enough money to fund a couple of students/scientists, not even a full lab. There's maybe 45-50 professors at WIV, each with their own grants and projects. It's entirely possible that they had a completely separate project distinct from Ecohealth that involved coronaviruses/humanized mice/chimeric viruses/GoF that went poorly.
Yes, as was I. It's worth remembering that early on the evidence being cited by lab leak truthers was actual garbage that was easily refuted; the fact that people were pushing the lab leak theory in the absence of data early on gave me the strong belief that they had ulterior motives. It took a while for the case to build. The narrative isn't so cut and dried as bigoted PhDs hate internet amateurs who had mountains of evidence to make their case.
I do agree with you that Fauci did try to spike the story early. It's not clear to me whether that was out of a circling of the wagons to try and maintain support for scientific funding, whether it was trying to avoid personal culpability/scandal or something else entirely.
But...again, say you believe me for a moment that most of the relevant decisions were made by other people and rubber stamped by Fauci's office. Are you still going to obsess over Fauci, or try and understand the process that led to that decision?
"They were funding research just as dangerous as the one that could have caused the pandemic, but by dumb luck theirs was likely not involved in it" is acting fine and well intentioned?
You did not have access to the same information as Faucci, so you can be excused, even though basic critical thinking was enough to tell they were overconfident in dismissing the theory.
Why go with what the truthers were saying, instead of what Faucci and his colleagues were? Also the arguments supposedly refuting the lab leak were themselves just as easy to refute.
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Thanks for coming in and adding your input. I would note to all readers that Chrisprattalpha and I had a more detailed vaccine back-and-forth that I thought was productive. Mr. Alpha linked to it in his post.
Overall I disagree with the idea of the "very safe" label. People should go look at our previous exchange to see where I disagree.
Well, once conventional vaccine alternatives are available to "tic" the box, I would much rather choose protein adjuvanted injections over job loss.
I have not been exposed to mRNA, so it makes a lot more sense for someone like me to be choosier, rather than someone who has taken a more novel method of vaccination.
And we're all getting Covid-19.
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The vaccines never targeted the circulating variant (as far as I know, no COVID-19 variant has been deemed a "strain", though this is more semantics than biology). They targeted an early Wuhan variant, but by the time the vaccines were widely available we we well into the dominance of the Alpha variant, and unnamed variants containing the D614G mutation had long since replaced the Wuhan variant.
The data, I suspect, is mostly bad methodology and wishful thinking. SARS-CoV-2 transmission rates changed drastically for no apparent reason during the pandemic, so if you started an intervention during a high transmission period you were almost certain to see a drop in transmission.
This came up often early on -- comparison to the Russian Flu of 1889, which may have not been influenza at all but HCoV-OC43, was common. That sort of thing got kicked into the skeptic pit.
As for the evolution of COVID, I would not rule out a second lab escape (or deliberate release) for Omicron.
Given the rather infamous multi-wave structure of the 1918 pandemic, I thought it was interesting to see the same structure play out in real-time. Early on many pop sci sources seemed to suggest that this was largely a result of changes in social behavior, whereas in hindsight in 2023 it looks pretty clearly dominated by the various variants spreading through the population. I suppose even the remaining samples of 1918 virus that we've studied don't provide quite the level of robust genome-over-time data that we have for today: the sheer scale of viral replication provides a variety of mutations that IMO gain-of-function research is unlikely to even poorly approximate in the near future.
I suppose this isn't surprising in hindsight, but it's interesting to look back on how much we thought we understood about respiratory pandemics in early 2020, and how little we actually knew (spoiler: it's airborne!).
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Agree with this.
I think Omicron is a large narrative tool.
Omicron is so much more deadlier than Delta because of its transmissibility, but this translates to less threat to each individual. I always grin when I see people "celebrating" omicrons rise, or remark how they avoided nastier variants, and now play host to the most transmissible pathogen in recent years. If you can catch a cold, once again, that means a 90 year old in a nursing home can catch it too.
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