Lunchtime pandemic reading.
Standard disclaimer: this is a roundup of informative pieces I've read that interest me on the severity of the crisis and how to manage it. I am not a qualified medical expert in ANY sense; at best I am reasonably well-read laity. ALWAYS prioritize advice from qualified healthcare experts over some person on Facebook.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.
You are welcome to share this.
---
WHO has issued a naming convention for all the major variants of SARS-CoV-2 so that we stop calling them by location names.
B.1.1.7: Alpha
B.1.351: Beta
P.1: Gamma
B.1.61.7.2: Delta
"The established nomenclature systems for naming and tracking SARS-CoV-2 genetic lineages by GISAID, Nextstrain and Pango are currently and will remain in use by scientists and in scientific research. To assist with public discussions of variants, WHO convened a group of scientists from the WHO Virus Evolution Working Group, the WHO COVID-19 reference laboratory network, representatives from GISAID, Nextstrain, Pango and additional experts in virological, microbial nomenclature and communication from several countries and agencies to consider easy-to-pronounce and non-stigmatising labels for VOI and VOC. At the present time, this expert group convened by WHO has recommended using labeled using letters of the Greek Alphabet, i.e., Alpha, Beta, Gamma, which will be easier and more practical to discussed by non-scientific audiences."
Source: https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants/
Commentary: This makes a lot of sense, is a heck of a lot easier to say, and removes the stigmatizing nature of using location names for diseases.
That would make SARS-CoV-2 Alpha the most prominent variant of concern right now in the USA, while Delta would be the most prominent variant of concern right now in India.
---
What's the motivation behind anti-vaccine disinformation? Billions of dollars. "1. Analysis of the online anti-vaccine movement has identified a dozen leading antivaxxers who operate businesses or organisations with significant revenues.
2. These twelve are responsible for up to 70 percent of anti-vaccine content shared to Facebook. Three of these twelve - Joseph Mercola, Del Bigtree and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. - are so influential that they account for nearly half of this content.
3. Anti-vaxxers represent an industry with annual revenues of at least $36 million, based on a limited view of their finances based on self-reported filings and publicly available revenue estimates for 22 organisations belonging to twelve of the industry’s biggest earners. This anti-vaxx industry employs at least 266 people.
4. Anti-vaxxers have received more than $1.5 million in federal loans through the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) designed to help businesses through the Covid pandemic. The largest such beneficiary was the anti-vaxx entrepreneur Joseph Mercola, whose business received $617,000 in total.
5. Some leading anti-vaxxers are earning six-figure salaries for leading roles at antivaccine non-profits, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who earns $255,000 a year as Chairman of Children’s Health Defense.
6. The anti-vaxx industry’s total social media following of 62 million could be worth up to $1.1 billion to social media platforms based on publicly available figures for the amount of revenue social media platforms make per impression or per user where that information is not available.
7. Leading anti-vaxxers are collaborating to market each other's disinformation and boost sales. Leading anti-vaxxers including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took part in a popular affiliate marketing scheme established by anti-vaxx entrepreneurs Ty and Charlene Bollinger which claims to have paid out $14 million to partners who promoted their health disinformation.
8. Anti-vaxx organisations led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Del Bigtree and Larry Cook privately admit in legal filings that they are reliant on mainstream social media platforms for reach and revenue, saying that deplatforming has curtailed their ability to spread anti-vaccine messages.
9. The same legal filings reveal that platforms do not believe that deplatforming contravenes free speech protections, with Facebook and YouTube stating that they are “private parties, not state actors. And under settled law, their content-moderation decisions are not subject to First Amendment constraints.”
10. We recommend that social media platforms take action to stop anti-vaxxers profiting from undeclared paid promotions for products, something which is against both platform standards and advertising regulations in the US and UK.
11. For-profit anti-vaxxers who repeatedly breach platform standards on dangerous misinformation should be deplatformed. The evidence shows that deplatforming cuts the audience anti-vaxxers can access, as well as their revenues.
12. Platforms must keep their promises to stop profiting from vaccine disinformation. As long as they allow vaccine disinformation on their platforms, they continue to make ad revenues from anti-vaxxers and their followers."
Source: https://www.counterhate.com/pandemicprofiteers
Commentary: Make a note of the 12 names in the report and never, ever share information from those sources:
1. Joseph Mercola
2. Andrew Wakefield
3. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
4. Del Bigtree
5. Larry Cook
6. Ty and Charlene Bollinger
7. Sherri Tenpenny
8. Mike Adams
9. Rashid Buttar
10. Barbara Loe Fisher
11. Sayer Ji
12. Kelly Brogan
---
Both mRNA vaccines likely to be approved as full licenses. "Moderna joins Pfizer in applying for Biologics License. @US_FDA will likely grant full approval to both vaccines by July. #SARSCoV2 mRNA vaccines are among the best ever. I hope it will encourage more people to get the jab & make vaccinations routine at the workplace & colleges."
Source:
Commentary: Why does this matter? The current mRNA vaccines - indeed, all COVID-19 vaccines - are operating under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). That means they have different requirements, restrictions, etc. than normal vaccines. Among other things, items operating under an EUA cannot be made compulsory by law; for example, the military cannot compel members to be vaccinated against COVID-19 because of the EUA status. Once the vaccines obtain normal licenses, service members may no longer opt-out of vaccination.
---
Visualize the problem. "Over and over, the pandemic has reinforced the reality of racial disparities in the U.S. health system. But that story remains difficult to see in the data, which is still inconsistently collected and reported across the country.
On Wednesday, a coalition of researchers and advocates launched a tool they hope will fill some of those gaps: the Health Equity Tracker, a portal that collects, analyzes, and makes visible data on some of the inequities entrenched in U.S. medicine.
“For far too long it’s been ‘no data, no problem,’” said Nelson Dunlap, chief of staff at the Satcher Health Leadership Institute at Morehouse School of Medicine, which developed the tool with funding and resources from Google.org, Gilead Sciences, Annie E. Casey Foundation, and CDC Foundation. By making data that do exist on racial health disparities accessible, the tracker aims to empower local advocates to drive change in their communities — and inspire action to fill in holes in data that are themselves reinforced by structural racism. In the tracker’s display, 38% of federally-collected Covid-19 cases report unknown race and ethnicity.
Those gaps are exemplified by the winding path the group had to take to access its Covid-19 data. At its inception, the tracker used state-reported race and ethnicity data collected by the Atlantic’s Covid Tracking Project — a foundation-funded, volunteer-driven effort that, in the absence of a strong, public-facing federal data effort, became a de facto data authority after launching in March 2020; it started tracking race and ethnicity the next month.
It wasn’t until late 2020 that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started releasing detailed Covid-19 case surveillance data to a limited pool of applicants, a county-level database that drives the Health Equity Tracker today. “We got access to it in late December, early January,” said Larry Adams, a Google.org fellow working on the project. “Which was serendipitous because Covid Tracking Project stopped publishing their data in early March.”
Today, the tracker includes the 26 million lines from that restricted CDC database, each of which represents a single Covid-19 patient — including their state and county, race and ethnicity, sex, age, whether they were hospitalized, and whether they died. It combines that information with state-level health insurance and poverty data from the American Community Survey, and details on diabetes and COPD prevalence from America’s Health Rankings.
Pairing these resources allows users to easily identify patterns across a limited number of health determinants and outcomes. Critically, the tracker’s county-level Covid-19 data makes it a cinch to visualize to what degree Covid-19 has disproportionately impacted communities of color, by comparing the share of total Covid-19 cases against a group’s share of the population."
Source: https://www.statnews.com/2021/05/26/health-equity-tracker-disparities-data-covid19/
Commentary: Tools like this will help us understand not only systemic inequities, but make it difficult for federal, state, and local officials to plead ignorance. Take a look and give the software a spin:
https://healthequitytracker.org/exploredata
---
A reminder of the simple daily habits we should all be taking.
1. Wear the best mask available to you when you'll be around other people, even after you've been vaccinated. Respirators are back in stock at online retailers, too. Wear an N95/FFP2/KN95 that's NIOSH-approved or better mask if you can obtain it. If you can't get an N95 mask, wear a surgical mask with a cloth mask over it.
2. Get vaccinated as soon as you're able to, and fulfill the full vaccine regimen. Remember that you are not vaccinated until everyone you live with is vaccinated.
3. Wash/sanitize your hands every time you are in or out of your home.
4. Stay home as much as practical. Minimize your contact with others and avoid indoor places as much as you can; indoor spaces spread the disease through aerosols and distance is less effective at mitigating your risks.
5. Get your personal finances in order now. Cut all unnecessary costs.
6. Replenish your supplies as you use them. Avoid reducing your stores to pre-pandemic levels in case an outbreak causes unexpected supply chain disruptions.
7. Ventilate your home as frequently as weather and circumstances permit, except when you share close airspaces with other residences (like a window less than a meter away from a neighboring window).
8. Masks must fit properly to work. Here's how to properly fit a mask:
---
Common misinformation debunked!
There is no basis in fact that COVID-19 vaccines can shed or otherwise harm people around you.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-covid19vaccine-reproductivepro-idUSL1N2MG256
There is no mercury or other heavy metals in the Pfizer mRNA vaccine.
Source: https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/09/1013538/what-are-the-ingredients-of-pfizers-covid-19-vaccine/
There is no basis in fact that COVID-19 vaccines pose additional risks to pregnant women.
Source: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104983
There is no genomic evidence at all that COVID-19 arrived before 2020 in the United States and therefore no hidden herd immunity:
Source:
There is no evidence SARS-CoV-2 was engineered, nor that it escaped a lab somewhere.
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/01/29/experts-debunk-fringe-theory-linking-chinas-coronavirus-weapons-research/
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0820-9
Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/anthony-fauci-no-scientific-evidence-the-coronavirus-was-made-in-a-chinese-lab-cvd/
There is no evidence a flu shot increases your COVID-19 risk.
Source: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/04/no-evidence-that-flu-shot-increases-risk-of-covid-19/
Source: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid/ciaa626/5842161
---
Disclosures and Disclaimers
To be clear, I declare no competing interests on anything I share related to COVID-19. I am employed by and am a co-owner in TrustInsights.ai, an analytics and management consulting firm. I have no clients and no business interests in anything related to COVID-19, nor do I financially benefit in any way from sharing information about COVID-19.
---
A common request I'm asked is who I follow. Here's a public Twitter list of many of the sources I read.
https://twitter.com/i/lists/1260956929205112834
This list is biased by design. It is limited to authors who predominantly post in the English language. It is heavily biased towards individual researchers and away from institutions. It is biased towards those who publish or share research, data, papers, etc. I have made an attempt to follow researchers from different countries, and also to make the list reasonably gender-balanced, because multiple, diverse perspectives on research data are essential.
This is also available as an email newsletter at https://lunchtimepandemic.substack.com if you prefer the update in your inbox.