https://www.theatlantic.com

COVID-19 isn’t just a cold

https://i.imgur.com/jKqwt6M.png

This thread is long, and hard to read - not just because of the technical language, but because “it’s just a cold,” “the vaccine protects me,” and “at least our children are safe” are comforting fairy tales.

I wish they were true.

This virus is like measles and polio: a virus with long-term impact.

Even a “mild” case in a vaccinated individual can lead to long-term issues which cause a measurable uptick in all-cause mortality in the first 6 months, and get progressively worse with time.

SARS-CoV-2 is a systemic disease which has multiple avenues to induce long-term impairment, attacking the brain, heart, lungs, blood, testes, colon, liver, and lymph nodes, causing persistent symptoms in more than half of patients by six months out.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E9cSmXIVgAAMYDK.jpg

The CoVHORT study, limited to non-hospitalized patients in Arizona - “mild” cases - found a 68% prevalence of 1 or more Covid symptom after 30 days, rising to 77% after 60 days. (We will explore an explanation later).

▻https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0254347

To prevent panic, @CDCgov has been using the term “mild” to describe any case of COVID-19 which does not require hospitalization.

#LongCOVID, however, is anything but “mild”, as the replies to @ahandvanish’s thread make heartbreakingly clear.

▻https://twitter.com/ahandvanish/status/1423017721822949376

A University of Washington study found that 30% of Covid patients had reduced Health Related Quality of Life, with 8% of the patients limited in routine daily activities.

▻https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2776560

These patients are struggling with real physical issues.

This Yale study demonstrated reduced aerobic capacity, oxygen extraction. and ventilatory efficiency in “mild” COVID patients even after recovery from their acute infection.

▻https://journal.chestnet.org/article/S0012-3692(21)03635-7/abstract

It’s also a vascular disease. A Columbia study found “significantly altered lipid metabolism” during acute disease, which “suggests a significant impact of SARS-CoV-2 infection on red blood cell structural membrane homeostasis.”

▻https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acs.jproteome.0c00606

Oregon Health & Science University found that “symptomatic or asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with increased risk of [fatal] cardiovascular outcomes and has causal effect on all-cause mortality.”

▻https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.27.21268448v1

Let’s review: SARS-CoV-2 causes an increase in mortality and reduced aerobic capacity even after asymptomatic cases, and remains in the body months after the initial infection.

No, it’s not “just a cold.”

But we’re just getting started. It gets worse. Way worse.

The virus appears to be able to cross the blood-brain barrier and cause significant neurological damage.

The ability of the spike protein to cross the blood-brain barrier was demonstrated in mice at the University of Washington.

▻https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33328624

A joint study by Stanford and Germany’s Saarland University found inflammation in the brain, and “show[ed] that peripheral T cells infiltrate the parenchyma.”

▻https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03710-0

For context, the parenchyma is the functional tissue of the brain - your neurons and glial cells. It isn’t normally where T cells are:

“In the brain of healthy individuals, T cells are only present sporadically in the parenchyma.”

▻https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6751344

The Stanford study also discovered microglia and astrocytes which displayed “features .. that have previously been reported in human neurodegenerative disease.”

Post-mortem neuropathology in Hamburg, Germany found “Infiltration by cytotoxic T lymphocytes .. in the brainstem and cerebellum, [with] meningeal cytotoxic T lymphocyte infiltration seen in 79% [of] patients.”

▻https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1474442220303082#

An autopsy of a 14-month-old at Brazil’s Federal University of Rio de Janeiro found that “The brain exhibited severe atrophy and neuronal loss.”

▻https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(21)00038-7/abstract

The UK Biobank COVID-19 re-imaging study compared before and after images of “mild” cases, and found “pronounced reduction in grey matter” and an “increase of diffusion indices, a marker of tissue damage” in specific regions of the brain.

▻https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.11.21258690v3

That seems to explain why there is evidence of persistent cognitive deficits in people who have recovered from SARS-CoV2 infection in Great Britain.

▻https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext

Also worrisome are syncytia, where an infected cell extrudes its own spike protein and takes over its neighbors, fusing together to create a large multi-nucleus cell.

Delta’s particular aptitude for this may partly explain its severity.

▻https://www.news-medical.net/news/20211006/SARS-CoV-2-emerging-variants-display-enhanced-syncytia-formation.aspx

And, yes, syncytia formation can happen in neurons. For our visual learners, here is video of syncytia and apoptosis (cell death) in a (bat) brain:

▻https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1429604323047133185

Luckily, the University of Glasgow found that “Whilst Delta is optimised for fusion at the cell surface, Omicron .. achieves entry through endosomal fusion. This switch .. offers [an] explanation for [its] reduced syncytia formation.”

▻https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_829360_smxx.pdf

If you’re interested in further understanding the host of neurological symptoms and the mechanisms underlying them, this Nature article is an excellent primer:

►https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01693-6

Let’s review: SARS-CoV-2 can cross the blood-brain barrier, and even “mild” or asymptomatic cases can cause loss of neurons and persistent cognitive defects?

That doesn’t sound “mild” to me; I like my brain.

But it keeps getting worse.

The brain isn’t the only organ affected: Testicular pathology has found evidence of “SARS-Cov-2 antigen in Leydig cells, Sertoli cells, spermatogonia, and fibroblasts” in post-morten examination.

▻https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/andr.13073

A Duke pathology study in Singapore “detected SARS-CoV-2 .. in the colon, appendix, ileum, haemorrhoid, liver, gallbladder and lymph nodes .. suggesting widespread multiorgan involvement of the viral infection.”

▻https://gut.bmj.com/content/gutjnl/early/2021/06/13/gutjnl-2021-324280.full.pdf#page1

The same study found “evidence of residual virus in .. tissues during the convalescent phase, up to 6 months after recovery, in a non-postmortem setting,” suggesting that “a negative swab result might not necessarily indicate complete viral clearance from the body.”

It also causes microclots: “Fibrin(ogen) amyloid microclots and platelet hyperactivation [were] observed in [Long COVID] patients,” in this work by Stellenbosch University of South Africa, which also explored potential treatments.

▻https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1205453/v1

Let’s review - SARS-CoV2 attacks our veins, blood, heart, brain, testes, colon, appendix, liver, gallbladder and lymph nodes?

No, it’s not “just a respiratory virus”.

Not even close.

There are also immunology implications:

Johns Hopkins’ @fitterhappierAJ found that “CD95-mediated [T cell] differentiation and death may be advancing T cells to greater effector acquisition, fewer numbers, and immune dysregulation.”

▻https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2020.600405/full

This Chinese military study of the initial Wuhan outbreak concluded that “T cell counts are reduced significantly in COVID-19 patients, and the surviving T cells appear functionally exhausted.”

▻https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2020.00827/full

The study authors went on to warn, “Non-ICU patients with total T cells counts lower than 800/μL may still require urgent intervention, even in the immediate absence of more severe symptoms due to a high risk for further deterioration in condition.”

Those warnings have since been proven by discovery of autoimmune features.

This study of 177 Los Angeles healthcare workers found that all had persistent self-attacking antibodies at least 6 months after infection, regardless of illness severity.

▻https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-021-03184-8

In the words of T-cell immunologist Dr. Leonardi (@fitterhappierAJ)

▻https://twitter.com/fitterhappierAJ/status/1475227891034210314

This Kaiser Permanente S.California study found that, although natural immunity provided substantial protection against reinfection, “Hospitalization was more common at suspected reinfection (11.4%) than initial infection (5.4%).”

▻https://www.clinicalmicrobiologyandinfection.com/article/S1198-743X(21)00422-5/abstract

In fact, remember those cytokine storms? It turns out that even that even severe COVID-19 may not be a viral pneumonia, but an autoimmune attack of the lung.

▻https://twitter.com/DaveLeeERMD/status/1413816137570205697

Let’s review - it’s autoimmune: SARS-CoV2 convinces our body to attack itself.

That might explain why the Arizona study saw more symptoms after 60 days than at 30 days.

It also means “natural immunity” isn’t something to count on.

But if you’re counting on vaccination to feel safe, there’s even more bad news.

A study of Israel healthcare workers found that “Most breakthrough cases were mild or asymptomatic, although 19% had persistent symptoms (>6 weeks).”

►https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2109072

Perhaps the most terrifying study is from Oxford University, which examined the effects of vaccination on long COVID symptoms, because not only did it find that vaccination does not protect against Long Covid, but that Long Covid symptoms become more likely over time:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIUXwFFUYAIP54R.png

In the words of the study authors, “vaccination does not appear to be protective against .. long-COVID features, arrhythmia, joint pain, type 2 diabetes, liver disease, sleep disorders, and mood and anxiety disorders."

▻https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.26.21265508v3

“The narrow confidence intervals rule out the possibility that these negative findings are merely a result of lack of statistical power. The inclusion of death in a composite endpoint with these outcomes rules out survivorship bias as an explanation.”

That finding contradicts the findings from the UK Zoe app study, which found that “the odds of having symptoms for 28 days or more after post-vaccination infection were approximately halved by having two vaccine doses.”

▻https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00460-6/fulltext

However, the structural limitations of the Zoe study - discussed in detail by @dgurdasani1 in the linked thread - may explain why it is particularly susceptible to bias against detecting a progressive degenerative condition.

▻https://twitter.com/dgurdasani1/status/1422802883632893952

Let’s review: we’ve now shown that vaccination appears to offer no protection against the long-term autoimmune effects of COVID - which we know causes T-cells to attack the lungs, and can cause T-cells to enter the brain.

Why are we letting this run wild?!

You may think, at least our children are safe.

They are not.

The CDC is tracking incidence of a life-threatening multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children following an acute COVID-19 infection, with 5,973 cases as of November 30, 2021.

▻https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#mis-national-surveillance

Children also suffer from Long Covid.

“More than half [of pediatric patients] reported at least one persisting symptom even 120 days [after] COVID-19, with 42.6% impaired by these symptoms during daily activities.”

►https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.23.21250375v1

Focusing exclusively on pediatric deaths is vastly underselling the danger to children.

Anybody telling you that SARS-CoV-2 is “just a cold” or “safe for children” is lying to you. They are ignoring the massive body of research that indicates that it is anything but.

Since our vaccines don’t stop transmission, and don’t appear to stop long-term illness, a “vaccination only” strategy is not going to be sufficient to prevent mass disability.

This isn’t something we want to expose our kids to.

Let’s review: even for children and vaccinated people, a “mild” case of COVID causes symptoms that point to long-term autoimmune issues, potentially causing our own body to attack our brains, hearts, and lungs.

Scared? Good.

Now we’re ready to get to work.

“This is the virus most Americans don’t know. We were born into a world where a virus was a thing you got over in a few weeks.” — @sgeekfemale, to whom I owe a “thank you” for her editing assistance on this thread.

The viruses they know in Kolkota, Kinshasa, and Wuhan are different: dangerous, lethal beasts.

Since 2020, the field has been leveled. Willing or no, we’ve rejoined the rest of the world. We are, all of us, vulnerable in the face of an unfamiliar threat.

The first step is acknowledging the threat.

That means acknowledging that our response has been woefully inadequate, and that is going to be uncomfortable.

The thought that we could have prevented this, but didn’t, will feel unconscionable to some.

The knowledge that we could start preventing this today, but haven’t, is unconscionable to me.

▻https://twitter.com/IanRicksecker/status/1426584062827712512

It’s time to quit pretending “it’s just a cold,” or that there is some magical law of viruses that will make it evolve to an acceptable level.

There’s no such law of evolution, just wishful thinking, easily disproven by:

Ebola. Smallpox. Marburg. Polio. Malaria.

There are things we can do to reduce our individual risk, immediately.

That starts with wearing a good mask - an N95 or better - and choosing to avoid things like indoor dining and capacity-crowd stadiums.

▻https://twitter.com/LazarusLong13/status/1440398111445188618

This isn’t a choice of “individual freedom” vs “public health”. It isn’t “authoritarian” to ask people to change their behavior in order to save lives.

▻https://www.thehastingscenter.org/individual-freedom-or-public-health-a-false-choice-in-the-covid-e

As Arnold @Schwarzenegger argued so convincingly in @TheAtlantic, it is our patriotic duty:

“Generations of Americans made incredible sacrifices, and we’re going to throw fits about putting a mask over our mouth and nose?”

▻https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/schwarzenegger-schmuck-mask-vaccines/619746

“Those who would sacrifice essential liberty for a little bit of temporary security deserve neither!”

What is the essential liberty here?

It is the liberty to be able to breathe clean air, to live our lives without infecting our families and risking disability.

To get there, we need to listen to our epidemiologists and public health experts - the ones who have been trying to tell us this since the beginning:

▻https://twitter.com/EpiEllie/status/1444088804961304581

It is time — long past time — to give up on the lazy fantasy that we can let it become “endemic” and “uncontrolled” because it inconveniences us, because it is killing our political opponents, or because the virus will magically evolve to some “mild” state.

It is time — long past time — to begin controlling this virus.

It’s possible: Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea have done it.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIUcfywVkAIejFs.jpg

It saves lives:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FIUcz_jUUAEQfph.jpg

It’s even good for the economy:

“Globally, economic contraction and growth closely mirror increases and decreases in COVID-19 cases... Public health strategies that reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission also safeguard the economy.”

▻https://bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12879-021-06357-4

It’s time.

▻https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1478611650760437765.html

sur twitter :
▻https://twitter.com/IanRicksecker/status/1478611650760437765

#long-covid #covid-19 #coronavirus #covid_long #long_covid #séquelles #post-covid

La primauté absurde de l’automobile
▻http://carfree.fr/index.php/2021/12/14/la-primaute-absurde-de-lautomobile

Compte tenu du nombre phénoménal de décès, de la #pollution galopante et des coûts exorbitants liés à l’automobile, il n’y a pas de meilleur mot pour caractériser la domination de Lire la suite...

#Destruction_de_la_planète #Fin_de_l'automobile #Insécurité_routière #Pollution_automobile #Réchauffement_climatique #climat #critique #culture #énergie #histoire #mort #santé #société #usa

Why Health-Care Workers Are Quitting in Droves, by Ed Yong - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/11/the-mass-exodus-of-americas-health-care-workers/620713

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/mGjA1_B-4juiWIeIF_-s1o042zE=/0x43:2000x1085/960x500/media/img/mt/2021/11/covid_healthcare_final/original.jpg

Health-care workers aren’t quitting because they can’t handle their jobs. They’re quitting because they can’t handle being unable to do their jobs. Even before COVID-19, many of them struggled to bridge the gap between the noble ideals of their profession and the realities of its business. The pandemic simply pushed them past the limits of that compromise.

What Will Journalists Do With France’s Trump?

By over-indexing on coverage of the far-right pundit Éric Zemmour, the media risk amplifying him.

By Yasmeen Serhan - October 27, 2021- The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/10/france-trump-eric-zemmour/620484

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/bN5G9-AbujIrc2lNQa7Pyuhg_SI=/0x53:2496x1353/960x500/media/img/mt/2021/10/EricZemmour-1/original.gif

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A television star eyes a presidential run as an outsider ready to take on the political establishment. Unlike his competitors, he doesn’t shy away from religious or racial provocation, nor does he hide his penchant for conspiracies. He is a vocal opponent of immigration, political correctness, and feminism. To his supporters, he is a familiar face who isn’t afraid to “tell it like it is.” To detractors, he’s an inflammatory populist set on dividing the country. The media’s wall-to-wall coverage makes him an inescapable presence.

This isn’t Donald Trump, though it might be France’s version of him. Éric Zemmour, a far-right pundit who has gained ground in recent polls ahead of the country’s presidential election next year, has yet to descend from his proverbial golden escalator to announce his candidacy. But the overwhelming coverage of him in the French media, as well as his increasing presence in the international press, suggests that it’s only a matter of time before he does.

That Zemmour has managed to attract outsize attention relative to the rest of France’s presidential hopefuls is a testament to his ability to remain provocative—a skill that he has honed over the course of his career. Like Trump, he has vexed his way onto front pages and prime-time news broadcasts simply by being the most outrageous voice in the room. The goal, it would appear, is to drum up enough momentum to bolster his anticipated candidacy. And so far, the French press has proved happy to oblige.

The media have been here before. Although the American media did not create Trump (like Zemmour, he was a household name long before he was ever a candidate), they did grant him a disproportionate level of coverage, bestowing upon him more attention and legitimacy than they’ve given any of his competitors. With six months left until election day (still a long way away, by French standards), France’s contest has scarcely begun. Yet by over-indexing on a single candidate—or, in Zemmour’s case, a potential candidate—French journalists look doomed to repeat the mistakes of their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic. (...)

Au nom du père - YouTube
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zZRFJ1oXHA

Sur la transmission du nom de famille

#inertie #patronyme

L’article du philosophe William MacAskill évoqué dans la vidéo : ▻https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/03/men-should-consider-changing-their-last-names-when-they-get-married/273718

Un article de la sociologue Virginie Descoutures sur le nom des femmes et sa transmission : ▻https://www.cairn.info/journal-mouvements-2015-2-page-43.htm

Les statistiques de noms donnés aux enfants en France pour 2014 : ▻https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/1379722

Et la même chose pour 2017 : ▻https://www.ined.fr/fr/tout-savoir-population/memos-demo/focus/double-noms

Par curiosité, j’ai cherché des données sur la transmission du nom du père au Royaume-Uni et je n’ai pas réussi à en trouver. Si vous en trouvez (ou si vous trouvez pour d’autres pays ou pour d’autres années en France, ce sera toujours intéressant), envoyez-moi le lien et j’ajouterai ça ici.

Sommaire

0:00 - Intro. Un point aveugle moral
2:59 - Une norme hégémonique
4:27 - Que dit la loi ? Égalité formelle et non réelle
6:58 - Le poids du statu quo
9:05 - Quelle norme alternative ?
11:05 - Le cas du Royaume-Uni et de Will MacAskill
12:53 - La norme actuelle satisfait-elle le principe de tort ?
14:49 - Conclusion. Quel avenir ?

Ah et n’oublions pas la vidéo drôlatique sur les noms dans les RPG : ▻https://youtu.be/gzBZFArR4mc

WE’RE ALREADY BARRELING TOWARD THE NEXT PANDEMIC - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/america-prepared-next-pandemic/620238

America’s frustrating inability to learn from the recent past shouldn’t be surprising to anyone familiar with the history of public health.

Inability ou unwillingness?

During the pandemic, many of the public-health experts who appeared in news reports hailed from wealthy coastal universities, creating a perception of the field as well funded and elite. That perception is false. In the early 1930s, the U.S. was spending just 3.3 cents of every medical dollar on public health, and much of the rest on hospitals, medicines, and private health care. And despite a 90-year span that saw the creation of the CDC, the rise and fall of polio, the emergence of HIV, and relentless calls for more funding, that figure recently stood at … 2.5 cents. Every attempt to boost it eventually receded, and every investment saw an equal and opposite disinvestment. A preparedness fund that was created in 2002 has lost half its budget, accounting for inflation.

#santé_publique #états-unis

Waning Immunity Is Not a Crisis, Right Now - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/waning-immunity-not-crisis-right-now/619965

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/9BwGS6KpDmIC4opKxH7Ls9v-Pm8=/24x0:1860x956/960x500/media/img/mt/2021/09/Atlantic_immun_v1/original.jpg

Doser les #anticorps chez les vaccinés (ou anciens infectés) en dehors d’une période de contact avec le virus donne un faux aperçu du statut immunitaire :

Checking someone’s #SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels when there’s no virus around can be a bit deceptive, […]. In the absence of a threat, immune cells are quiescent. But the capacity for protection remains intact: When new invaders arrive, they’ll reawaken our defenses. That’s why post-vaccine infections, when they do happen, tend to be milder, shorter, and less likely to spread to other people. When the new threat resolves, levels of antibodies and active immune cells decrease again. “You could call that ‘waning,’” Pepper, of the University of Washington, told me. “But that’s just how it works.”

Mais il arrive un moment où l’immunité finit quand même par disparaître :

Immune memories don’t last forever. Eventually, even the grizzled B and T cells in the body’s reserves might permanently retire. That’s when protection against disease and death could start to take a tumble, and when experts start to get worried.

Pour certains experts il faudrait multiplier les rappels de #vaccins pour empêcher cet épuisement :

Some officials, including CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, have suggested that upticks in post-vaccine coronavirus infections are a sign of what’s to come, and that giving people extra shots could be a way to jog the immune system’s memory before it fades away.

The same rationale applies to many multi-dose vaccines: The first shot introduces the body to the notion of a threat; the ones that follow clinch the concept that the danger is real and worth taking seriously. A triple-jab regimen is already built into several well-established vaccines, including the ones that block HPV and hepatitis B; others require four or five inoculations before they take.

Mais, pour la plupart des experts et pour différentes raisons, cela semble incertain sinon douteux pour le sars-cov2 :

But according to most of the experts I spoke with for this story, the immunological argument for a COVID-19 booster this early is shaky at best.

To start with, the recent numbers on vaccine effectiveness aren’t really that alarming. Vaccinated people are indeed getting infected with SARS-CoV-2 more frequently than they were a few months ago. But these breakthroughs remain fairly uncommon. Recent reports from the CDC show that the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were blocking infection at rates of up to about 90 percent in the spring, when the vaccines had barely begun their rollout en masse; now those stats are hovering around the 60s and 70s, still a remarkable feat. (That doesn’t mean that 30 to 40 percent of vaccinated people are getting infected; rather, immunized people are 60 to 70 percent less likely than unimmunized people to be infected if they’re exposed.) Numbers from other studies look to be in a similar ballpark. And these stats might even undersell the vaccines’ benefits: Many “infections” are found simply through the detection of viral genetic material—with no guarantee that this material is active, infectious, or anything more than the carnage left behind from a victorious immune attack.

The outlook is even better when you consider symptomatic cases of post-vaccine COVID-19. Early reports, including Moderna’s and Pfizer’s original study estimates, put the vaccines’ efficacy against symptomatic illness in the range of 90 to 95 percent. More recent studies now document rates in the 80s, even when facing off against Delta—a variant for which the vaccines weren’t originally formulated.

Certaines constatations en faveur d’une multiplication des rappels seraient biaisées :

Some reports from Israel appear to paint a more dire portrait: A few preliminary numbers released by the country’s Ministry of Health suggested that vaccine effectiveness against both infection and symptomatic disease had dipped to about 40 percent. But Çevik, of the University of St. Andrews, told me that these and other data reporting heftier declines are messy and might actually overestimate the problem. Across countries, early vaccine recipients tended to be older, in slightly worse health, and in higher-risk professions than those who got injected later on. That alone could make the protection that they got seem less impressive in comparison. Also, when initial effectiveness numbers were calculated, people were adhering more to physical distancing and masks. Measured these days, amid more lax behavior, risk of infection would rise. And as more of the unvaccinated have been infected, their collective immunity has grown, making them, too, less susceptible to the virus—which could make the effectiveness of vaccines look lower.

Il faut distinguer #protection contre l’infection de protection contre l’hospitalisation et la mort ;

“The point isn’t to protect you from getting even a tiny amount of virus in your body,” she said. We’re not out to eradicate positive test results: “That’s not what vaccines do.”

Si l’utilité de la multiplication des rappels est incontestable dans certains cas… :

As for boosters, the pros and cons will vary by context. For people who never responded well to their first vaccines, including people who are moderately or severely immunocompromised, additional shots will be very important, Omer said. Their third jabs don’t provide an extraneous “boost” so much as they help complete the original inoculation schedule.

… cette utilité est incertaine dans les autres cas :

For the rest of us, though, the perks are harder to visualize. In someone with a fully functional immune system whose defenses were already substantially shored up by their first shots, more doses would probably increase antibody production. That, in turn, could further cut down on infection and transmission, Gommerman told me. Very early data hint that this may be happening in Israel, which is already boosting widely. But it’s not clear how long that preventive bump would last . Ellebedy, of Washington University in St. Louis, said boosters would have “real gain” only if they expanded on the body’s capacity to manufacture antibodies long term, instead of just fueling a temporary boom-and-bust . It’s especially unclear whether that would happen with yet another injection of the original vaccine recipe, delivered to the arm—as opposed to, say, a nasal spray with Delta-specific ingredients.

En conclusion, en l’état actuel de la pandémie et des connaissances, la multiplication non sélective des rappels se ramène à verser de l’eau dans un verre déjà bien rempli… :

Right now, some forms of vaccine effectiveness are slipping, but the most important ones aren’t. Unless that changes, widespread boosters in already vaccinated countries are likely to provide diminishing returns, like topping off a drink that’s already on the verge of spilling over.

… et pire encore à favoriser l’émergence de nouveaux variants en privant les pays pauvres de lots de vaccins :

In the meantime, billions around the globe have yet to take a sip at all.

#immunité

PatriotTakes and the Future of #Resistance Twitter - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/patriottakes-and-future-resistance-twitter/619645

Where PatriotTakes is, in fact, documenting American extremism (instead of just ridiculing easy targets), it does so with a lack of context that undermines the account’s stated mission. There’s little that other researchers or journalists can do with content that’s been presented without metadata, links, or thorough attribution.
(...) “It’s incredibly performative,” says Brandy Zadrozny, a senior reporter at NBC News who covers online platforms and politics. “I’m going into the lion’s den and bringing you the danger of the far right. That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t shine a light on anything. It just takes videos from one place and puts them in another.”

One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/the-uyghur-chronicles

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/files/bw_portrait_u.jpg

If you took an Uber in Washington, D.C., a couple of years ago, there was a chance your driver was one of the greatest living Uyghur poets. Tahir Hamut Izgil arrived with his family in the United States in 2017, fleeing the Chinese government’s merciless persecution of his people. Tahir’s escape not only spared him near-certain internment in the camps that have swallowed more than 1 million Uyghurs; it also allowed him to share with the world his experience of the calamity engulfing his homeland. The following articles are Tahir’s firsthand account of one of the world’s most urgent humanitarian crises, and of one family’s survival.

Before I met Tahir, I knew his poems. I encountered them soon after I began working as a translator in Xinjiang, the Uyghur region in western China. A close friend there kept telling me that if I really wanted to understand Uyghur culture, I had to read the poetry. Like many Americans, I rarely felt drawn to poetry, but one day, another friend put a sheaf of Tahir’s verses in my hand. Poetry had never affected me so deeply.

Vaccination Is Making America Forget a Basic Pandemic Rule - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/06/individualism-still-spoiling-pandemic-response/619133

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Unvaccinated people are not randomly distributed. They tend to cluster together, socially and geographically, enabling the emergence of localized COVID-19 outbreaks. Partly, these clusters exist because vaccine skepticism grows within cultural and political divides, and spreads through social networks. But they also exist because decades of systemic racism have pushed communities of color into poor neighborhoods and low-paying jobs, making it harder for them to access health care in general, and now vaccines in particular.

As Eleanor Murray, an epidemiologist at Boston University, said on Twitter, “Don’t tell me it’s “safe”; tell me what level of death or disability you are implicitly choosing to accept.” (...) How much additive burden is a country willing to foist upon people who already carry their disproportionate share? What is America’s goal—to end the pandemic, or to suppress it to a level where it mostly plagues communities that privileged individuals can ignore?

Bike Share Oversupply in China : Huge Piles of Abandoned and Broken Bicycles - The Atlantic

▻https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2018/03/bike-share-oversupply-in-china-huge-piles-of-abandoned-and-broken-bicycles/556268

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Article de mars 2018

Last year, bike sharing took off in China, with dozens of bike-share companies quickly flooding city streets with millions of brightly colored rental bicycles. However, the rapid growth vastly outpaced immediate demand and overwhelmed Chinese cities, where infrastructure and regulations were not prepared to handle a sudden flood of millions of shared bicycles. Riders would park bikes anywhere, or just abandon them, resulting in bicycles piling up and blocking already-crowded streets and pathways.

En partant d’un thread Twitter sur la place du vélo (▻https://twitter.com/StrategicCities/status/1388609162829910017) qui montrait une photo de la gare d’Eindhoven , une personne a remis ce lien des photos de piles de vélos partagés abîmés en Chine.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E0VUq5RUcAEiJ7Q.jpg

Un autre article en parlait là ▻https://seenthis.net/messages/650852.

J’avais oublié ces photos assez impressionnantes, dans la démesure de l’industrie chinoise.

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/GTpAe9jFB-9UfDoiagd2_00nZYU=/1500x1000/media/img/photo/2018/03/bikes/b06_RTS10XJ1/original.jpg https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/GFBgHKGNdgVXkHWJ6flR66B92ms=/1500x853/media/img/photo/2018/03/bikes/b09_1035978916/original.jpg https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/ZiDJTgs-MvpLIVHHkFQGd_qB1YU=/1500x1001/media/img/photo/2018/03/bikes/b17_834180342/original.jpg

#vélo #vélo_partage #chine #photographie #bicycle_graveyard

Facebook Should Dial Down the Toxicity Much More Often - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/facebook-should-dial-down-toxicity-much-more-often/618653

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The strategy works! Facebook has recently touted reductions in the amount of hate speech and graphic content that users see on its platform. How did it make these improvements? Not by changing its rules on hate speech. Not by hiring more human content moderators. Not by refining artificial-intelligence tools that seek out rule-breaking content to take down. The progress was “mainly due to changes we made to reduce problematic content in News Feed.” The company used dials, not on-off switches.

The Chauvin trial may be a unique event, but racial tension and violence are clearly not. Content on social media leading to offline harm is not confined to Minneapolis or the U.S.; it is a global problem. Toxic online content is not an aberration, but a permanent feature of the internet. Platforms shouldn’t wait until the house is burning down to do something about it.

National Parks Should Belong to Native Americans - The Atlantic
Story by David Treuer
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/return-the-national-parks-to-the-tribes/618395

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/2jq4ZI92sdMIUDEz2PpPwmWhEQA=/0x357:1998x1398/960x500/media/img/2021/04/WEL_Treuer_NationalParks_OPENER-1/original.jpg

Pas encore lu ce #récit mais lu deux romans de l’auteur dont le père est un européen immigré aux usa et la mère amérindienne

Return the National Parks to the Tribes

The jewels of America’s landscape should belong to America’s original peoples.

Academic freedom is in crisis ; free speech is not

In August 2020, the UK think tank The Policy Exchange produced a report on Academic Freedom in the UK (▻https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/academic-freedom-in-the-uk-2), alleging a chilling effect for staff and students expressing conservative opinions, particularly pro-Brexit or ‘gender critical’ ideas. This is an issue that was examined by a 2018 parliamentary committee on Human Rights which found a lack of evidence for serious infringements of free speech (▻https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201719/jtselect/jtrights/1279/127904.htm). In a university context, freedom of speech is protected under the Human Rights Act 1998 as long as the speech is lawful and does not contravene other university regulations on issues like harassment, bullying or inclusion. Some of these controversies have been firmly rebutted by Chris Parr (▻https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/free-speech-crisis-uk-universities-chris-parr) and others who describe how the incidents have been over-hyped.

Despite this, the government seems keen to appoint a free speech champion for universities (▻https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/feb/15/tories-war-on-the-woke-ministers-statues-protests) which continues a campaign started by #Sam_Gyimah (▻https://academicirregularities.wordpress.com/2018/07/06/sams-on-campus-but-is-the-campus-onto-sam) when he was minister for universities in 2018, and has been interpreted by some commentators as a ‘war on woke’. In the current climate of threats to university autonomy, many vice chancellors wonder whether this might be followed by heavy fines or reduced funding for those institutions deemed to fall on the wrong side of the culture wars.

While public concern has been directed to an imagined crisis of free speech, there are more significant questions to answer on the separate but related issue of academic freedom. Most university statutes echo legislation and guarantee academics ‘freedom within the law to question and test received wisdom, and to put forward new ideas and controversial and unpopular opinions, without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions.’ [Section 202 of the Education Reform Act 1988]. In reality, these freedoms are surrendered to the greater claims of academic capitalism, government policy, legislation, managers’ responses to the pandemic and more dirigiste approaches to academics’ work.

Nevertheless, this government is ploughing ahead with policies designed to protect the freedom of speech that is already protected, while doing little to hold university managers to account for their very demonstrable violations of academic freedom. The government is suspicious of courses which declare a sympathy with social justice or which manifest a ‘progressive’ approach. This hostility also extends to critical race theory and black studies. Indeed, the New York Times has identified a right wing ‘Campaign to Cancel Wokeness’ (►https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/26/opinion/speech-racism-academia.html) on both sides of the Atlantic, citing a speech by the UK Equalities Minister, Kemi Badenoch, in which she said, “We do not want teachers to teach their white pupils about white privilege and inherited racial guilt…Any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”

This has now set a tone for ideological oversight which some university leaders seem keen to embrace. Universities will always wish to review their offerings to ensure they reflect academic currency and student choice. However, operating under the cover of emergency pandemic planning, some are now seeking to dismantle what they see as politically troublesome subject areas.

Let’s start with the most egregious and transparent attack on academic freedom. The University of Leicester Business School, known primarily for its disdain of management orthodoxy, has announced it will no longer support research in critical management studies (▻https://www.uculeicester.org.uk/redundancy-briefing) and political economy, and the university has put all researchers who identify with this field, or who at some time might have published in CMS, at risk of redundancy. Among the numerous responses circulating on Twitter, nearly all point to the fact that the critical orientation made Leicester Business School distinctive and attractive to scholars wishing to study and teach there. Among those threatened with redundancy is the distinguished former dean, Professor Gibson Burrell. The sheer volume of protest at this anomaly must be an embarrassment to Leicester management. We should remember that academic freedom means that, as a scholar of proven expertise, you have the freedom to teach and research according to your own judgement. When those in a field critical of structures of power have their academic freedom removed, this is, unarguably, a breach of that expectation. Such a violation should be of concern to the new freedom of speech champion and to the regulator, the Office for Students.

If the devastation in the School of Business were not enough humiliation for Leicester, in the department of English, there are plans to cancel scholarship and teaching in Medieval and Early Modern literature. The thoughtless stripping out of key areas that give context and coherence within a subject is not unique to Leicester – similar moves have taken place in English at University of Portsmouth. At Leicester, management have offered the justification that this realignment will allow them to put resources towards the study of gender and sexuality. After all, the Vice Chancellor, Nishan Canagarajah, offered the keynote speech at the Advance HE conference in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion on 19th March (▻https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/programmes-events/conferences/EDIConf20#Keynotes) and has signalled that he supports decolonising the curriculum. This might have had more credibility if he was not equally committed to extinguishing critical scholarship in the Business School. The two positions are incompatible and reveal an opportunistic attempt to reduce costs and remove signs of critical scholarship which might attract government disapproval.

At the University of Birmingham, the response to the difficulties of maintaining teaching during the pandemic has been to issue a ruling that three academic staff must be able to teach each module. The explanation for this apparent reversal of the ‘lean’ principle of staffing efficiency, is to make modules more resilient in the face of challenges like the pandemic – or perhaps strike action. There is a consequence for academic freedom though – only the most familiar, established courses can be taught. Courses that might have been offered, which arise from the current research of the academic staff, will have to be cancelled if the material is not already familiar to other colleagues in the department. It is a way of designing innovation and advancement out of courses at the University of Birmingham.

Still at Birmingham, UCU is contesting a proposal for a new ‘career framework’ (▻https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/strike-warning-over-birminghams-or-out-probation-plan) by management characterised as ‘up or out’. It will require newly appointed lecturers to achieve promotion to senior lecturer within five years or face the sort of performance management procedures that could lead to termination of their appointment. The junior academics who enter on these conditions are unlikely to gamble their careers on academic risk-taking or pursue a challenge to an established paradigm. We can only speculate how this apprenticeship in organisational obedience might restrain the pursuit of discovery, let alone achieve the management’s stated aim to “develop and maintain an academic culture of intellectual stimulation and high achievement”.

Meanwhile at the University of Liverpool, Vice Chancellor Janet Beer is attempting to apply research metrics and measures of research income over a five-year period to select academics for redundancy in the Faculty of Life Sciences. Staff have been threatened with sacking and replacement by those felt to hold more promise. It will be an unwise scholar who chooses a niche field of research which will not elicit prime citations. Astoundingly, university mangers claim that their criteria are not in breach of their status as a signatory to the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Assessment (▻https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2021/03/08/project-shape-update). That is correct insofar as selection for redundancy by grant income is clearly such dishonorable practice as to have been placed beyond contemplation by the international board of DORA.

It seems we are reaching a pivotal moment for academic freedom for higher education systems across the world. In #Arkansas and some other states in the #USA, there are efforts to prohibit the teaching of social justice (►https://www.chronicle.com/article/no-social-justice-in-the-classroom-new-state-scrutiny-of-speech-at-public).

In #France, the education minister has blamed American critical race theory (▻https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/11/france-about-become-less-free/617195) for undermining France’s self-professed race-blindness and for causing the rise of “islamo-gauchisme”, a term which has been cynically deployed to blunt any critique of structural racism.

In Greece, universities are now bound by law to ensure policing and surveillance of university campuses (►https://www.crimetalk.org.uk/index.php/library/section-list/1012-exiting-democracy-entering-authoritarianism) by ‘squads for the protection of universities’ in order to suppress dissent with the Orwellian announcement that the creation of these squads and the extensive surveillance of public Universities are “a means of closing the door to violence and opening the way to freedom” and an assertion that “it is not the police who enter universities, but democracy”.

Conclusion

It occurs to me that those public figures who feel deprived of a platform to express controversial views may well be outnumbered by the scholars whose universities allow their work to be suppressed by targeted intellectual purges, academic totalitarianism and metric surveillance. It is telling that assaults on academic freedom in the UK have not attracted comment or action from the organisations which might be well placed to defend this defining and essential principle of universities. I hereby call on Universities UK, the Office for Students and the freedom of speech champion to insist on an independent audit of academic freedom and autonomy for each higher education institution.

We now know where intervention into the rights of academics to teach and research autonomously may lead. We also know that many of the candidates targeted for redundancy are UCU trade union officials; this has happened at University of East London and the University of Hull. Make no mistake, this is a PATCO moment (▻https://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/05/reagan-fires-11-000-striking-air-traffic-controllers-aug-5-1981-241252) for higher education in the UK as management teams try to break union support and solidarity in order to exact greater control in the future.

Universities are the canary down the mine in an era of right-wing authoritarianism. We must ensure that they can maintain their unique responsibility to protect against the rise of populism and the dismantling of democracy. We must be assertive in protecting the rights of academics whose lawful and reasoned opinions are increasingly subject to some very sinister threats. Academic freedom needs to be fought for, just like the right to protest and the right to roam. That leaves a heavy responsibility for academics if the abolition of autonomy and academic freedom is not to be complete.

▻http://cdbu.org.uk/academic-freedom-is-in-crisis-free-speech-is-not
#liberté_académique #liberté_d'expression #UK #Angleterre #université #facs #justice_sociale #black_studies #races #race #approches_critiques #études_critiques #privilège_blanc #économie_politique #Leicester_Business_School #pandémie #crise_sanitaire #Birmingham #Liverpool #Janet_Beer #concurrence #Grèce #Etats-Unis #métrique #attaques #éducation_supérieure #populisme #démocratie #autonomie #canari_dans_la_mine

ping @isskein @cede

’Remember the Internet’: An Encyclopedia of Online Life - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/03/remember-the-internet/618350

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At the same time, the internet is constantly disappearing. It’s a world of broken links and missing files—often because the people in charge cast things off on a whim. In 2019, MySpace lost 50 million music files and apologized for “the inconvenience.” Around the same time, Flickr started deleting photos at random.

Even if every single website and every single online post were preserved somewhere for posterity, the feeling of the internet would still be missing—the petty arguments, the 3 a.m. rushes of inspiration, the thrills and heartbreaks and blue-light nausea. So how can we remember that?

Jeanne Thornton and Miracle Jones—friends and the publishers of the small press Instar Books—have come up with one surprisingly analog answer. Called, appropriately, Remember the Internet, it’s a series of pocket-size books about recent internet history. Each one tells the story of a hyper-specific online subculture from the point of view of a writer who was personally invested at the time.

Three Ways the Pandemic Has Made the World Better - The Atlantic
▻https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/03/three-ways-pandemic-has-bettered-world/618320

https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/9tzesmXxAWRKgJCKM7c1FWNxaYo=/0x56:2995x1616/960x500/https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/img/mt/2021/03/COVID_Sequence_02/original.jpg

par Zeynep Tufekci

This has been a year of terrible loss. People have lost loved ones to the pandemic. Many have gotten sick, and some are still suffering. Children have lost a year of school. Millions have lost a steady paycheck. Some have lost small businesses that they’d built for decades. Almost all of us have lost hugs and visits and travel and the joy of gathering together at a favorite restaurant and more.

And yet, this year has also taught us much. Strange as it may sound, the coronavirus pandemic has delivered blessings, and it does not diminish our ongoing suffering to acknowledge them. In fact, recognizing them increases the chance that our society may emerge from this ordeal more capable, more agile, and more prepared for the future.

Here are three ways the world has changed for the better during this awful year.

1. We Now Know How to Code for Our Vaccines
Perhaps the development that will have the most profound implications for future generations is the incredible advances in synthetic messenger RNA (mRNA) biotechnologies.

But amid all this came historic developments. The new mRNA technology, on which several vaccines—notably Pfizer-BioNTech’s and Moderna’s—are based, is an epochal scientific and technical breakthrough. We are now coding for vaccines, and thanks to advances in science and industrial production, we can mass-produce them and figure out how to deliver them into our cells in a matter of months.

This is all new. Neither Moderna nor BioNTech had a single approved product on the market before 2020. Each company essentially designed its vaccine on a computer over a weekend in January 2020—BioNTech’s took just a few hours, really. Both companies had vaccine candidates designed at least four weeks before the first confirmed U.S. COVID-19 fatality was announced, and Moderna was producing vaccine batches to be used for its trials more than a month before the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. In 2021, the companies together aim to produce billions of stunningly efficacious vaccine doses,

The mRNA vaccines work differently. For these, scientists look at the genetic sequence of a virus, identify a crucial part—such as the spike protein, which it uses as a key to bind onto cells’ receptors in order to unlock and enter them—produce instructions to make just that part, and then send those instructions into our cells. After all, that’s what a virus does: It takes over our cells’ machinery to make more of itself. Except in this case, we instruct our cells to make only the spike portion to give our immune system practice with something that cannot infect us—the rest of the virus isn’t there!

Until this year, that was the dream behind the synthetic mRNA technologies: a dream with few, scattered adherents, uphill battles, and nothing to show for it but promise. This year, it became a reality.

In 2020, we figured out how to make messenger RNA with precision, by programming the exact code we wanted, producing it at scale (a printing press for messenger RNA!), and figuring out a way to inject it into people so the fragile mRNA makes it into our cells. The first step was pure programming: Uğur Şahin, the CEO of BioNTech, sat at his computer and entered the genetic code of the spike protein of the mysterious virus that had emerged in Wuhan. Moderna employees had done the same thing the weekend after the genomic sequence was released on January 10. The Moderna vaccine candidate was called mRNA-1273 because it encoded all of the 1,273 amino acids in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein—the code was so small that it could all be represented with little less than half the number of characters that fit on a single-spaced page.

The rest of the process relied on key scientific and industrial innovations that are quite recent. Messenger RNA are fragile—they disintegrate easily, as they are supposed to. The lipid nanoparticles we envelop them in to use as delivery systems were approved only in 2018. Plus, the viral spike protein is a notorious shape-shifter. It takes one form before it fuses with our cells and another one afterward. The latter, postfusion form did not work well at all for developing vaccines, and scientists only recently figured out how to stabilize a virus’ spike in its prefusion form.

This may allow us, finally, to transition from a broadcast-only model of medicine, wherein drugs are meant to be identical for everyone in a particular group, to targeted, individualized therapies. Plus, these technologies are suitable for small-scale but cheap-enough production: a development that can help us treat rare diseases that afflict only a few thousand people each year, and are thus usually ignored by mass-market-oriented medical technologies.

It’s also no coincidence that these two mRNA vaccines were the fastest to market. They can be manufactured rapidly and, crucially, updated blazingly fast. Şahin, the BioNTech CEO, estimates that six weeks is enough time for the company to start producing new boosters for whenever a new COVID-19 variant emerges. Pfizer and Moderna are both already working on boosters that better target the new variants we’ve seen so far, and the FDA has said it can approve these tweaks quickly.
2. We Actually Learned How to Use Our Digital Infrastructure
The internet, widespread digital connectivity, our many apps—it’s easy to forget how new most of this is. Zoom, the ubiquitous video service that became synonymous with pandemic work, and that so many of us are understandably a little sick of, is less than 10 years old. Same with the kind of broadband access that allowed billions to stream entertainment at home and keep in touch with family members and colleagues. Internet connectivity is far from perfect or equally distributed, but it has gotten faster and more expansive over the past decade; without it, the pandemic would have been much more miserable and costly.

Technology also showed how we could make our society function better in normal times.