Day 313, part 2 – Vaccine delivery

The first vaccines for The Virus arrived in South Africa yesterday, and wow, was the pomp and ceremony was dragged out onto the cold, wet apron at the airport in Johannesbeagle?

(Yes. Yes, it was.)

Dignitaries, politicians, umbrella holders and a really sycophantic media were all present to witness a whole 1 million doses of Covishield™ arriving on an Emirates 777.

That’s just enough to fully vaccinate 0.8% of the population, by my rudimentary calculations.

And yet:

I don’t watch news programmes specifically for this reason. But last night, I flicked on eNCA because I wanted felt I had to watch Ramaphosa’s address on reducing the lockdown. This was long, long, overdue, but clearly held back so that he could wave his little “we’ve got some vaccine” flag.

And wow. The blatant fawning during the pisspoor pre-speech small talk was absolutely sickening.

I looked up several times from the ironing (it’s all about the glamour here, ok?) and was eventually told off by Mrs 6000 for using the phrase

What the actual fuck?

four times – ever more incredulously – in about a 90 second period.

I’m well aware that the art of politics is all about spin, but this was so robustly applied that we were all almost flung outwards at mass times angular velocity squared times radius*.

They’re clearly not even bothering to hide it anymore. Gone are the clever intricacies of subliminal messaging. This was in your face GovernmentLove©. I’m not one for hyperbole, but I was actually quite shocked. I would not have been surprised if they’d cut across the studio to some sort of shrine to the ANC**.
It was actually like I was watching a party political broadcast***.

Stay away from news channels, guys. Or at least watch them with the knowledge that they’re all pushing some sort of agenda. This one wasn’t pretty. But at least it was pretty obvious.

Right. While I’m sounding like some sort of Trump fan with a Masters in Media Conspiracy from the Dunning-Kruger Online College, might I just ask why we’re bothering with this whole injection thing anyway?

It’s a tiresome, clumsy, process and people can avoid getting the jab if they so choose.

Ugh. No. That’s not what our reptilian overlords want.

Why not just use chemtrails?

After all, Darth Putin has got one of his planes in Cape Town right now, ready to go:

The Russian-built, Russian-registered, catchily named Illyushin II-76 TD-90VD arrived last night from the so-called Novolazarevskaya Airbase (which also sounds Russian), and features a huge cargo hold, capable of being adapted to hold fluids to bomb fires (definitely) or spread weather-modification and mind-altering chemtrails (possibly).
Surely it shouldn’t be such a big thing to fill it with vaccine and get us all done in one go?

I mean, that’s almost certainly why it’s here, right?

Right.

I’m glad you are all in the know as well.

 

Stay safe.

 

 

* engineers and physicists will know
** ok, that was a bit of hyperbole
*** back to no hyperbole

Day 229 – Not done yet

Great news on the vaccine for the virus:

…but we’re not done yet, even though a lot of people have been treating things as if we have been done for quite a while now.

Not done yet because:

a) Nelson Mandela Bay metro has run out of Intensive Care beds as the number of infections there continues to rise:

b) And yes, while the situation in the Eastern Cape is clearly a bit out of control, there are worrying little upturns in the Western Cape and KZN graphs as well:

We need to keep an eye on this – things should be dropping consistently at the moment.

c) We’re still learning about the effects of the virus on humans:

This figure is more than double than you would expect to see with influenza infections.

d) There’s “talk” of a return to Level 2 lockdown:

I say “talk”, because that’s from Business Insider and we all know what they’re like and even they state:

Now government officials have confirmed – anonymously – to Bloomberg that tougher restrictions are on the cards again in discussions this week.

Ah. The anonymous source. That old chestnut.

We believe you.

e) This has nothing to do with Covid, but I got bitten on the chin by a stray dog today, while lying in a pool of its urine underneath a Toyota double cab with its engine running in the middle of a fairly busy road in Upper Kenilworth.

I wouldn’t advise any of it.

Tetanus shot and broad spectrum antibiotics. No stitches required – puncture wound only.

Right. Must go and howl at the moon. See you tomorrow.

Day 136 – Long read takeaway

This is a long read about America.

 

 

I’m not really into long reads or America, but I actually found it rather interesting.
A combination of anthropology (obviously), epidemiology, sociology, history and politics, with some really interesting facts thrown in here and there. I learned stuff.

Since it’s Sunday – the day of rest – you probably have the time (although perhaps not the inclination) to give it a go. Yes, I was being sarcastic about the time thing.

This was one of the paragraphs from early on in the article, highlighting just what we’re up against in getting a vaccine developed and giving us any chance of getting back to a “normal” life.

And that before we’ve even thought about production, rollout and uptake.

Sobering.

Day 106 – No definite answer

It’s cold, grey and wet. We’re sheltering behind closed curtains and in front of a fire, either working on spreadsheets, working on school stuff or reading sobering, cautionary correspondence about how we, as the human race, are going to deal with the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The widespread opinion has been that we’re in this sticky situation until we can get a vaccine sorted, rolled out and administered to as many people as possible. And that’s the goal.

But there are signs that it’s not going to be quite as simple as Design Vaccine, Mass Produce Vaccine, Immunise World Population. Never mind the clear difficulties inherent in steps 2 and 3: number 1 seems to be proving more problematic than we had hoped.

This BMJ editorial from various UK academics spells out (some of?) the potential problems with any vaccine (and other immunological therapies) for Covid-19

Worldwide, many covid-19 vaccines are at various phases of development…
Understandably, there is great public expectation that these efforts will be successful, but caution is necessary with respect to both vaccines and passive immunity.

Vaccine being poking you with stuff that will make your body produce antibodies against Covid-19, and passive immunity being short-term protection by poking you with ready-made antibodies taken from someone who has had Covid-19.

Both are good ways to prevent people getting any given disease, but there are no guarantees that either of them will be successful against Covid-19.

There are many reasons why they might not work, or why they might not work as well as we would like or need them to:
Vaccines don’t work as well in older people: Covid-19 disproportionately affects older people. So can we make it work in the people that need it most?
The bit of the virus that we are hoping to target with the vaccine might mutate – meaning that even if we make a working vaccine, it might not work for very long.
We’ve never managed to make a vaccine against SARS or MERS – both very similar viruses to this nasty bugger – despite years of trying.

And – it’s complicated – but giving antibodies to patients might not be the best plan either. It’s worked well before with other diseases (even Ebola!), but this isn’t other diseases. In fact, there’s even the risk that – because of the way some cases of Covid-19 progress – giving convalescent serum (the antibodies) to a patient might even make them sicker.

Finding the solutions to these problems isn’t something that you or I can influence, but I just felt that it was worth putting it out there that you should probably abandon those foregone conclusions that science will have this all sorted out by Christmas (or whenever).

Sorry about that.

Microbiology is bad news

Except it’s obviously really not.

Microbiology is great.

But when microbiology gets into the news, it’s rarely for happy happy joy joy reasons. Even the mention of words like Ebola, Listeriosis or Bacteroides melaninogenica twist the tongues and instill fear into the hearts – and horrendous infection into other major organs – of the population.

This isn’t how it should be, so to balance the bias, I went searching for some good news microbiology stories.

Rookie error. It’s all terrible.

A tiny beetle is is killing South Africa’s trees. But only because it’s introducing a tinier fungus into those trees.

According to Professor Marcus Byrne, an Ig Nobel prize winner and entomologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, the beetle bores tunnels into tree trunks where it spreads the fungus Fusarium euwallaceae, which effectively cuts off the trees’ vascular system, causing them to die.

So, it’s the fungus that is actually killing the trees. Not the beetle.
Entomology is only very slightly to blame here. Microbiology loses again.

_____

Aside: Ig Nobel prize details here:

Byrne, an entomology lecturer, and his colleagues from Lund University in Sweden, designed caps and boots for dung beetles and dressed the beetles in their new apparel to prove, firstly, that dung beetles use the Milky Way to orientate.

The caps blocked light from reaching their eyes in order to experiment with how they use starlight to navigate. The boots, in a fashionable luminous green, blocked heat from reaching the dung beetles’ feet.

_____

Next up: Virus kills pigs. Millions of pigs.

It’s African Swine Fever caused by… er… the African Swine Fever Virus.

Otto Saareväli lost his entire herd of 7000 pigs because of a case of ASF was diagnosed on his farm in Estonia.

“We have the strictest biosecurity measures here, and still no one is quite sure how the disease got in – it may have been a truck that wasn’t washed properly after visiting an infected farm,” says Saareväli. “But if you find just one pig, then everything has to go.”

Estonia is just the tip of the iceberg though. China is home to half the pigs in the world, so it’s vital that the virus doesn’t get a trotterhold there… oh… too late:

“The key thing that makes us very conscious of the threat that ASF poses is that China represents half the pigs in the world,” says Dr Matthew Stone, deputy director general of science at the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE), which coordinates international monitoring of diseases. “It’s extremely important for food security and the economy of China and in the absence of a vaccine, stamping-out policies are crucial.”

And it’s not under control.

“At the moment because it’s on the move and undergoing a period of pandemic spread it’s very important.”

Still – at least that’s just a virus of pigs. There’s worse news when it comes to (very human) Measles Virus.

The annoying… no… the INFURIATING! thing about hearing about cases of, and deaths from, measles is that we have a very, very effective vaccine for measles. It’s entirely preventable.

Simply: there is no need for any child, any human, to suffer from, let alone die of, measles. So why is it happening?

Well, in Western Europe because “Dr” Andrew Wakefield is a corrupt twat, and because people chose – and continue to choose – to believe his lies.

Result?

Oh, and because misinformation and fake news is a big deal these days:

A new study showing that Russian-linked trolls and social media bots have been heavily promoting misinformation on vaccines shows just how far Putin’s government is prepared to go in its worldwide effort to sow mistrust and division. The study follows rapidly on the heels of earlier reports that Russian-owned media sites had been among the most prominent proponents of anti-GMO stories and memes, again aiming to undermine scientific consensus and public trust in academic institutions.

Both anti-vaccine and anti-GMO groups appeal to prejudices against modern science and conspiracy thinking to spread fear and misinformation. Like the tobacco lobby of old, doubt itself is their product.

We live in a truly sick (no pun intended), truly bizarre world.

And, as if it couldn’t get any worse, this:

In which, the Indonesian Ulama Council (MUI) declared the vaccine haram – religiously forbidden, despite also commenting that:

…the religious organisation understood the dangers associated with not getting children immunised.

So they do understand that the vaccine works, they do understand the need for it and they do understand the implications of children not being vaccinated, but they’re still going ahead and railing against it anyway.

Fantastic.

And why would you do that?

It’s entirely possible Amin is using this fatwa and the MUI in general as political tools to impact the election. The group receives funding from the government of Indonesia, and Amin has used it to impact politics in the past.

Ah – personal gain at the expense of others. Pretty sure that’s unlikely to be top of the list at the Things I Learnt From the Quran Symposium later this year.

To be fair to Microbiology, it might be Fusarium spp. killing the trees and not the beetle, but it’s Ma’ruf Amin killing Indonesian kids and not the measles virus.

Science is doing everything it can, but in Indonesia, it’s Religion 1-0 Microbiology.

Microbiology will still get the blame, though.

I will go on looking for good news Microbiology stories, but I’m not going to waste too much time over it, because I don’t think that there are any of them out there.