Notes for Philcon “Recent Science Headlines” panel

https://www.popsci.com/environment/cop26-final-agreement-climate-change/

COP26

  • Phase down (not phase out) of fossil fuels including coal – thanks, Australia (and China and India).
    • Developing countries say they need fossil fuels to help their people
    • Sinking countries (e. g. the Marshall Islands) point out that this policy can cause their entire nations to cease to be
  • Creation of a carbon market (nations can reduce emissions more than their quota and sell the “credit” to another country)
  • Poor countries continue to be promised funding that nobody actually supplies (except Scotland)

Mostly promises, little action. See you in Egypt next year.

Climate Change Causes Disasters

https://apnews.com/article/climate-science-health-environment-and-nature-d1cd773bfb6000e0d77a58ea743c135f

COVID-19

Booster shots – we’ve all heard about ‘em.
https://covidtransmissions.substack.com/p/covid-transmissions-for-9-20-2021

Treatments coming online!

Molnupiravir
https://covidtransmissions.substack.com/p/covid-transmissions-for-10-4-2021

Paxlovid
https://covidtransmissions.substack.com/p/covid-transmissions-for-11-8-2021

Fluvoxamine(!)
https://covidtransmissions.substack.com/p/covid-transmissions-for-10-29-2021

Spinal Cord Repair!

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2297272-paralysed-mice-walk-again-after-gel-is-injected-into-spinal-cord/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC23754/

Kessler Syndrome?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/russia-just-blew-up-a-satellite-here-s-why-that-spells-trouble-for-spaceflight/ar-AAQMueK

Astronauts hide in shelters as thousands of debris particles are generated. Russia inexplicably accuses the West of “hypocrisy”.

Space Stations

Boeing, Blue Origin Unveil Plans for Private Space Station

Example: Boeing/Blue Origin team up for “Orbital Reef”

China, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station

Toliman searches for extraterrestrial habitable planets

https://www.space.com/alpha-centauri-habitable-planets-space-telescope-toliman

Human beings are not the same thing as monkey cells: no, don’t start taking fenofibrate

Audacy (a site for radio stations’ online presence) reports, “Cholesterol drug cuts COVID infection rate by 70%: study”.

Actually, no, that is not what’s reported.

70% reduction in infection would be incredible, so naturally I read the article. I even read the actual journal paper they refer to.

Bonus points for this being an actual, peer-reviewed, published paper in a real journal, Frontiers in Pharmacology Translational Pharmacology. It just does not say anything about infection in humans. It says that the virus failed to infect monkey cells in culture media by up to 70%.

This is a really interesting paper, and I look forward to future work. This could potentially be a useful treatment.

That does not justify the utterly false headline. Audacy reporter Stephanie Raymond apparently either did not read the paper or did not know what Vero cells are and did not bother to look it up. Certainly she did not interview any of the scientists involved. One wonders if she worked off a press release.

Note: in the subject line I said not to start taking fenofibrate. I of course mean, “Unless it’s prescribed by your doctor, for a valid reason.” I am not a medical doctor and I’m not giving medical advice. I’m just saying that you shouldn’t start any prescription med unless it is prescribed by a licensed practitioner.

Kaiser doctor: Cause, Effect, What’s the Difference?

A press release on the Kaiser Permanente web site showcases Doctor Robert Sallis, who conducted a study in which the data on 50,000 KP members diagnosed with COVID-19, finding that people who were less active were 20% more likely to be hospitalized and 30% more likely to die after diagnosis.

Yes, it’s just as nonsensical as you are quite likely thinking.

We know that various comorbidities, such as diabetes, asthma, old age, and kidney disease can result in worse outcomes when someone gets COVID-19. And we also know that these same conditions are associated with lower levels of physical activity.

So Dr. Sallis has found that … sicker people are less active.

But he interprets it as meaning that exercise can save you from dying if you get the disease. That might be true, but the press release comes nowhere near proving it.

Of course, it’s possible the actual paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has a more powerful analysis. So I found it.

Umm ….

The activity levels were self-reported. Red flag.

The authors mention confounders. That’s it. They make no effort to account for them, they just vaguely discount them: “There is also the potential issue of residual confounding due to unmeasured confounders or measurement error. However, many studies have demonstrated numerous strong benefits from PA, especially among those who suffer from a variety of chronic diseases.” Yes, but that doesn’t mean that exercise automatically has benefits in every case. It would in principle be possible to do a better analysis, in which you compared people in matched subgroups (groups matched by age and pre-existing conditions, where the only difference between members is level of physical activity). They didn’t bother to do that.

Let me be clear: if I had access to the data I could do that analysis. It isn’t mysterious. They just didn’t.

So … this paper is, let’s say, very far from convincing.

Conspiracy theorizing: killing people again

Wisconsin pharmacist who destroyed more than 500 vaccine doses believes Earth is flat, FBI says.

Pharmacist Steven Brandenberg deliberately ruined over 500 doses of COVID-19 vaccine, by leaving it out of the freezer so that it spoiled.

Why? Because he thought it would be harmful, cause infertility, and that it included some kind of microchip.

Why? Because he believes in conspiracy theories. Notably, he believes that the Earth is flat, and that the sky is fake, a physical dome put in place to prevent people from seeing God. Note that this last theory is not compatible with literally any religion I’ve ever heard of. He isn’t religious–he has fallen down the rabbit hole and is unable to properly reality-check. He’s measuring the value of a proposition, not by how well it comports with reality, but by how cool it would be if it was true.

And … if any of the incorrectly vaccinated or unvaccinated people he deprived of their shots die, he has killed them in the name of nonexistent harms and nonexistent microchips.

For more on conspiracy theorizing:

All science denial is a form of conspiracy theory by Steven Novella.

Terrifyingly transmissible variants?

So, we hear a lot about how the VOC 202012/01 variant (the “British variant”) and 501Y.V2 (the “South African variant”) are more transmissible than the baseline SARS-CoV-2 virus, and there is evidence that this is true.

However, something to keep in mind:

New Cases of SARS-CoV-2 InfectionUKSouth Africa
Jan 1641,34613,973
Jan 3023,2755,297
Source: Worldometers.info

So, while these new variants are coming to dominate new infections in both nations, both countries have reduced their number of actual infections dramatically. That isn’t an inconsistency–it just indicates that common-sense public health measures like distancing and mask-wearing actually work fine against the new variants. (There are lots of other factors, like the “post-Christmas surge” in cases abating, of course.)

This is what evil looks like

A protest forced the temporary closure of a COVID-19 vaccination site in Los Angeles. They’re literally willing to kill people for the fiction that COVID-19 doesn’t exist.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-01-30/dodger-stadiums-covid-19-vaccination-site-shutdown-after-dozens-of-protesters-gather-at-entrance

They’re willing to kill for a lie. I literally can’t think of worse evil. Bigger evil, sure, but not worse.

To quote a post from one of the protestors, “… please refrain from wearing Trump/MAGA attire as we want our statement to resonate with the sheeple. No flags but informational signs only.” Naturally, they had to lie about who they were.

Internet Archive Promotes Woo

I have used and liked the Internet Archive since it was just the Wayback Machine. I have donated money on multiple occasions.

And now they’re promoting The Secret. Yes, the infamous peak-nonsense idea that if you just want something really badly, you get it. The literal apotheosis of blame-the-victim, The Secret implies strongly that if you die of cancer it is your own fault, because if you wanted it to go away badly enough, it would have. Your own bad attitude is responsible for anything bad that happens to you.

And the Archive invited one of its best-known promoters, Michael Beckwith, to speak at their event.

I am discouraged. I believe that I will be donating to something else this year.

Retail Unmasked

I wrote this to a particular local store. I’m not going to name-and-shame them, so this is an open letter to many retailers:

Hello,

I was in your store this morning.

Several of your staff were wearing their masks either around their necks, or not covering their noses.

This is another way to say, “Not really wearing masks.”

Or, “Not protecting your customers or each other from disease.”

I am deliberately not naming or describing them, because this is not a failure of the hourly employee. It is inevitably and inarguably the responsibility of the management to ensure that the staff follows proper health and safety practices.

If you need assistance, Suffolk County and the State of New York have many resources available to you.

I will note that at least one staffer was apparently walking in to start a shift. You may want to remind them to wear a mask whenever they are in the store, not just when they are on the clock. The same rules that apply to your customers apply to your staff. Masks protect us all, but only if we all wear them.

Let me emphasize that I’m not angry at your staff, or you. I am trying to help protect them, and you, from a potentially deadly disease.

Thank you.

Resurrections in Spain!

According to the Worldometer, 1915 people returned from the dead today (May 25, 2020). Specifically, COVID-19 victims.

I thought this would be the result of a statistical correction, maybe Spain reclassifying a bunch of deaths as being caused by something else, but their News section says nothing about that. My Spanish is very rusty, but their source also doesn’t say such a thing.

I was never that great of a programmer, but surely someone at the Worldometer could have inserted sanity checks for things like the dead rising from the grave. Is Spain threatened by a zombie apocalypse, in addition to the pandemic?

On that same page, they also show that -372 new cases appeared today, and that no one in Spain has recovered from COVID-19 since March 18.

I emailed to let them know about that last anomaly a couple of days ago. No answer so far.

I like the Worldometer’s coronavirus pages and look at them regularly. I have no idea why this slipped through and never got corrected.

Covid-19 and your business: an open letter

In the past few days, I have received emails from hotel chains, supermarkets, convenience stores, travel brands, and a storage locker company explaining how they’re protecting my health from the Covid-19 outbreak. Almost all of them are stamped from the same template:

  • We are sanitizing frequently-touched surfaces more often
  • If you have reservations, we are giving you flexibility to change them, even if we don’t usually let you cancel without penalty
  • We’re following applicable recommendations from WHO and the CDC

Only one, 7-Eleven, has mentioned a critical one: asking sick people to not come in, and saying that they’re directing any employee to stay home if feeling ill. That last is obviously key, though. Here’s the thing: they don’t mention “And we’re giving them sick pay.”

People who work in restaurants and convenience stores are often part-timers with no benefits, and in particular no paid sick days. Telling a person who needs her pay from the night shift to feed her kids, “Just stay home if you run a fever,” is like saying “Just let your family starve if you run a fever.” They won’t and they can’t.

So: how seriously do you really take this outbreak? Are you ready to pay your staff to stay home when sick? Because if not … then people will inevitably die.