CharonY

Details of the model should be in the manuscript, and by skimming the references these look promising: - Kaplan 1960, Tellus 12,204-208 - Manabe and Moeller 1961, Mon. Wea. Rev. 89,503-532 - Moeller 1963, J Geophys Res 68,3877-3886 - Plass 1957, Quart J Roy Meteor Soc 82,310-324

For the life of me I don't understand how a podcast is news, but apparently Peterson was on one and provided his usual brand of word salad. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/us/joe-rogan-jordan-peterson-climate-science-intl/index.html https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/27/word-salad-of-nonsense-scientists-denounce-jordan-petersons-comments-on-climate-models Incidentally, a while back I had a chat with an acquaintance from the psych department and he sent me an article from someone who was on the hiring committee. https://www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html He also mentioned that Peterson's former work (especially alcoholism) was solid, his personality work was fine if one was into it (that field itself is at least somewhat controversial), but at some point he is selling is thoughts on matters outside his research area as facts (though to be fair, the big personality type models have sparked a whole industry of woo, so he is not alone in that, at least).

Your links are a bit screwed up and your claims are again rather vague. But from what I gather you seem to imply that the official numbers of ca. 150k deaths are inaccurate and only deaths with COVID-19 as with any pre-existing conditions should be removed. I will also say that your claim that ONS made the claim that the death numbers are inflated are wrong. They never made that claim, and the claim is in fact based on misrepresentation or cherry-picking of the FOI request. I will give the benefit of doubt and assume that it is based on misunderstanding rather than willfulness. I will say, however, that this is again a tactic used by folks since the beginning of the pandemic to play down the disease. In 2020 the mantra was that it is just a flu and now the insane claim that people die with rather than of COVID-19. I will start with discussing why pre-existing conditions matter, but also add some more general points with regard to excess deaths, if I still have time. Pre-existing conditions: We know that there are comorbidities that increase the likelihood of death. Excluding folks at risk from death by the disease from the statistic is like excluding folks with a driver's license from vehicular deaths. Moreover, older individuals also are more likely to have some sort of comorbidity. One of the biggest risk factor is diabetes as well as other chronic inflammation. In these individuals an infection with SARS-CoV-2 has a very high risk to trigger a fatal sequence of events leading to death. Obesity is another risk factor and if we exclude all obese folks from death statistics, it would be around 1/3 of the UK population from most death statistics. How would that make sense? Also note that the death is generally speaking never caused by COVID-19. You die of some complications related to it, such as renal or lung failure, blood clots and so on. In other words, the claim here is that if we exclude factors that increase the risk the death of COVID-19, then the expected COVID-19 deaths would be lower, which is is not really insightful nor does it change how lethal the disease is in the current population, wher enot everyone is 20 and healthy. The claim of deaths with rather than by COVID-19 is also directly targeted by other health agencies (I don't think the UK does make the distinction, but I may also just have missed it) where a distinction is made whether a distinction is made with COVID-19 as the underlying cause (i.e. what initiates the events leading to death) rather than contributing cause. See the guidelines here https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvss/vsrg/vsrg03-508.pdf In the general overview (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm) you can se that about 90% of all deaths related to COVID-19 are indicated to be underlying cause with the rest being mentioned as contributing (there is a finer data set somewhere, but I am running out of time). In other words, the death statistics are overwhelmingly reflecting the deaths caused by COVID-19 rather than incidental deaths. Unless Brits are very different there is not reason to assume that there will be fundamental differences. In other words, there is no basis for the claim that deaths are massively overcounted.

Good find. Apparently the situation in UK is different to Canadian and US surveys, so I shouldn't have generalized it that much. I will note that instead of specifying what exactly is being called to question or at least providing a report from the Office of National Statistics so that one can try to establish context you again want us to watch a youtube video. But that is the modus operandi of the pro-virus lobby, isn't it? Sow doubt while being as vague as possible. And when specific claims are refuted, quickly pivot to something else or hide the goalposts where the sun doesn't shine.

The unvaccinated healthcare workers are a small group. Disproportionately smaller than the average population. Moreover, as already mentioned, the level of training on that matter is inversely proportionate to vaccine hesitancy (i.e. MD < Nurses < paramedics < support staff). And I note that you are now moving away from the scary "new" mRNA vaccine and now it is adenovirus-base vaccines. As it is, the risk is still orders of magnitude lower than getting blood clots following a SARS-CoV-2 infection. And hey, if you are in a high risk group, you have other vaccines to choose from. But that is of course not the point, is it? It is about not wanting a vaccine and trying to find excuses for it. Geez, I wonder why did not squash the pandemic yet.

The fun bit is that we can copy/paste the whole discussion here and post it again once we got another larger disease outbreak. I mean, it is said that history does not repeat itself but it often rhymes, but I think some folks have not gotten the memo.

Interestingly enough most of the articles as well in OP are not arguing about freedom or rights, but more about practicability. I.e. the main reason not to have the mandate is that one might lose folks. I.e. the idea seems to be that policies should somehow be determined by a small proportion of the uninformed.

Exactly. By now there are over 9 billion doses administered. I doubt that there is any single vaccine out there that has a number close to that by several orders of magnitude before being used routinely/being mandated. Time is just a distraction folks use to justify their opinion. Edit: and quite some of those folks would be happy to take a drug that has been tested by a few thousand folks at most. As long as it does not say "vaccine", apparently.

Considering lack of details (e.g. magnification) and quality of images it is difficult to tell what we are looking at. Considering that they are asking about confluency the second image is likely an eukaryotic culture. However, the image quality is not great. If I do a visual assessment I would move the focus a bit to make sure that I can assess the density better. There are also simple tools (e.g. imageJ plugins) that can help you calculate it. But we generally like folks to give their estimates so that we can see where their thinking is.

Could you point to the info release that shows that (also, is it for a given time period, total estimate...)?

Or to put it differently, folks who understand the risk/benefits of vaccines better are less likely not to get vaccinated.

There is recent evidence that combined testing performs better https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/ns-combined-nose-throat-rapid-test-more-accurate-1.6322961

We also see a gradient in hesitancy among health care workers, with MDs having the lowest and paramedics or related staff having the highest. If anything, hesitancy among healthcare workers shows that informed decisions alone are unlikely to allow us to get universal vaccination levels. Therefore it actually is argument for mandatory rather than voluntary measures. The failure is on the "inform" side, as certain folks will continuously deny information presented to them. Edit: Swansont and TheVat made important points and I would like to add that similar patterns have emerged from other countries with federal and/or local vaccine mandates. Moreover, historically there are always folks resisting mandates, regardless of the level of actual safety data available (again, red herring, it is more related to confirmation bias). But over time the mandate helps to normalize vaccination schedules and compliance almost always increased over time. That being said, public trust is at an all-time low (thanks internet! https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-health/dozen-misguided-influencers-spread-most-anti-vaccination-content-social-media), so the effect might be more muted this time around.

It is funny that in Canada the nurse and medical association were protesting, too. For not making vaccines mandatory in Ontario and Quebec. Some hospitals and care home require them nonetheless.

More so, I would say. I mean, at least in my lab the students generally do not have routine contact with vulnerable individuals. The fact that this does not seem to be universally the case just because of liability reasons is actually quite surprising. But then it might be potentially difficult for affected patients to prove that they got infected by health care personnel and not e.g. by other patients.

The long-term safety data is a bit of a red herring- what one should look for is the rate of adverse effects relative to doses administered. Collecting less data over a longer period does not tell us more.

"Also it is only old people, so who cares? I want to live my life." Which, btw. is an actual quote.

Don't mean to speak on Arete's behalf, but in a way these things have happened to some limited degree. In Indonesia there was a report that folks without masks were ordered to dig graves for COVID-19 victims https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/17/asia/indonesia-coronavirus-grave-diggers-intl-hnk-scli/index.html And apparently there have been many heartfelt messages on social media as well in different news outlets with folks regretting not getting vaccinated. However, the issue here is at least two-fold. There is a big group (typically younger) who simply think that it does not apply to them. I.e. they might think that only old and overweight people will suffer (and die). Then there is a smaller, but somewhat crazier faction who simply don't believe that these deaths are real. Yet another group is simply misinformed, but believe in false information that make them believe that vaccinations carries a higher personal risk than getting sick (and often none of them really think or care too much about the risks for others, a pattern that we also see here). There is a relatively large body research over the last decade that indicate that reaching out individually to people and especially by trusted people seems to be the most effective way to address vaccine hesitancy. But as we can see, it is difficult to implement.

And 5 millions are basically only the lower estimate (i.e. confirmed cases). The overall burden is likely to be higher. Way higher by some estimates: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00104-8 True, given that COVID-19 related deaths have vastly outpaced vehicular deaths. I really could not think of anything even coming close in recent times. Even the opioid crisis has been outpaced and we know how much regulations, laws and punishments have been implemented with regard to illicit drug use.

It is like saying that folks should be allowed to be drunk driving. Y'all got airbags after all. It makes no sense.

Or that maintaining a pool of infected increases the chance of new variants (I mean that has only been the driver of at least three waves...). Or increase the risk of folks for which vaccines won't work, or that filling up hospitals and thereby restricting health care is bad for everyone etc, etc. I keep being astonished that 2 years into a crisis of this magnitude folks are able to learn nothing.

A couple of things: many archaea are difficult to cultivate and therefore presence and diversity of archaea were underestimated for a long time. Cultivation-independent has remedied that somewhat (but only ramped up fairly recently), but without an accessible pure culture it is not easy to study their physiology and pathobiology. There is some evidence that in certain anaerobic dental infections and abcesses archaea are present, but without a good model system it would be hard to figure out whether they caused it, or were just opportunistic. There is at least study where folks tried to infect mouse models with methanogens, resulting in higher mortality compared to controls, but there is not a huge body of evidence out yet. Moreover many of these studies are fairly new (a couple of years, really) and more studies and a better understanding of the role of archaea in our microbiome is needed.

While many certainly have a confirmation bias, the sad thing is that in that climate there are many that appear to be genuinely unclear about what is fact or fiction.

I mean, anti-vaccination has a history basically as long as vaccinations and many of the original arguments still echo today. E.g. safety of vaccines, which in the 19th century were certainly much more valid than today. The internet definitely has allowed the spread of stupid things much more easily for sure, though and I think it is drowning out the information. See if you tell folks something like only 1 in 1 million will have issues, that is a good message. But if you start being more precise like the studies have shown something like 1 in 100k with milder issues, or that some subgroup may have a higher frequency of non-serious complications etc to contextualize the data, you start confusing folks. Thus, science being precise is seen by many folks as science being uncertain. It is something that the medical officers are also facing. Either make simple declarative statements, but then it is an issue if you need to revise them due to new situations. Or you make more complicated, but more precise statements, which leaves many folks confused and hence less trusting.

This is perhaps one of the weirder experiences I had related to the pandemic. We had several discussions with students and members of the public who had concerns about vaccines. We were somewhat prepared to have some crazies and there were indeed questions that were borne out of conspiracy theories (e.g. 5g, vaccines are lethal made with aborted fetuses etc.). Yet, surprisingly we found that engaging with them and explaining it why that was silly did help to assuage their fears. I.e. it seems that some folks are not on the level of a true "believer" but they are utterly confused by the existing information and they apparently have no ability to distinguish between the nonsense in social media and actual facts (and it seems to go though all age categories). It does seem to me that there is a fundamental erosion of trust in public messaging and that individual connections might be believed more. The issue there of course is that everyone can go to youtube, call themselves Dr. so-and-so and create inane narratives that then spread like wildfire. Many of the ideas are so far out that you would assume that one has to be a conspiracy nut to believe them. The positive way to think about it is that even if folks believe crazy things, they might be amenable to education. The negative way to think about it is that apparently not only crazies are susceptible to this internet nonsense.