CharonY

It is simple, really. If you want your group to rally around your cause, the easiest approach is to create a foe.

It should be noted that the UK SC has also limited power as it cannot overturn primary legislation by Parliament. Inherently, their appointment therefore becomes less political as it cannot be used to change legislative agendas (from what I understand at least).

Another study on veteran's data in the US indicated that COVID-19 is associated with an increased long-term risk of cardiovascular diseases. For all types of cardiovascular cases the excess burden (i.e. additional cases per 1,000 persons) after a year was 45, with heart failure and atrial fibrillation being the most common issues. Xie et al. Nature Medicine 22 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-01689-3

It is slightly off-topic but I think it is worthwhile highlighting that terms like immunity, tolerance and resistance are often used in slightly different ways depending on context. In "classic" microbiology, which includes non-medical contexts we often use the terms tolerance to define a host-pathogen interaction which does not negatively affect host health but is also not being detrimental to pathogen fitness. Resistance on the other hand typically refers to direct limitation of the pathogen burden (and can include passive and active elimination of it). Unfortunately this is about the most consistent definitions you can find in literature and after that things get muddied up, depending on the sub-discipline. Immunity is then generally often referred to as a resistance mechanism, which can include our immune system, but sometimes also refers to other mechanisms which are employed to defend against parasitic interactions (it can be used in the context of bacterial mechanisms to fend off bacteriophages, for example). But unfortunately when it moves into the medical area, language can get a bit vague as the focus there is less on the direct interactions between host and pathogen (and underlying mechanisms) but is typically (and perhaps unsurprisingly) based on health outcome, such as disease development. Moreover, typically there is little consideration with regard of infection in the process. Infections are mostly considered in the context of host range but rarely (to my knowledge at least) extends to individuals. Individuals who get infected, but never develop symptoms would under the classic definition considered to be tolerant, but sometimes are also called immune, for example. But then, this is also used to describe a situation when an individual has the ability to clear the pathogen before disease manifests (which would be a resistance mechanisms). It also does not help that those terms are sometimes are not used consistently within a field, in part because mechanisms often overlap or are linked. That being said, natural immunity rarely is used (at least from what I have seen) to describe a situation where an individual cannot be infected by whatever reasons. Rather it does refer to immunity (in terms of resistance) due to exposure to a pathogen and is contrasted to vaccine-induced immunity. Neither of them meaning that one cannot get infected, but rather describing a situation where resistance is enhanced, if that makes sense. Time makes it even more complicated, as at this point we would need to look at the time dependent response of the immune system (where fast responses wane but slower long term responses have to take over) but also new variants play a role.

So is there data out there that would suggest either? Because most reports I can find on Lionfish does indicate that there are efforts underway to control them and I am unable to find reports indicating that they are mostly non-disruptive. Sure, it is possible that the worries were overblown, but before declaring it a myth, I would like to see some evidence. And if I scan lit on the Southern Caribbean I see a number of efforts to cull them (https://www.forbes.com/sites/daphneewingchow/2022/01/31/the-caribbean-is-taking-a-bite-out-of-its-invasive-lionfish-problem/?sh=648af9cb5e8f) There several papers that try to investigate the impact and cost of lionfish management, e.g. DOI:10.1007/s00227-015-2745-2 and a number of agencies, including NOAA seems to spend quite a bit of efforts on controlling this species, too: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/southeast/ecosystems/impacts-invasive-lionfish So at least that makes it strange that apparently either no one picked up on the fact that they are harmless (and spending a lot of money on it) or at least I cannot find reports on that.

If we had concentrated HCl or even HF in our bodies, we would be pretty much dead. . Concentrated HCL has a molarity of ca. 12M whereas the concentration in our stomach is ~0.15M. Also, I am pretty sure that even in concentrated HCl it will take quite a bit longer than a few hours to dissolve bone.

I wonder whether that is really a myth. Or conversely, are there studies that indicate that lionfish are non-disruptive for the ecosystems they got in? A quick google seems to indicate a fair number of studies where they seem to indicate significant damages. That being said, these were mostly a few years old already and it would be interesting to see what the current state of science is on that matter. One of the newer ones for example: https://doi.org/10.1080/03632415.2017.1340273

I mean, what else would become feces but what we ingest? Note that food does not liquefy in your stomach. It gets partially digested and mixed up, but it is mostly a pulpy mess. As this liquid pulp travels through our intestines, excess liquid gets re-absorbed by our intestines.

Hey, you know, just saying, but we can help with excess funding...

Actually folks knew for years that we need to put more money into vaccines to speed up development. Folks were just not that interested until recently.

There is quite some data for that out there and it is sometimes referred to as the leaky pipeline issue (my apologies if that has been mentioned before, I read this thread in bits and pieces and may have missed it). It is not necessarily only because of conscious preferential treatment, but as you mentioned there are complex contributors, including monolithic structures at the top and other systems that provide slight sieving effects on every step. In academia this leakiness even persists in women-dominated fields. In nursing above 90% of the students are female, but on the professorial level (I could not find data separated by rank) about 18% are male. While overall pay in this area is closer to parity than in other fields, it still favours men, if only slightly. But as a whole the barriers to seniority (as well as certain well-paying fields) are certainly contributors to the gender pay gap and there is a huge body of literature on this topic going back decades at this point. In parallel, as mentioned earlier various studies still find (sometimes diminishing) gaps within groups. For example here: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/1060821ar And this is just in academia, which is a competitive field, but at least outwardly strives to achieve equity.

Very good points. I also wanted to add that due to the exponential nature of spread, even moderate reduction in transmissions per infection event can change the timeline with which hospitals fill up dramatically. It is not an all or nothing situation.

I think an easier, cheaper, but less inconspicuous method would be paper-based immunosorbent assays. It is possible to basically dry down a colorimetric assay in various size and shapes and it would likely not be less accurate than any straw-based design. A further advantage is that it won't come in direct contact with the drink, so risk of consumption and toxicity is also less of an issue. I would not be surprised if there are already products out there, actually. However, one would need to transfer some liquid from the drink onto it, which might not be easy to do without anyone noticing. A challenge with these assays (and likely more so for straw-based design) is that often there is a compromise with regard to sensitivity and accuracy, but in a pinch they would be better than nothing in either case. Edit: I was told that there is already something on the market like that: https://www.drinksafe.com/

I get that way when I see folks too lazy to to check their own sources and as a result promote dangerous misinformation. Especially when the claims are ridiculous. PhaseI is never dropped as it is a requirement to recruit a larger cohort (especially if preclinical data is lacking) From your link: How does it square with your claim that: It is bad (but perhaps not fatal) to misunderstand something. But it is worse to spread misinformation and then put in a link that contradicts the assertion, apparently hoping that folks would not read. Heck, here is a graph showing the timeline and the overlap between I/II/III. There is misunderstanding, which I am happy to help clear up and there is willful misrepresentation. This is not an example of the former. I also note that you entirely missed the issue of endpoints and rather seem to develop an own idea how trials should be rather how they are in reality. Edit: It is a bit rich in accusing someone of using outdated data and then present papers to delta. That aside the percentage in the paper refer to the secondary attack rate (SAR), which is basically the ratio between numbers of new cases among contacts to the total number of contacts. A SAR of 25% would indicate one new infection after four contacts, whereas a SAR of 38% would indicate one infection after 2.6 contacts (i.e. vaccination resulted in a reduction by ca. 34%). There are a couple of more studies out there but fundamentally they roughly show that vaccinations in delta reduce transmission roughly by half (some show more, some less). The authors do describe why they had overall SAR, and this is because they measured most of it in household settings, where SAR is higher due to ongoing contact with an infected person. With regard to omicron, studies found that two shots do not confer much of immunity anymore, but a booster shot still reduces transmission by half (i.e. comparable to two-shots with delta). The immunity does go down with time, but is still protective for at least 6 months. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1050721/Vaccine-surveillance-report-week-4.pdf See page 14. I will reiterate, we are entering a new phase where proper risk assessment is going to be increasingly relevant. Spreading misinformation has contributed significantly to the disease burden and deaths we have seen so far and we have to take a strong stance against it. I do get that being anti-consensus can make one feel like something special, but here we are not talking about something theoretical ideas. Here, our actions have immediate impact on those around us and we have seen that misinformation kills. I am happy to address and discuss things that may be confusing, as frankly the whole mess is not necessarily straightforward. However disseminating outright misinformation is dangerous and should be treated like spread of similar dangerous information. I am pretty sure that at this point more folks died from misinformation related to COVID-19 than from trying to do dangerous experiments, for example, and we have a policy against the latter.

I would appreciate it if you would conduct at least do some basic fact checking before stating falsehoods as facts. All clinical trials are listed and you can easily look them up on clinicaltrials.gov. There, you can easily see that the BioNTech has set the trial up in two parts. One PhaseI and one PhaseII/III. Phase I started April 2020 and moved into Phase II/III in July. Again, that is publicly available information. As noted, the endpoint is not length, but whether a sufficiently large cohort of individuals got infected to evaluate efficacy, and in November an interim report indicated that they were hitting those numbers. Again, all of that is available and documented. Why are you making things up? It is not like that the virus is going to pay you anything, yo know?

That would be a huge jump in assumption. A lot of syndromes are associated with the immune system and a lot stimuli and drugs influence it. In order to ascertain that any of that has a direct impact on the course of a specific infection very specific studies are needed.

The reason why trials take so long is not because they need to be so long, but it is because they phases are traditionally done one after the other. In large part because they are expensive. Safety is assessed predominantly in Phase I. Phase II is looking for efficacy and III is generally used to assess whether it works better than e.g. existing treatments. So one way to accelerate the process, is to increase the recruitment and basically conduct II and III at virtually the same time, rather waiting for a result and then decide on making a decision to go forward. The fact that countries threw money at them clearly helped in the process. The length is often determined by the type of treatment (i.e. how long has it to be taken to show an effect) and time required to recruit sufficient number of people. Moreover, each trial has specific endpoints being monitored, which determines the length of the trial. In case of vaccinations, an important point is to get a certain amount of people infected, so that you can compare how many of the infected were in the placebo vs the treatment arm. For some diseases this can indeed take years. If they are are rare, it is very unlikely that any of the participants will get infected within a short time frame. The companies were "lucky" as during the trials there were several COVID-19 surges and they hit their endpoint fast. As StringJunky pointed out Phase 4 are after-market observations (which includes aspects like manufacturing quality, impurities and other issues). But again, it is not looking at an individual for a long time, but it is looking at side effects in a large population. For vaccines a typical Phase 4 would be a follow-up for side effects for three months and analysis of efficacy over 2 years (e.g. involving antigen/antibody tests, surveys etc.). Others have already commented on the other aspects that are misunderstood. To go back on-topic: the the vaccination mandate was scrapped for fear of losing workers.

You don't take vaccines over several years. Can you show me the article for details? The vaccine components are eliminated from the body in a fairly short time frame. What effects are you looking for and how would you ever now it was because of the vaccine rather than what happened to you between taking the vaccine and the point when it happened? In typical trials folks are not monitored for years after taking a vaccine. What is generally monitored are acute side effects, but those normally manifest while components of the vaccines are still present. So the typically monitoring time is roughly 2 months. You can find examples here: https://www.chop.edu/news/long-term-side-effects-covid-19-vaccine Fundamentally the number of folks vaccinated is still the best way to get safety data. The longer you look back, the fuzzier the sources becomes. Moreover, we also already know that COVID-19 causes long-term issues. So you have the choice between high risk of immediate and long-term issues up and including death and then another option of minimal risk.

Red herring again. The same information as for other trials are available. There is no long-term data for other vaccines as those are not long-term treatments. If you have issues somewhere in your life, how would you trace it back to a vaccination you got as a child? Most has been addressed by Arete:

I think this is one of the questions where one would need to do a reality check. I am pretty sure one can construct a situation where somehow torture is justified, as long as you recast it in way where the outcome is inevitably positive. There are likely also scenarios in which one can imagine genocide somehow to be acceptable. But in mind that would only allow us to explore the limits of morality in general and not the ethical concerns of the acts themselves. For the latter one would need to take reality into account. FBI interrogators have objected to interrogation tactics because a) they found it ineffective and b) they found out that non-toture methods (e.g. building rapport) was more effective in getting actual intel. I.e. they got more information from insurgents before they tortured, rather than after. Here is one of such interviews to this effect: https://www.npr.org/2020/09/08/910640336/former-fbi-agent-addresses-post-sept-11-torture-in-newly-declassified-book There are also theoretical considerations and a more complex review of interrogation methods (https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/law0000136) concluding that torture is simply not a good interrogation method. A review specifically of the "enhanced interrogation program" came to the same conclusion as mentioned already but essentially it does state that the whole program, i.e. the logic behind the method and the training program (spearheaded by contracted psychologists, IIRC), were ultimately devoid of scientific evidence and evaluation. However, a key finding was that psychological theory does suggest that high-pressure coercion and torture and increase the resistance of an individual not to comply. And there is no evidence (outside of Hollywood movies) that it can yield useful information from uncooperative sources. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/OathBetrayed/Intelligence Science Board 2006.pdf In summary, I do not think that one can disassociate the moral argument from torture, for the simple fact that we have evidence that it actually works.

Peterson is saying whatever creates the most outrage so that he can remain relevant and line is pockets.

That is certainly true. Unfortunately these issues are not simple academic discourse, but also intersects with politics, public discourse and so on. It is unfortunate that (internet) celebrities tend to take away much of the oxygen for much needed debates. Unfortunately the internet, but also conventional media thrive from dissent. So uninformed radical takes get the front page, whereas folks investigating these issues are rarely even mentioned (especially not the difficult ones). In certain areas advances have been made, though up to a certain level there are still barriers. One issue is that it can vary quite a bit depending on are and system. In Germany, for example in the last decade the percentage of female professors increased from 10 to about 20%, which might sound like a steep increase. Yet, if you look closer, women are more likely to be on non-tenure track positions (i.e. these are non-permanent positions). What basically happened is that in order to address gender imbalance a system of what some might call "virtue signaling" has been implemented, which basically creates an illusion of catering for minorities but effectively being ignored where it counts. The good news is that when folks get used to such systems, some actually take them seriously. I still do not see it happening in Germany, but in parts of the US and Canada, it has been starting to make a dent, but it will take at least another decade to see whether these changes take hold. Obviously if we talk about a longer time span, say the fifties, yes attitudes have permanently changed. Though I would add that the baseline was pretty low to begin with.

Here, intersectionality comes into play. There is a long history where fights for equal rights resulted in infights. In the US, the civil rights movement experienced quite a significant amount of gender discrimination. I.e. fighting for black rights, often was exclusionary to women's right, and especially black women's rights. Fundamentally. as a society we need to take a careful look at our attitudes and structures to see where we are exclusionary and why and how that ultimately impacts us from the individual to the societal level. There can be disconnect between the ideals and of, e.g. the civil rights movement, and how individuals within in act and focus on. Fundamentally, that is also the idea with regard to diversity. There is the (potentially somewhat naïve) assumption that if leadership is sufficiently diverse, one would be more cognizant of conscious and unconscious exclusionary biases and issues. That, unfortunately requires that everyone involved has significant knowledge on the issue, which quite often requires more than personal experiences. But I do see it as a problem to use these fractures in order to discredit the principles of a given movement. I.e. even if there are feminists who are exclusionary, should we stop striving for a system where men and women have equal access to power? That being said, the society as a whole is clearly still created and dominated with a male-focused element when it comes to power and influence. Things like abortion rights but even maternity/paternity leave show limits of equality and are still elements that limit transition of women into leadership roles.

It is the fear of change. I have been learning quite a lot how different and challenging navigating competitive careers for women is from my wife as well as (former) bosses. I am mentoring quite a few women, too and it is obvious that there are still ongoing challenges. Yes, it is getting a bit harder for men, but this is because there is a desire to create a system that does not caters to them almost exclusively. We are still working with a patchwork system and it is certainly not perfect as attitudes have not really shifted that much among the powerful. But it might be changing. Conservatives don't like it as, well conservatism almost by definition likes to stick to things they were and folks like Peterson love culture wars because that is how they make their money nowadays.

In addition to the test itself, there are no guarantees regarding spread. It depends a lot on the viral load in the infected individuals and there is evidence that in vaccinated folks the viral load is lower on average (though not consistently so) and the risk of a boosted individual to get infected is cut down roughly by half (on average, there is a lot of variability here, too). It is also possible that it was a different variant that they were exposed to, where the vaccination is even more effective against. The whole host-pathogen interaction is subject to many stochastic factors (also including innate immune responses) so it might be impossible to figure out what ultimately happened. But if I were to hazard a guess I would think that having several doses of the vaccine would have played a significant role in it.