CharonY

No, the scale just indicates weight. The organization sets weight limits.

There is precedence already. The weight categories set in contact sports, for example. Or how disabilities are weighed in paralympics, as SJ, said. None of the rules in sports are perfect and sometimes create weird incentives. I do not see how this is fundamentally different or impossible. As it has been said before, sports are games with made-up rules. And rules have been amended continuously to adapt to changing conditions such as accommodating broadcasting schedules, forcing athletes to show more (or less) cleavage and so on. Making up new ones to be more accommodating does not seem too much of a stretch here, especially with examples already being used.

Many countries had established systems after SARS and those that did maintain them did better. Many countries reduced such monitoring efforts (including the US) after there are no outbreaks after a little while. After the catastrophic start, China did actually control the virus somewhat well, and one does not need espionage to get at least rough ideas. At least not with a disease of this magnitude. If folks opened up without having the disease under control, catastrophic failures of the medical system follows. That has not happened in China, which does not really have a brilliant system to begin with. Moreover, excess death analyses of China during 2020 mostly found excess deaths in Wuhan, but little elsewhere. Considering the amount of travel to and from China (which is part of the issue) it is naïve to assume that the Chinese government could fully control tat type of information.

That is a cliché that US Americans believe and which is unlikely to be true. Idea of free speech and related concepts are ancient and did not start with the USA. Moreover, the US had many, many issues with it. McCarthy, anyone? Not that the US under the last administration did not try that. Instead they muzzled the agency responsible for keeping folks safe. I am not saying that China did the right thing, but at least eventually they openly declared that the outbreak was an issue and did something (whether it was the right thing might be debatable). In the US meanwhile, the officials offered mixed messages and were not able to clearly communicate the severity of the disease. The differences in countries that did that and the US is clearly visible in the death counts (which is even worse when one also includes undercounted cases). In short, freedom of speech is an ideal that many American hold dear in principle. In effect, there are many mechanisms that undermine it, which tend to show up when the system becomes more authoritarian. This is basically also true for Europe, looking at some countries who recently have become more authoritarian (e.g. Hungary or Poland), some of the measures almost always include limitations of freedom of expression of some sort.

We have seen that depending on leadership, the US is not even transparent to its own citizen. So would the magic entity be? The other issue of course being that folks need to have a good system to detect diseases in the first place. And considering how bad the US and Europe were in detecting and tracing cases, it seems that we need an organization led by a coalition of NZ, Taiwan and Vietnam. I do suspect that this is not what you had in mind. What the pandemic has shown is that we are do not have a good system to contain asymptomatic spread. Of course, changing the world in a way that contain any travel would reduce spread of such diseases. But that is generally not acceptable to folks. Of course one potential system is to shut down travel from and to any country in which a new outbreak is detected. Though again, I think that economic considerations would take precedent. And I will also note that some folks think that diseases only originate in far-away countries and as the recent epidemics and pandemics showed, it is clearly not the case (though tropical areas with rich wildlife have more reservoirs for zoonotic diseases).

This seems a bit silly, considering how few transgender people are there (of which only a tiny fraction will be athletes). That seems a bit like a loaded question. The issue is that historically the assumptions of the majority of minorities can create rules and laws that disadvantage the latter (and often thereby reinforces notion of the majority). This includes the historic treatment (and criminalization) of LGBTQ folks. Much of today's society has at least made a nominal commitment to start off inclusive (rather than the more exclusive approach based on a strong opinions and nominal, if vague values).

https://theconversation.com/striking-a-balance-between-fairness-in-competition-and-the-rights-of-transgender-athletes-159685 I think this is could be a reasonable take (as opposed to bans):

Absolutely, one of the things I assumed was going to happen when the internet came up is that we would see a massive jump in knowledge generation. I thought that folks would actually go away from fact-learning and more toward knowledge building and application, as facts or details would be so easy to get. As it turns out, at least one of the challenges that the information is actively getting diluted by bad info, and much time needs to be spent to vet information.

I think a big part of it is how schooling might have changed. It in class I noticed that kids are more focused on getting the right answer rather than understanding the why. And despite the fact that MigL has a point, I think there is genuine qualitative change that is associated with how media are consumed. I think there are several connected things that play into it and one of them is the way how media are presented and consumed. Reading papers in class was something I have done for a long time, but in the last 5 years or so, as part of student evaluations it has been consistently criticized as being far too much work. Students are now very uncomfortable when it comes to applying knowledge, they are obsessed with right and wrong answers. Much of it is due to schooling. I am not sure how common it is, but I was told recently that in school students would regularly get question catalogues and all exams would need to be on the list. Consequently, students are really unhappy when the task in an exam is now to apply things and so on. It is not everybody, of course. However, the proportion of folks struggling with this kind of tasks have been increased and curving has become more and more extreme. That being said, there is of course the argument to be made that because folks are consuming media differently, we should teach differently, too (and the question catalogue is presumably one such measure). But honestly, I am a bit at a loss, if reading and synthesizing scientific literature is becoming harder and harder to teach. And at least in my field of expertise I cannot compress information into one interesting tweet.

I agree. Growing up working-class immigrant poor we initially could not afford books, imagine my joy when I found the public library! The town was small and so was the library but at that point it was like an infinite amount of free candy. There is a lot I could lament about the internet experience, but I do feel that having too much info (and much of it of low quality and merely bite-sized) takes away from the desire (and enjoyment) to really dig into something. In the last 10-15 years or so, there is a noticeable shift in how kids experience learn and is heavily impacting their performance when it comes to more complex matters. It also has soundly refuted my assumptions regarding the role of technology in information gathering and learning that I had when I was young. Oh god, we are old, aren't we?

His comment is uninformed. There is nothing in the spike protein mRNA that makes it vastly more stable, and the instability of mRNA is well known. It is fairly common to use surrogates for these type of studies. Even if it was much more stable, we would be looking at a couple more days at best, which, unless you are talking about mayflies rarely falls under the moniker of long-term effects. I just quickly calculated the total detectable lipid concentration, which dropped by that amount. So yes, it is cumulative for all organs. Again, it is based on how we generally metabolize lipids. As we are not getting continuous injections, what happens is that the total amount of lipids gets distributed and eventually eliminated. We also know which organs conduct much of the lipid metabolism so I am not sure why at this point we should all pretend not to understand how lipid metabolism works. Again, I think the basic thing that you and the twitter post seem to misunderstand is how compounds, including lipids get metabolized and eliminated. I am sure that if you look at ADME profiles, you will find something for those LNPs. Moreover, the post seems to be confused about how elimination studies are done. If you want to understand how it is eliminated from the body you would go and measure generally blood and liver values as well as identify those compound in waste (i.e. urine and feces). And guess what, that is what they did and how they estimate elimination rates (some other routine methods involve simple blood plasma analyses. Quickly screening lit has indicate that terminal terminal half life for ALC-0315 and ALC-0159 were ~3 and 8 days, respectively. It is not a hypothesis, it is how the liver works. It is how we metabolize things. What you propose is that for some reasons LNPs changes how our organs work. If the liver would simply accumulate harmful substances we would be all dead. A steady state also does not see-saw. If the compound was delivered at a steady rate the concentration would remain steady and then decline slowly as the compound is being eliminated. However drugs can be released in bursts or re-distributed unevenly (e.g. the compound can be released from other organs back into the bloodstream). The main source in this case is leakage from the injection site into the bloodstream. Again, not a hypothesis, there is huge body of literature out there showing how liposomes, LNPs and similar compounds pass through our body, get eliminated and/or can get modified to control said elimination. We should not assume that science collectively forgot how basic animal physiology works just because a random guy on twitter doesn't. Again, there are plenty of studies looking at mRNA as well as LNP degradation and metabolization, as well as basic liver functions. And I want to recall that one of the biggest challenges mRNA vaccines faced are the fact that those were eliminated too quickly to reliably create an immune response. Similarly, early LNPS were cleared too rapidly which added to the issue. Thus, much of the work surrounded stabilization of mRNA in vivo. So suddenly assuming that it is somehow very stable just goes against all the basic biochemistry we understand regarding those molecules. In addition, the whole molecule is not terribly stable outside of the body, either, which is why they require storage at low temps. I am not sure why you want to discuss tweets from a person who clearly has no expertise on that matter. Although it does not fall strictly into my area of expertise either, it is easy to see that the author of the tweet has not found it necessary to educate themselves on the subject matter before taking it to the social media (and yes, the irony is not entirely lost on me, considering my postings here). Take Gregoriadis and Neerjun (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1432-1033.1974.tb03681.x) which is one of the early papers looking how one could control uptake and elimination. There are tons of advances to control elimination rate, tissue specificity and overall stability in the lit, with detail that goes far beyond my knowledge. So any argument that argues that something mysterious is happening here, is likely based on ignorance. So what I think you propose is that for some reasons the main organs for lipid metabolization (and subsequent elimination) will only be active for the first two days or so, then all residual LNPS would magically bypass these organs and mechanism, accumulate in ovaries and stay there forever? So instead on measuring well known excretion routes we should instead focus on something that a random twitter guy does not understand? I would advise you look for some reliable sources. I am not sure whether the person has an agenda or is just badly misinformed, but either way I would urge you to find someone better to follow as neither of us is going to learn anything by feeding trolls.

! Moderator Note Does not seem to discuss mainstream biology, moved to speculations. Please take some time to familiarize yourself with the rules regarding speculation threads. https://www.scienceforums.net/forum/29-speculations/#elForumRules

Vaccinated folks are less likely to get infected from the virus in the first place, and even if infected they overall viral load tends to be lower. I.e. they produce fewer particles and the overall (population-wide) reservoir of viruses that could mutate is lower.

I have addressed the issues for the most part above already but I can give a more detailed breakdown for clarity. Overall I do not think that the tweet is well informed (but then so are most, I guess). 1) the mRNA in the vaccine is fragile and we know that it degrades over time. In the Pfizer report we see that the test mRNA they used vanished from the liver within 48 hours. In other words, if we expect effects due to the mRNA, they would need to happen before that time frame, and likely need to involve a higher accumulation than in the liver (as liver inflammation does not seem to be a major issue). 2) it can be expected that the LNP and their load seep out from the injection site, and typically eventually reach the liver. Over time, they would be metabolized and eliminated from the body. The Tweet seem to claim that the liver values are stable but that is not necessarily what we expected. Rather we have steady state situation where elimination is balanced with additional accumulation (i.e. likely the liver is doing its work). In fact, between say hour 2 and 48 h we see a loss of ~30% of the total signal. I.e. even if distributions shift, the total levels will obviously go down, rather than up. As such, very long term effects are unlikely to happen due to accumulation of stuff. If anything happens it is more likely due to something stupid our immune system is doing that could affect the body long-term. 3) We see that much of the short-term accumulation happens in the liver (which again, does most of the lipid metabolism) but also spleen (same reason), each of which have about double the concentration than ovaries. The other site to look for for short-term effects (again the mRNA is gone pat 48 hours) could be e.g. also adrenal glands, where quite a bit accumulates in the 24 hours but I have not seen reports that indicate issues here (again, the issue with endpoints, I outlined above). 4) The kinetics are likely going to be different. The rats got a 50 ug dose whereas the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is about 30 ug (IIRC). Given that the average human weighs about 240 times more, the elimination is likely going to be faster. There are a couple of other points I could point out, but I hope that this explains most of it (and let me know if something is unclear (as often I am in a rush and did not proofread it properly).

! Moderator Note Post regarding effects of vaccines have been split from another thread.

Also the cohort has more men, IIRC. That part also means that in the FAIR study the symptoms are those that are bad enough to warrant a claim (i.e. severe symptoms). I.e. one could say that about 23% of all COVID cases (including folks initially without symptoms) had issues that were severe enough to warrant a claim. The study in OP was looking for typically COVID-19 associated symptoms, such as loss of smell/taste, which won't typically appear on claims, but can still affect quality of life. But there were also other symptoms in lower proportions such as dyspnea as well as neurological symptoms other than loss of smell. It should be noted that post-viral syndromes are not new or unique to COVID-19. But often general malaise and other quite possibly crippling long-term effects are often not recognized as folks may not associate them with a prior infection. Many folks are not getting tested when they have flu-like symptoms, for example.

Not sure what you mean. We have plenty of diseases that have a significant burden on public health. Influenza is responsible for 10k deaths in France. Covid is likely to add to it but it is not the first nor will be the last.

Actually I don't think we can easily establish that either. The FAIR study does not have a control group to establish how many of such claims are made by COVID-negative populations. However, the veteran's study for example looked especially add the increased odds of such symptoms in negative vs positive groups (with the caveat that veterans are not a truly representative group for the broader population).

If vaccination is the only measure then SARS-CoV-2 is likely to stick around (we have got another thread about that here somewhere). Fundamentally our most likeliest point of stamping out the disease was early in the pandemic, or around the summer time when we had a reduction in many areas to more manageable levels. Of course we decided to open up at that point... Now, the hope is that with vaccination the virus will be more manageable like other disease outbreaks that we deal with. What we do not know yet are things like overall health burden, especially if we take long-haul symptoms into account.

Note that the data in OP looks specifically at a particular age group, whereas the values that I (and you) have indicated are for the whole study group, separated by symptoms. As such the data is actually very worrisome, as the age group was assumed to be least affected, but shows above average risk with regard to long-term COVID. I have not looked at the other data in an age-distributed way, but I would be curious to see how that looks like.

There is another study using large number using large number of insurance claims showing that ca. 23 % of all; 19% of asymptomatic, 27.5% of symptomatic but not hospitalized and 50% of hospitalized patients show long-covid symptoms (I remembered the numbers wrong, my apologies. LINK Another study using data from the veteran's health affair to come to similar conclusions: High-dimensional characterization of post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 | Nature Post-viral syndromes are insidious as they were often not recognized (there is more recognition now) but there are limited treatment options. Especially in this case it appears that it is unclear in some cases whether the symptoms actually eve go away (especially the neurological issues). With increasing vaccinations and decreasing active cases there is an increasing worry about these issues. While one might hope that the vaccines may also be protective against long-haul issue, but I have not seen data on that yet.

Yes, that is basically the most likely scenario.

I think the odds that we mess up the planet to such a degree that only a fairly small human population survives and where much of the effort is focused on sustenance (albeit in a high-tech version) is also not completely off the table.

LNPs were in use before that. See Anselmo and Mirtagotri Bioeng Transl Med. 2016 Mar; 1(1): 10–29.

We have to separate the issues. If we talk about the current vaccine, there are two factors that are relevant. The first is the availability of other vaccines and the respective countries seem to have sufficient access to cover their population with these vaccines. And the second is that currently B.1.617.2 (delta) is becoming dominant in many areas and AZ seems to perform worse than the others. Given the overall risk data, if there was no other vaccine, I would still take the AZ, even if I was in a risk group. Going to adenovirus-based vaccines and therapeutics, I should add that, again, almost everything we put in our bodies does something to it and especially when applied to a large population it is almost inevitable that there will be rare harmful interactions. The goal is therefore not zero events, but to ensure that the overall benefits outweigh the risks for a given population. Moreover, it is important to note that interactions that can lead to harmful events are not the same thing as the harmful event itself, there are mitigation strategies, dosage effects and so on. For example aspirin, causes blood thinning and in theory that could lead to internal bleeding. However, at recommended dosages it is considered to be safe, except for certain folks. In the past some studies indicate that certain adenovirus-based vectors might bind to circulating platelets and getting sequestered. That actually leads to reduced platelet count but not necessarily to clots alone. For that, it has been suggested that the vaccine might form an antigenic complex with platelet factors, resulting in the formation of antibodies against that complex. These antibodies than activate the platelets and initiate a pro-thrombotic response. It is not really my field so I do not know who would be at higher risk for this event and why.