Day 633 – It me

Spotted yesterday, this:

If you look at how other people gained their super powers: getting nibbled by a radioactive spider, being born on Krypton or having shedloads of cash and a cave under your mansion (is this right? – Ed.), most superheroes have had it fairly easy.

I haven’t had a spider bite, I was born on earth and I don’t have a mansion or a cave. So it looks like I’ll have to go via this route. And looking back at the last 5 months of my life, I would absolutely argue that this so-called “super immunity” – if I even have it – is absolutely not worth the effort.

I can’t even fly.

Rubbish.

Day 630 – Fighting misinformation

Sigh.

2 years into this nonsense and over a year after we started vaccinating people, and we’re still seeing this sort of thing:

Maybe this person just doesn’t understand, or maybe they just don’t want to understand. Either way, while sharing this, it’s important to note that “the vaxes and boosters” don’t put any spike proteins into our bodies. Nor do they cause our bodies to make any full spike proteins. The small protein fragments made by our cells in response to the mRNA vaccines are enough for the immune system to work its magic and produce antibodies which can target the real thing, should it become necessary.

So, the spike proteins that “the vaxes and boosters are putting into our bodies” don’t get “expelled after a period of time” (and thanks for clarifying what a period of time might mean, though), nor do they collect anywhere, simply because they never existed.

Just imagine if they did, though. What would happen if we keep adding more? Well, proteins are very, very, small, so this would take a while, but I would imagine that we would likely all become just one giant spike protein (but with legs, obviously.) It would be much easier to see who had been vaccinated and who hadn’t – none of this QR code or “passport” silliness – only people who looked like giant spike proteins would be allowed into bars, cinemas and shops.

We’d have to avoid the rain, of course. Important solubility consideration. Safety first.

But maybe the scientific community shot itself in the collective foot with how we went about naming the spike protein, anyway. After all, “spike” sounds so aggressive, nasty and dangerous. If we’d thought about it beforehand (and that would include allowing for this sort of social media lunacy) then surely the “cuddle protein” or the “fluffy protein” would have been a better, more socially acceptable term. It’s very had to imagine anyone being even vaguely concerned with a build-up of cuddles in their ovaries.

Or wherever.

But more seriously, the fact remains that there will always be people out there who can’t understand, can’t accept, or simply won’t believe what we tell them, no matter how simply we put it. I can’t imagine living my life that way – distrusting every single thing that anyone says. But then I can imagine giant spike protein people going to the pub, so maybe the joke’s on me.

There are important concerns and questions for the future of science, of scientific communication and of trust and credibility in our experts here. I’m sorry to say that I don’t have any answers right now.

Day 629, part 2 – Red list lifted

I’m still mildly bemused by the exceptionalism shown to the UK regarding the recent travel red list. (I mean, I’m not really, we know that everyone loves to hate the Brits, but still…)

Sure, you can say that it was unscientific, unjustified or whatever (as if those are the only arguments that count here), but no-one seems to be chastising Chile or Italy or Oman or Singapore or the UAE or Panama or Uzbekistan or Canada or (weirdly) Rwanda (I know, right?) for stopping incoming Saffas and visitors to SA from… well… coming in.

And now that the UK (at the time of writing) has opened up again, while many of the the other countries (and there are almost 70 of them!) are still banning travel from SA, there still seems to be this latent whining at the UK, rather than any outrage at or pressure on other countries to follow their lead.

Odd.

We now know a lot more about Omicron – and while the news (tentatively) seems to be pretty good – when the UK and everyone else added SA to their red list, no-one had any idea how nasty or otherwise it might be (it didn’t even have a name back then!), and the UK had detected no cases there. What I wrote a couple of weeks ago still stands:

That “more information” did become available, and the UK has acted timeously on it. Of course I’m sorry that SA lost out on tourism business for three weeks. I know it’s crap. The last 2 years have been crap for all of us. Omicron was out of anyone’s control (and it’s still wildly out of everyone’s control!), and there will be other variants in the future which will probably result in new restrictions and limiting travel. It’s not anyone’s fault.

I know how much the tourist industry needs a good season right now, but as far as I’m aware, the UK (or anywhere else for that matter) has no obligation to send a quota number of tourists here each year. And I’m not a business person, but to me, seemingly relying on a single nation to prop up your tourist industry seems like a worryingly risky approach.

If this was really just about the tourist thing and the stigma of being on a red list, then it does seem as if local social media and news sites should move on now from their… er… “unjustified, unscientific and irrational” stance, and start pressurising the likes of Aruba, Gabon and Kuwait (oh, and “Germany, the US, France and the Netherlands”, obviously) to allow travellers from SA back into their countries rather than pointlessly continuing to chastise the UK.

Really weird that that’s not happening.

Day 626 – They’re Russian over to help us

Hmmm. This is.. interesting.

Indeed:

“An IL-76 of the Russian Emergencies Ministry has been loaded with Rospotrebnadzor’s (the Federal Service for Surveillance on Consumer Rights Protection and Human Wellbeing) mobile laboratory mounted on a Kamaz vehicle at Volgograd’s airport and is heading for the South African Republic. There are virologists, epidemiologists and physicians of Rospotrebnadzor and the Russian Health Ministry along with an Emergencies Ministry task force on board the IL-76,” the ministry said.

Why?

Having had the world singing the praises of our scientists for the past couple of weeks, why do we need a mobile Russian virology lab and mobile Russian virologists in Cape Town?

The flight is performed by order of Russian President Vladimir Putin, following the request of his South African counterpart Cyril Ramaphosa. On Friday night, it departed from Moscow to Volgograd, where the laboratory was loaded on the plane.

Curiouser and curiouser, Comrades.

Day 623 – Too late

On the day that the news broke that 2 Pfizer jabs had very limited effect on the Omicron variant, but that 3 seemed to be pretty good (see the lilac bars here):

… our local medicines body, SAHPRA authorised a 3rd jab 6 months after the second.

For anyone below the age of 50 (or who was below the age of 50 at the time of their first jab), that means waiting – with very limited protection – until March next year. But which time this fourth wave will be just one more unpleasant memory. For those who survive*.

As I’ve mentioned on here, the shouts of ‘vaccine apartheid’ ring hollow as far as SA is concerned, but the government isn’t doing a lot to correct this narrative. Why? Well, lest we forget, they were the ones who started ordering vaccine stocks too late:

and they are the ones who are comprehensively failing to get what they have got into people’s arms:

Now, About 80% of the population who are eligible to have a vaccine (have to wait until well into the new year to get the much-needed third shot. While we slow down our orders because we have so much in stock.

The advanced muppetry continues in the clown farm.


* Is it me? Am I the drama? I don’t think I’m the drama.