Coronavirus / COVID-19

[Crandar]

A brief summary on the possible origins of Covid. The lab hypothesis seems like the most probable and convincing one. That type of research for pandemic prevention is very controversial and has caused accidents before. The career of many well-respected scientists depends on these practices, which is probably why they adopted the bat theory so quickly, but the lab explanation requires much fewer assumptions to get established. It's unlikely we will learn the truth in the foreseeable future, though.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Good article...very looong read. I think it's unlikely the true origins of SARS-Cov-2 will ever be found (or admitted to), but it's obvious, despite rhetoric to the contrary, that the virus could have certainly been fabricated by scientists in a lab. Research into bio-weapons has been going on for many decades, and the creation of weaponized bacteria and viruses has been a part of that (well documented by Mr. Baker).

While he documents the underlying zealousness of scientists who pursue science for the sake of knowledge, regardless of the risks, he was a little light on the matter of just how much money goes into allowing scientists to play with their "toys". The best example of this is in 2014 when there was a pause in the funding of so-called "gain-of-function" research due to some accidents involving anthrax, influenza, and smallpox:

Baric, in North Carolina, was not happy. He had a number of gain-of-function experiments with pathogenic viruses in progress. “It took me ten seconds to realize that most of them were going to be affected,” he told NPR. Baric and a former colleague from Vanderbilt University wrote a long letter to an NIH review board expressing their “profound concerns.” “This decision will significantly inhibit our capacity to respond quickly and effectively to future outbreaks of SARS-like or MERS-like coronaviruses, which continue to circulate in bat populations and camels,” they wrote. The funding ban was itself dangerous, they argued. “Emerging coronaviruses in nature do not observe a mandated pause.”

THAT, is unadulterated whining from a scientist who was about to lose his government sponsored income to "play" with his toys. Baric has been playing with recombinant-virus experiments for years culminating in his "no-see'm" technique:

[...] in a further round of “interspecies transfer” experimentation, Baric’s scientists introduced their mouse coronavirus into flasks that held a suspension of African-green-monkey cells, human cells, and pig-testicle cells. Then, in 2002, they announced something even more impressive: They’d found a way to create a full-length infectious clone of the entire mouse-hepatitis genome. Their “infectious construct” replicated itself just like the real thing, they wrote.

Not only that, but they’d figured out how to perform their assembly seamlessly, without any signs of human handiwork. Nobody would know if the virus had been fabricated in a laboratory or grown in nature. Baric called this the “no-see’m method,” and he asserted that it had “broad and largely unappreciated molecular biology applications.”

A scientist, given nearly unlimited funds to play around to his hearts content with experiments, justifies the danger involved by claiming "broad and largely unappreciated [...] applications" while giving only vague lip-service as to what those unappreciated applications might be. And yet, sweeping under the rug, a major reason for these "gain-of-function" experiments:

In 2006, Baric, Yount, and two other scientists were granted a patent for their invisible method of fabricating a full-length infectious clone using the seamless, no-see’m method. But this time, it wasn’t a clone of the mouse-hepatitis virus — it was a clone of the entire deadly human SARS virus, the one that had emerged from Chinese bats, via civets, in 2002. The Baric Lab came to be known by some scientists as “the Wild Wild West.” In 2007, Baric said that we had entered “the golden age of coronavirus genetics.”

I find it interesting that Shi Zhengli, the "bat woman", when it was determined that the pathogen responsible for the emerging outbreak in Wuhan closely resembled the bat virus RaTG13 that she had been experimenting with, was immediately concerned that it has escaped from her lab in Wuhan. This is where the Chinese government can, and should be held accountable:

If one of the first thoughts that goes through the head of a lab director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is that the new coronavirus could have come from her lab, then we are obliged to entertain the scientific possibility that it could indeed have come from her lab. Right then, there should have been a comprehensive, pockets-inside-out, fully public investigation of the Virology Institute, along with the other important virus labs in Wuhan, including the one close by the seafood market, headquarters of the Wuhan CDC. There should have been interviews with scientists, interviews with biosafety teams, close parsings of laboratory notebooks, freezer and plumbing and decontamination systems checks — everything.

As Mr. Baker points out, none of that happened, and likely never will.

Picking on Professor Baric again:

Baric hoped to find a SARS vaccine, but he couldn’t; he kept looking for it, year after year, supported by the NIH, long after the disease itself had been contained. It wasn’t really gone, Baric believed. Like other epidemics that pop up and then disappear, as he told a university audience some years later, “they don’t go extinct. They are waiting to return.” What do you do if you run a well-funded laboratory, an NIH “center of excellence,” and your emergent virus is no longer actually making people sick? You start squeezing it and twisting it into different shapes. Making it stand on its hind legs and quack like a duck, or a bat. Or breathe like a person.

Mr. Baker points out that Baric's safety record is good, and his intentions may have been good, but it's the infusion of millions of dollars by government that leads scientists like Baric, IMHO, to lose perspective on what they are doing, and the danger it poses. And then there's Peter Daszak's [a British zoologist and president of EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit non-governmental organization that supports various programs on global health with headquarters in New York City] Dante-like proclamation:

The fallen angels could be seen as pathogenic organisms that had descended “through an evolutionary (not spiritual) pathway that takes them to a netherworld where they can feed only on our genes, our cells, our flesh,” Daszak wrote. “Will we succumb to the multitudinous horde? Are we to be cast downward into chthonic chaos represented here by the heaped up gibbering phantasmagory against which we rail and struggle?”

Seriously? "Chthonic chaos against which we rail and struggle"? Dunno what he's been smoking, but I want none of it....

Baker's best argument on the possibility for lab generation of SARS-CoV-2:

The zoonoticists say that we shouldn’t find it troubling that virologists have been inserting and deleting furin cleavage sites and ACE2-receptor-binding domains in experimental viral spike proteins for years: The fact that virologists have been doing these things in laboratories, in advance of the pandemic, is to be taken as a sign of their prescience, not of their folly. But I keep returning to the basic, puzzling fact:This patchwork pathogen, which allegedly has evolved without human meddling, first came to notice in the only city in the world with a laboratory that was paid for years by the U.S. government to perform experiments on certain obscure and heretofore unpublicized strains of bat viruses — which bat viruses then turned out to be, out of all the organisms on the planet, the ones that are most closely related to the disease. What are the odds?

Perhaps viral nature hit a bull’s-eye of airborne infectivity, with almost no mutational drift, no period of accommodation and adjustment, or perhaps some lab worker somewhere, inspired by Baric’s work with human airway tissue, took a spike protein that was specially groomed to colonize and thrive deep in the ciliated, mucosal tunnels of our inner core and cloned it onto some existing viral bat backbone. It could have happened in Wuhan, but — because anyone can now “print out” a fully infectious clone of any sequenced disease — it could also have happened at Fort Detrick, or in Texas, or in Italy, or in Rotterdam, or in Wisconsin, or in some other citadel of coronaviral inquiry. No conspiracy — just scientific ambition, and the urge to take exciting risks and make new things, and the fear of terrorism, and the fear of getting sick. Plus a whole lot of government money.

Baker points out the serious lack of oversight in these "gain-of-function" experiments:

In chapter six of this thousand-page dissertation [a Gryphon Scientific report], published in April 2016, the consultants take up the question of coronaviruses. “Increasing the transmissibility of the coronaviruses could significantly increase the chance of a global pandemic due to a laboratory accident,” they wrote.

The Cambridge Working Group continued to write letters of protest and plead for restraint and sanity. Steven Salzberg, a professor of biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, said, “We have enough problems simply keeping up with the current flu outbreaks — and now with Ebola — without scientists creating incredibly deadly new viruses that might accidentally escape their labs.” David Relman of Stanford Medical School said, “It is unethical to place so many members of the public at risk and then consult only scientists — or, even worse, just a small subset of scientists — and exclude others from the decision-making and oversight process.”

When asked by a reporter to comment on increased funding for gain-of-function research, Dr. Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said this:

A reporter asked Marc Lipsitch what he thought of the resumption of NIH funding. Gain-of-function experiments “have done almost nothing to improve our preparedness for pandemics,” he said, “yet they risked creating an accidental pandemic.”

So why the hell do we keep funding them, considering the risk? Further evidence that big money drives gain-of-function research:

Daszak was outraged (“I am not trained as a private detective”), and again he fought back. He was reluctant to give up his own secrets, too. “Conspiracy-theory outlets and politically motivated organizations have made Freedom of Information Act requests on our grants and all of our letters and emails to the NIH,” he told Nature. “We don’t think it’s fair that we should have to reveal everything we do.”

You conduct experiments that theoretically could lead to the deaths of millions if your "pets" escape a laboratory, yet you don't think it's "fair" to reveal what your experiments are involved with. This is the core problem, IMHO. Lack of oversight.

Prescient?

“The world is sitting on a precedent-setting decision right now,” wrote Alina Chan [a member of the Broad Institute of Health at Harvard and MIT] on December 8. “It is unclear if SARS2 is 100 percent natural or emerged due to lab/research activities. If we walk away from this, demonstrating that we cannot effectively investigate its origins, it will pave the way for future COVIDS.”

Baker's conclusion:

For more than 15 years, coronavirologists strove to prove that the threat of SARS was ever present and must be defended against, and they proved it by showing how they could doctor the viruses they stored in order to force them to jump species and go directly from bats to humans. More and more bat viruses came in from the field teams, and they were sequenced and synthesized and “rewired,” to use a term that Baric likes. In this international potluck supper of genetic cookery, hundreds of new variant diseases were invented and stored. And then one day, perhaps, somebody messed up. It’s at least a reasonable, “parsimonious” explanation of what might have happened.

In light of all of this, if THIS doesn't scare the shit out of you, nothing will:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/reconstruction-1918-virus.html

Justification for doing this:

All of these issues show that more work needs to be done, both here in the United States and internationally, to prepare for the next pandemic.

Article was presented in 2018. Two years later....we all know what's transpired.

Makes sense, though....let's reconstitute the virus responsible for the deadliest pandemic in modern history...you know...just because we can, and claim it will help us "prepare for the next pandemic".

Scientists just don't have enough sense to let dead dogs lie....or in this case, dead Inuits....

[ReluctantSamurai]

...but dude - you're from Michigan.

Yes, and I spent 25 years in rural Steuben County, NY when it was common to experience -25 degree F temperatures regularly, and snowstorms dropping 3' of snow at a time. But these folks are 65 year old+ FLORIDIANS. Not the same...

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Yes, and I spent 25 years in rural Steuben County, NY when it was common to experience -25 degree F temperatures regularly, and snowstorms dropping 3' of snow at a time. But these folks are 65 year old+ FLORIDIANS. Not the same...

Indeed. I was just out shopping this morning while the better half went with her mom to the cardiologist. Saw several folks wearing their ug boots. Most folks had on thick hoodies or light jackets.

in 52F weather

to brave the 100 foot walk between heated store and heated car...

[Montmorency]

I'd definitely want to hear more scientists' sides of the story on the issues of funding, oversight, research targets. I've never had the impression that researchers in the biological sciences are awash in money, though it's granted that virological containment breaches have been a hard-scientific fiction trope for generations.

[ReluctantSamurai]

@ Seamus

I've never had the impression that researchers in the biological sciences are awash in money

Oh...it's BIIIG business, especially when you can produce patents. Aside from that, what about the ethical aspect? The article about resurrecting the H1N1 is frightening. Sure there's probably some epidemiological benefits, but is that worth the risk? (and I don't give a damn about all your BSL securities---accidents happen---Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon etc.) The last time this particular H1N1 variant was running amok, more than 50 million died.

[Montmorency]

Here we should distinguish between commercial research and public or university-funded basic research - right? Did anyone ever get rich taking NIH grants?

In abstract I suppose, but if you could find some contras on Twitter or the blogs or the academic sites to parse...

[Crandar]

The Church resists and the state retreats.

[ReluctantSamurai]

but if you could find some contras on Twitter or the blogs or the academic sites to parse

This paper is a bit dated (2015), in five years the $ amounts are probably significantly more, it's UK-centric, and focuses on non-human test subjects used in experiments, but it illustrates one of the more hidden aspects of big business in research:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4598698/

Research establishments, scientists, laboratories, companies that sell nonhuman animal subjects, that supply equipment for the research, and corporations that market the resulting products are among those that benefit financially.

For example, For example, the research and development of medicines for the pharmaceuticals industry is largely based in the use of nonhuman animal subjects. Reports suggest that testing a potential medicine can involve the use of up to 800 nonhuman animals at a financial cost of over US$6 million. The nonhuman animals used and the money spent are clearly thought to be worth it by the pharmaceuticals industry; worldwide the industry is worth US$300 billion, with an anticipated rise to US$400 billion within three years.

There is a lot of money to be made out of the customers and consumers of services and products for human health and, where there is little money to be made pharmaceutical companies, for example, are less likely to innovate. The desire to maximize profits has been pointed out in current news media reports about the Ebola virus. In Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone there have been a total of 26,044 “confirmed, probable and suspected cases” of Ebola and at least 10,808 people in those countries have been killed by the virus. In Europe there have been two reported cases (one in Spain and one in the UK) and in the USA there have been four cases of Ebola, and one reported death. At the time of writing there is no vaccine against the virus. Erica Etelson suggests a reason for this. She refers to Margaret Chan’s (Director of the World Health Organization) assertion that the pharmaceutical industry’s failure to develop a vaccine up to now is because “A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay”. Etelson infers that, had the Ebola virus been detected in the USA sooner, a vaccine would already be available. She concludes that “Big Pharma’s greed isn’t some kind of aberration; it’s an inherent feature of free-market capitalism: A capitalist system, by design, puts profits over people”. This emphasis encourages a perspective on “benefits” that is oriented towards benefits as profits rather than on benefits as improvements to human health.

Biomedical research is funded by governments, private companies and organizations, and by donations from individuals and charities. In the UK, biomedical research receives millions of pounds of government funding. For example, in 2012 the UK Government announced “the Biomedical Catalyst….an integrated £180m funding programme to support the development of innovative solutions to healthcare challenges by both SMEs (Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises) and academics across the UK”. Private awards and grants augment the amount that is available for such research. In the UK the biggest investor is the pharmaceutical industry, which spends £12 million a day on such work, representing 70 percent of the total funds.

Biomedical researchers in academia rely on grants to fund their research not only to fund research but because securing a research grant enhances individual academic reputations and enhances the reputation of the university at which they are employed. Gaining research funding is a core component of evaluations for promotion.

The UK pharmaceutical industry alone invests vast sums of money in research and development. Across the EU in 2010 the pharmaceutical industry invested €27 billion in these activities. The UK pharmaceutical industry reports that 37 percent of current sales return is spent on research and development. When we recall that the UK industry spends £27 million daily on such work (see above) we gain an insight into the scale of their total sales return. An indication of the profits made from pharmaceuticals can be gleaned from individual company returns. For example, the UK-based pharmaceuticals company GlaxoSmithKline reported a pre-tax profit of £548 million for the three months to the end of September 2014 which, although considerably down from the figure of £1.4 billion for the same period in 2013, was reported to be better than expected. Shareholders benefitted as “shares rose 4% after its third-quarter results beat expectations and it pledged to return an additional £4bn to shareholders via a special share scheme”.

With at least 115.3 million nonhuman subjects used in experiments across the world every year there is a great deal of money to be made out of the breeding and selling of nonhuman animals to laboratories. Charles River is one of the suppliers of nonhuman animals to the global industry. The list of nonhuman animals the company supplies is extensive. Mice and rats are used in vast numbers in biomedical experiments, not least because they are thought to react to medication in similar ways to humans and because they are relatively inexpensive to buy. A three week old Swiss pigmented mouse, who is marketed as being “for general purpose”, is sold by Charles River for US$10.10 [if he is male] and for US$10.95 (if she is female). The “genetically engineered” mouse who is sold under the label 11BHSD2 is bred in the USA and is promoted by Charles River as being “Ideal for cardiac hypertrophy, heart failure”. Depending on “types” and age an individual mouse costs between $32 and $181, with additional charges of $10 for each additional week of age. In 2013 the company’s total revenue was US$1.17 billion.

The equipment that is used in such research includes that which is associated with housing, feeding, experimenting on and the killing of nonhuman animal subjects, The catalogues of suppliers include advertisements for cages, restraints and guillotines. The Canada-based company Lomir Biomedical is a supplier of a range of equipment for such research. The company markets a variety of products and strives to invent new ones that can be marketed as responding to the changing needs of biomedical scientists. For example, the company states that it has “identified a need for a range of undershirts for laboratory animals as scientific procedures become much more refined. Undershirts are an effective means of securing electrodes, connectors, Fentanyl patches or any piece that needs to be kept in contact with skin.”. One dog undershirt costs either US$50.99 or US$54.11, depending on how many are ordered. The company has an annual revenue of US$4,695,040.

Guillotines and undershirts?

Publishing papers and research is also BIG business:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/...ad-for-science

The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

Publishers are now wound so tightly around the various organs of the scientific body that no single effort has been able to dislodge them. In a 2015 report, an information scientist from the University of Montreal, Vincent Larivière, showed that Elsevier owned 24% of the scientific journal market, while Maxwell’s old partners Springer, and his crosstown rivals Wiley-Blackwell, controlled about another 12% each. These three companies accounted for half the market. (An Elsevier representative familiar with the report told me that by their own estimate they publish only 16% of the scientific literature.)

Another article on the lucritive publishing industry:

https://www.molbiolcell.org/doi/10.1091/mbc.E19-03-0147

The profits of major commercial publishers are astonishing. As a whole, the industry made more than $10 billion in 2015, with profits for the largest players, such as Elsevier, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley, exceeding 30%. Elsevier alone, a publicly held company and the world’s largest for-profit academic publisher, revealed revenues in its 2018 Annual Report of $3.2 billion for its science/technology/medical branches with an operating profit of $1.2 billion. This profit margin of almost 38% increases to more than 40% when we look at the journals division by itself, which posted earnings of $1.75 billion and estimated profits of $737 million. In other words, every time we pay a $3000 article processing charge, only $1800 supports the publishing process, while the remaining $1200 goes directly to Elsevier shareholders.

A bit more later......

[ReluctantSamurai]

One explanation of why a 50% increase in transmissibility is worse than a 50% increase in lethality:

https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/s...67425107881986

[Pannonian]

One explanation of why a 50% increase in transmissibility is worse than a 50% increase in lethality:

https://twitter.com/AdamJKucharski/s...67425107881986

Watch playthroughs of Plague Inc. Transmission is everything.

[rory_20_uk]

Here we should distinguish between commercial research and public or university-funded basic research - right? Did anyone ever get rich taking NIH grants?

In abstract I suppose, but if you could find some contras on Twitter or the blogs or the academic sites to parse...

Generally the two are not as clearly delineated as you might wish - if the unit is 80% Pharma paid for is research on the other 20% independant?

[Montmorency]

I acknowledge that biotech, pharmaceuticals, lab materials, etc. are big industries, I just doubt that many individual scientists receiving public or academic grants for research in virology have the prospect of raking in big bucks, let alone that their research is driven by personal financial considerations. It smacks too much of the old canard that climate researchers are only in it for emoluments from Big Clean Energy.

Generally the two are not as clearly delineated as you might wish - if the unit is 80% Pharma paid for is research on the other 20% independant?

For instance, this is a hint at higher-level institutional incentives, but it doesn't imply anything as to whether scientists want to participate in research or pursue personal interests, or generate lucrative compensation opportunities for themselves. Especially if the latter such opportunities are not particularly available beneath management-level.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I just doubt that many individual scientists receiving public or academic grants for research in virology have the prospect of raking in big bucks

They do if they secure patents for their work. One example:

https://thepatentprofessor.com/how-o...-medical-idea/

Now this guy was more of an inventor than a pure researcher, but it works the same. There are additional concerns when a scientist is working at a university and using government, or private money.

Dr. Baric, mentioned in Crandar's link, has these patents:

https://patents.justia.com/inventor/ralph-baric

So far, I've only found vague information on how much scientists make on a single patent, but it can be as much as $8 million... Baric owns, or shares, 13 patents.

And then there's the speaking fees:

https://www.allamericanspeakers.com/...nd-Engineering

Just click on the $100k-$200k category....this is range an elite, or well known researcher would be in....

It's not easy to find this info, dude....

[Montmorency]

Just click on the $100k-$200k category....this is range an elite, or well known researcher would be in....

One of my high school biology teachers was a young guy, a PhD, who quit working as a lab grunt because teaching paid better. Teaching.

I'm just suspicious of looking to the 1% of scientists to explain research trends.

(Incidentally, I looked up one of my HS physics teachers years ago and he held a couple patents, but I have no idea if they were worth squat.)


I just looked at your page for speakers. That was a not a great link to pick. Those are speaking fees. Who pulls in speaking fees? The category you're pointing out is on a tier with the likes of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton in that respect. Normal scientists don't make good money off speaking fees. Now we're not talking 1% but 0.01%. Two of the names in the $100K-200K category are:

Ray Kurzweil: Famous futurist and publisher of many best-selling popsci books.
Peter Thiel: Dude, holy shit, he's an actual megabillionaire, THAT Peter Thiel!

abaghaagha

[ReluctantSamurai]

That was a not a great link to pick.

Normal scientists don't make good money off speaking fees. Now we're not talking 1% but 0.01%.

Well....for a fee....I could look harder.....



I can only apply a bit of forward logic here. If it wasn't profitable in some manner, you wouldn't hear scientists whining so loudly when their pet project comes under financial scrutiny. For the average researcher, making a breakthrough, or coming up with a new process means advancement. Getting your work published in a scientific journal means a significant increase in salary....

[Pannonian]

Relating to the NYT's article about how the UK government is throwing money to their friends, a Tory-connected company is being paid £30 per head to provide school meals packages for a week. That's the company receiving £30 per head from the government, for which they've provided around £5 of food.

[Hooahguy]

I'm curious, has anyone here received the vaccine yet?

[Pannonian]

I'm curious, has anyone here received the vaccine yet?

A mate of mine has, as he's a carer who works with the elderly.

[Hooahguy]

Yeah a friend of mine is a microbiologist and he got his second dose last week. Mildly jealous but on the plus side he reports no side effects which is good.

[Idaho]

A friend of mine who works as a manager at the hospital got one. He wasn't going to as he thought the priority (rightly) should go to medics, even though his office was next to the corridor where the covid patients were wheeled in (and alas sometimes out). However he found out that they kept throwing away unused vaccines each day, and that the IT department who set up the schedule had put themselves at the top of the list...

[Idaho]

Yeah a friend of mine is a microbiologist and he got his second dose last week. Mildly jealous but on the plus side he reports no side effects which is good.

Is it just the Pfizer one there?

I am, completely irrationally and stupidly (especially for an anti patriot) would prefer the Oxford jab

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Pfizer and Moderna versions both in use. Others seeking approval including a one-dose stable at normal fridge temps.

[Hooahguy]

Is it just the Pfizer one there?

I am, completely irrationally and stupidly (especially for an anti patriot) would prefer the Oxford jab

As said, both Pfizer and Moderna are being deployed here but he got the Pfizer one.

[Pannonian]

A friend of mine who works as a manager at the hospital got one. He wasn't going to as he thought the priority (rightly) should go to medics, even though his office was next to the corridor where the covid patients were wheeled in (and alas sometimes out). However he found out that they kept throwing away unused vaccines each day, and that the IT department who set up the schedule had put themselves at the top of the list...

Makes sense, as IT departments have to deal with viruses all the time. Has anyone checked if they are taking worming medicines as well? Goodness knows how they'll deal with Trojans though. Employ an Ithacan, perhaps.

[Gilrandir]

However he found out that they kept throwing away unused vaccines each day

Perhaps they knew something?
https://see.news/norway-23-dead-afte...ntech-vaccine/

[Idaho]

Perhaps they knew something?
https://see.news/norway-23-dead-afte...ntech-vaccine/

The first people to be vaccinated have been tens of thousands of extremely sick, old and vulnerable patients. It would be bizarre and alarming if a number of these people *didn't* die.

[Gilrandir]

The first people to be vaccinated have been tens of thousands of extremely sick, old and vulnerable patients. It would be bizarre and alarming if a number of these people *didn't* die.

So if they hadn't been vaccinated they wouldn't have died?

[rory_20_uk]

So if they hadn't been vaccinated they wouldn't have died?

Chances are they'd die either way of non Covid-19 related things as y'know they are very old and frail.

Given the resource is so limited I have no idea why it is being wasted on the elderly and frail. Give to all key workers first (of which I am not one) and this lot can continue to isolate - as can I.

[Montmorency]

Perhaps they knew something?
https://see.news/norway-23-dead-afte...ntech-vaccine/

100% of all patients who receive vaccine will die.

Chances are they'd die either way of non Covid-19 related things as y'know they are very old and frail.

Given the resource is so limited I have no idea why it is being wasted on the elderly and frail. Give to all key workers first (of which I am not one) and this lot can continue to isolate - as can I.

Israel has like 1/3 of its population dosed already.

My understanding is that there is a consensus that, to the extent delivery is prioritized, the top priority should be the most vulnerable elderly - because they're the ones actually dying at the highest rates and in the greatest numbers. But frontline healthcare workers have been put on the same tier, or a step below, in part because of their proximity to the former population.