As reminders…

Alpha–Variant first identified in the UK

Beta–Variant first identified in South Africa

Gamma–Variant first identified in Brazil

Delta–Variant first identified in India

Omicron–Variant first identified in South Africa

Updating the chart above:

Ancestral: B.1.1.529 Omicron (and cousins)

Transmissibility: All the +

Immune Evasiveness: All the +

Vaccine Effectiveness: Check (for hospitalization)

Also as a reminder:

Grand Canyon Viral Illness

–Only update here is after we went to press last week, health officials in Arizona announced that several of the GI cases in question have tested positive for norovirus. As a quick recap, norovirus is a little more famous for cruise ship outbreaks, and can be a spectacular case of diarrhea, nausea and vomiting. Care is supportive, with symptoms appearing 12-24 hours after exposure (either directly to an infected person, or more commonly a contaminated surface), and resolving in 1-3 days. Hand washing, hand washing, and hand washing is the best way to prevent it. Also, again if in the Grand Canyon in the next couple months while this is active there, most water filters are not going to cut it. Stick to bottled or city water if camping. If you must drink from streams/rivers there, boil or make sure your chemical inactivation is good for norovirus.

Monkeypox

–The US is planning on releasing hundreds of thousands of doses of monkeypox vaccines to be available for what I am assuming is ring vaccination strategies of known contacts in states with identified cases. Currently, those number only in the few hundreds. There remains little pandemic threat from monkeypox, despite this version having more mutations than expected. On the other hand, I am not sure how much excitement monkeypox had been generating recently to have tracked its evolutionary history, so take rumors of its heightened mutation rate with some sizeable grains of salt. There is a global monkeypox data tracker here. I have not found a good estimate of its Rt, but it is presumably quite low. Monkeypox does not transmit person to person like coronavirus, and previous outbreaks have fizzled within just a few generations. The US curve remains pretty linear, not exponential as an expanding epidemic would be, and may even be flattening. Caveats that there may be more active cases than testing have caught applies. The most surprising part of the data is the gender skew–98% of cases globally are in men, mostly 30-50 years old, and heavily enriched for bisexual and homosexual preferences. Much like HIV though, don’t expect it to stay in that demographic. Most of the current human to human transmission remains linked to sexual transmission, so stay safe out there folks. Just remember that the skin lesions can be anywhere in monkeypox, so condoms alone will not cut it. Monogamy and abstinence are the best options; vigilance for skin lesions and maybe not banging the person with them right then is a distant second.

Coronavirus

–In the US, new cases remain largely flat, as BA.4 and BA.5 waves continue (Omicron cousins). Hospitalizations are trending up slightly, but still well below and later than previous waves. Some of the early metrics are showing pops, but nothing too dramatic. I would expect us to continue in this wave of “someone you know who traveled recently popped positive this week and has a nasty cold for it” from the last month or two now. We should crest mid to late July. Elsewhere you have upticks in Europe, Mexico and Brazil, likely as these variants make their way through populations and vacationers there too. More optimistically, South Africa numbers continue to fall. There has been no follow on winter wave from BA.4/BA.5 that started earlier in their Fall season. So fingers crossed there is a similar reprieve this winter season once BA.4 and BA.5 have burned out in the northern hemisphere as well.

–To quickly recap, last week the FDA approved both Moderna and Pfizer vaccines for children between the ages of 6 months and 5 years old. As we mentioned at the time, despite enrolling nearly 7,000 patients between the two studies, there were not enough hospitalizations in either arm, in either study, to evaluate clinical efficacy of the vaccines. You can count the total number of hospitalizations on your two hands. The approval was thus based on increases in antibody titers, only measured in a subset of patients, that “looked similar” to increases in antibody titers in older children and adults. Despite frequent arguments that antibody titers are insufficient prediction of immunity, and thus boosters should be given without regard to antibody titers, the FDA’s conclusion was that this increase in antibody titers was sufficient to demonstrate vaccine efficacy, and has approved them for use in these children. There were no deaths in either study. Side effects were minimal, but similar to previous studies, they did not enroll enough patients to detect myocarditis with statistical significance (since this is a rare, but significant known risk), and this will be followed in post-market surveillance. Which is read as “we will watch for reports of this like a hawk as more people actually use the vaccine in the real world.” The vaccine did little to stop symptomatic, although non-hospitalizing, breakthrough infection with omicron, which is the wave during which most patients were enrolled, similar to breakthrough infection rates in vaccinated older children and adults. Importantly, the studies also suggested that protection against symptomatic, breakthrough infection waned in about 4-6 weeks–again, similar to results in older children.

What is the main takeaway of that approval?

Clearly, unless the vaccine was actively killing kids, this was going to get approved no matter what. There is no other explanation for approving a vaccine that did not have enough clincially significant events (severe, hospitalizing COVID) to even evaluate efficacy in preventing it. While I concede that an increase an antibody titer is evidence that the vaccine is producing an immune response, and one I will argue is consistent with protection against severe disease (and why it should be evaluated more seriously to determine who needs a booster and when), that was NOT the primary objective of the study, and the proof of the pudding is a reduction in hospitalization rates with the vaccine. That they could not get enough hospitalizations in 7,000 kids in two concurrent studies only underscores the minimal risk SARS-CoV-2 infection poses to immunocompetent , without other serious risk factors, in this age group. Since the clinical benefit literally could not be evaluated, it makes risk:benefit calculation for this vaccine, for this age group, impossible to judge.

It’s all feelingsball, and what you really got was a GIANT safety study here, since clinical efficacy could NOT be evaluated by these studies.

Why the recap? Because this week saw some truly jaw dropping attempts to explain the deficiency in the clinical data away, and encourage vaccine adoption for this age group.

For example, the update about monkeypox for Indiana healthcare providers from the state department of health also included a discussion of the FDA approval of the vaccines for 6 month to 4 year old children. This was a deeper dive into the rationale behind the approval, and deserve discussion, because I suspect that it is similar to slide decks and talking points in the other states around this vaccine approval, and also reflects “talking point” comments in interviews to mainstream news reporters in their articles. I have saved some screenshots for posterity (and to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me when reading this), but am not sure if/how to distribute, so I will be describing what is on them instead.

So a big part of the rationale is the idea that COVID has been a “top 5” cause of death for children in this age group. Accidents are still far and away number 1 (~20 fold higher than the number they cite for COVID), and deaths due to cancer are twice as common as the number they have for COVID. They also specifically cite “600 deaths” in this age group in multiple slides. I am not certain where they are getting “600 deaths”, because the CDC has only 442 provisional COVID deaths for ages 0-4 nationwide over the entire pandemic (dataset from CDC is here; accessed 29 Jun 2022). Further, as far as I am aware, those 442 provisional deaths due to COVID are overwhelmingly in children 0-4 with serious underlying risk factor diseases, like severe congenital immunodeficiencies. I also clarify “provisional” because the CDC already had to go through and clean up the data earlier this year, when it was overstating cases that died with COVID and not of COVID, as covered here (where you will also learn that the COVID specific mortality rate for all children is 0.26%).

“Wait a minute…if COVID is a top 5 cause of –death- among children age 6 month to 5 years, how did two vaccine studies, run by two independent companies, in this age range that enrolled thousands of patients -fail- to get enough –hospitalizations– to calculate vaccine efficacy? That should have been an easy bar to clear for a “top 5 killer” in this age group, no? And if it is a top 5 killer of kids this age, how did those two studies not record a single death due to COVID between them?” I hear you ask Hypothetical Reader.

Excellent questions, Hypothetical Reader, since I can promise you they powered those studies (read: calculated a total target enrollment) to get enough hospitalizations to crunch those numbers!

Couldn’t do it though–which meant hospitalization rates due to COVID in this age range were massively overestimated.

Meanwhile, here’s the Phase 3 study of a vaccine to RSV, a common respiratory virus that can hospitalize kids in this same age who might need some respiratory support until the virus passes. This enrolled and treated ~2127 kids (only Native Americans in this one)–and met the hospitalization endpoint. They could calculate vaccine efficacy here for true risk/benefit analysis!

Before you ask, no RSV is not even remotely a leading cause of mortality in kids in this age range.

These two giant phase 3 vaccine studies of the COVID vaccine manage to suggest that COVID is not…quite… the mortal threat it is made out to be for kids age 6 months-5 years old. I am willing to go on a limb and say it’s not really a top 5 cause of death in this group either. As we mentioned last week, the pre-print claiming a top 5 slot for COVID in 6 month-5 year olds has been pulled for revisions. Imma little curious as to just how revised it will be (assuming we ever see it again), given COVID vaccine efficacy studies in this age range couldn’t even hit a “severe disease” threshold to run stats on.

Why a public health department, and other “experts” quoted in the media, are continuing to run with this “Top 5 cause of death!” stat is a mystery to me.

IMPORTANT MEDICAL POINT THOUGH: That said, if your kid in this age range has a serious underlying health condition, the vaccine is probably better than nothing. At least it’s a shot (no pun intended). After all, there absolutely have been SARS-CoV-2 caused deaths in as many as 442 kids in that age range–nearly all of whom had a severe underlying condition!

But very dubious claims of lethality in this age range are not the only sketch here!

They have two slides calculating the number of children ages 6 month to 4 years needed to be vaccinated to prevent 1 infection or 1 hospitalization. The first slide is the number needed to vaccinate to prevent 1 infection or 1 hospitalization over 120 days (~4 months). We’ll focus on hospitalization, since that’s the pandemic relevant metric.

They calculate that we will need to vaccinate 6,150-12,300 kids under age 5 to prevent 1 hospitalization of a kid in this age group over 120 days.

In the next slide, they calculate that we will need to vaccinate 1,660-3,320 kids under 5 to prevent 1 hospitalization over 6 months, and compare that to 1,030-6,890 kids under 5 needing flu vaccinations to prevent 1 flu hospitalization per ~6 month flu season.

“Wait, wait, wait… You just said… I literally just scrolled back up to read it again… that they did not have enough hospitalizations in two large Phase 3 studies to calculate a hospitalization rate, let alone how many hospitalizations the vaccine prevented, with any confidence.

So how in the hell are they calculating a number of vaccinations needed to prevent 1 hospitalization in this age group?!?!?!?!” I hear you ask, Appropriately Skeptical Hypothetical Reader.

I want to stress I am not making this up. I saved the screenshots of these slides, because I could not believe they were trying to ship this either.

So to read the fine print on the slide, the way they calculated the impossible these statistics was to assume first that the vaccine in these kids prevented hospitalization at the same rate as adults, despite the honest-to-God absence of exactly this data in two clinical trials with ~7,800 total patients, and second that “benefits of vaccination accrue over 120 days“, this time despite honest-to-God evidence to the contrary in those studies, as breakthrough infections were seen in 4-6 weeks not the ~4 months that “120 days” approximates.

Same for the “6 month” slide, which again assumes, despite clinical study evidence to the contrary, that “benefits of vaccination accrue” over 6 months. But it gets them a number that looks close to the flu vaccine at 6 months, which I can only assume was the purpose of this exercise in absolute science-less fantasy.

And I’m not even going to touch the implication that “benefits of vaccination accrue” over time has for boosters, because I am sure that statement will be memory-holed by the time they are talking boosters in about 3-4 months.

–So in summary, what have we got here? Well, we got two Phase 3 studies of COVID vaccines in kids under 5 that wound up being better described as giant Phase 1 safety studies, because clinical efficacy could not be measured in them. They got some antibody data for a subset of patients showing the vaccines produced an antibody response. That was enough for the FDA to conclude they were probably, most likely, maybe bordering on certainly working, even if the relationship of that to clinical important outcomes like hospitalization could not be established. Because there were not enough hospitalizations. In any other scenario, this is probably a failed vaccine study, and would call into question the benefit of vaccinating a disease whose severity appears to have been over-estimated for its patient population.

I don’t know for certain, but I certainly suspect, that it was considered politically unpalatable to fail a study of COVID vaccines in under 5 year olds after they had passed everywhere else, and the FDA was going to pass this as long as it was not actively killing kids. And I don’t say “politically” to infer team R or team D or whomever actual politician was interfering in this. I think there is strong reason to suspect that within the scientific community itself, certainly among those overseeing the public health vaccination campaign and approval, there is undue sensitivity to their perception of what the public will perceive.

Specifically, if those experts feel that a particular vaccine result will “call into question” vaccine “acceptance” by the unwashed masses, as they understand and estimate the unwashed masses’ ability to understand and follow the data, there is no pretzel into which they will not twist themselves to avoid “calling into question” vaccine acceptance.

Sadly, they are moving scientific goal posts in pursuit of their perceptions, and relying on convoluted logic, assuming they are smarter and know more than you to gloss over where their data is weak, rather than simply tell you the truth:

“We think the vaccines are safe, and will benefit kids 5 or less with serious health problems that put them at risk, so we’re going to damn the torpedoes and approve these anyways. For kids under 5 otherwise healthy, we cannot evaluate a benefit, as COVID is only rarely serious in them. The vaccine in an otherwise healthy under 5 year old should thus be at the discretion of the parent and pediatrician. We won’t eat your lunch either way you decide, and it certainly has no bearing on vaccinating those over 50 and all of those with underlying risk factors for severe COVID, because the benefit on reducing hospitalization and death there is crystal clear. The best argument for a healthy under 5 is to avoid some days with a bad cold from SARS-CoV-2, and maybe to protect more vulnerable, older adults they might come into contact with if sick. But frankly, those adults should be vaccinated and boosted already, and we can treat those adults if they get sick. So still, totally your call.”

Instead, they are putting on the full court press of razzle dazzle, and pissing off even Thomas the Train with their obvious bullshit. Their reputation, their own self-perception as the sagacious experts leading you through a health crisis you cannot possibly understand, matters more to them.

And if that is not a better description of the Time Of Coronavirus, when the world was cranked to Maximum Stupid, I don’t know what else is.

–And before we leave vaccine bullshit, the FDA also announced that it would like the vaccine makers to update their boosters to cover Omicron and its cousins. They have asked this to be a bivalent preparation, which means they want it to be a blend of the original vaccine to the wild type (original strain) SARS-CoV-2 and the mutations in the spike protein that characterize the Omicron crew. You can read the announcement here. The best argument is that this covers the spike protein of the more severe strains (even delta hospitalization was prevented well by the vaccines) and the most contagious strains.

To be clear, I think this update of the booster and that bivalent idea is a fine and reasonable one, especially for high risk patients.

What I want to highlight though, especially in light of my screeds on reputational concern motivating vaccination decisions and messaging from public health authorities, is the last two paragraphs from that article (emphasis mine):

“Advisers to the World Health Organization recently said omicron-tweaked shots would be most beneficial as a booster only, because they should increase the breadth of people’s cross-protection against multiple variants.

‘We don’t want the world to lose confidence in vaccines that are currently available,‘ said Dr. Kanta Subbarao, a virologist who chairs that WHO committee.”

When I say that I believe concerns about your ability to follow vaccination and public health science is driving their decisions, this is what I am basing that assessment on. That kind of bolded statement above. They either have no faith in your ability to understand the big picture, or essential nuance, or no faith in their ability to communicate it in a way that you will understand. Instead, they clearly see themselves as guardians who must lead you for your own good, telling you only what is necessary for your own good, even if it involves clear distortions. Particularly when the real world results are at odds with the “simplified” messages they made before.

This is the same motivation as Fauci lying about mask usefulness at the beginning of the pandemic Rather than just ask people to isolate and keep the available masks for healthcare workers until more were available. (Narrator: They made the people isolate anyways.) They don’t trust you to make decisions in your own good, let alone the greater good, and will clearly lie to you to make sure you do what they think best. As Fauci later bragged about his mask lie.

Our supposed “leaders”, our so called “best and brightest” continue to do this as if regular people don’t already donate to charities, don’t give up seats on the bus to the elderly, or did not plant Victory gardens and stoically keep calm and carry on during the rationing of World War 2 (and the later fuel rations of the 1970s energy crisis and stagflation). They clearly see a large portion of the population as an unrestrained Id who must lectured and nudged and white lied into virtue they do not otherwise possess.

If this is the character of their people under their expert and wise leadership, this is an indictment of their leadership as having failed to make personal and civic virtue commonplace. That implicit admission is also somehow lost on our current leaders.

Again, and perhaps it’s just my optimism bias, but believe people will do the right thing, can and will rise to adversity. Look at all the lockdown memes as people adjusted to a radical stress.

All you need to do is be frank and honest with them. Present the facts as you know them. If they change, explain the change. If they require sacrifice for a greater good, explain the sacrifice, what can be expected of it, and most importantly, what the great good is. People will respond to that.

What you cannot do is lie, over and over again. Or prioritize your own perception of your reputation over all other concerns. I am quite certain that if I could transport myself back in time to sit in on Hippocrates’ school, “don’t lie to your patients” would be a 101 lesson.

Because the problem with the kind of thinking behind that bolded quote above is obvious. They do far greater damage with this attitude than the good they think they do front running their mental model of the knuckle dragging Id they think the public to be. Their aristocratic pretensions and frank classist biases lead directly to the embarrassing “explanations” for the approval of the vaccines in the under 5 group given the actual trial results we covered earlier, Dr. Fauci’s lies, and the implicit condescension in the bolded quote above, among many other examples. Far more confidence is lost in them, and the vaccines, when they do this. Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” was explicitly about the dangers of this kind of concern of “messaging” over capital-T Truth. This is why you read screeds about a current Dark Age wrought by overspecialization and reliance on experts and nod along. We can see, plainly, that their expertise is too narrow and blunders, because anyone who lacks their expertise cannot possibly be intelligent or reliable, and it is the uniquely narrow purpose of our narrow expert to guide all the non-experts out there.

Wise expertise simply advises from a position of deeper knowledge, so that consensus decisions can be made from a position with deeper facts. That is what an “expert” should do. Wise expertise does not dictate, and that is the mistake our culture of expertise makes at present. Once a problem is perceived to lie within a specific domain, the “expert” of that domain dictates the solution, and we are merely told it is best. Instead, with a humility our current leaders and experts lack, expertise must recognize that other approaches, fields, and methods of study not only exist but hold value, and the best decision is most often not narrow to one field (even if the problem at first appears confined to one narrow field), but an integration of the facts, views, and methods of several fields.

That these lessons have still not been learned in 2.5 years of pandemic at this point is astounding.

Our leaders and experts breach their integrity over and over again, and then wonder why confidence in them, and their institutions, is wasting away. They wail and lament their growing lack of influence, yet, in the definition of madness, continue their same approach…

–This era will go down as the case study, par excellence, in how NOT to run a public health vaccination campaign.

–So again I ask you, the aliens come and make first contact. Who do you send? What leader, what institution, do you trust at this point to see all the angles and NOT screw things up? Who ya’ got?

–And I propose the “First Encounter Test”. If you are having trouble answering the “who do you send to meet the aliens” question, your society has a major problem with its leaders, and the criteria used to select them.

Socioeconomic

–Best of times and worst of times still in China. They continue to loosen restrictions in Shanghai, and have reduced the mandatory quarantine period from something like three weeks for international visitors to seven days as they announced a shift to better manage the pandemic. However, a senior Chinese official released a statement stating that “Zero COVID” policies might continue with periodic mass testings and lockdowns for the next five years. That drew understandable consternation on Chinese social media, and it was promptly scrubbed by CCP censors from their internet. You can read more about that here.

–Ecuador’s oil ministry announced exports are likely to be affected by continued protests of the government there over the high cost of everything. While no one will confuse Ecuador with Saudi Arabia, that’s still 750,000 barrels per day about to go offline in the midst of a shortage where locating the physical oil is the big problem. Libya is also still a mess right now.

–Shortages in fertilizer and chemical weed and pest control are delaying planting in the US Midwest, raising costs for farmers, and forcing some last minute planting switches. Again, yield per acre is going to be an interesting, and important, question come fall. The US will not be able to make up for the food shortages likely to be hitting in earnest by then. You can read about it here.

Just as a word of caution if you follow that link to the Reuters article though. There is some really lazy reporting at the end. The final paragraph header is “Agrichemical profits climb”, and then it reports how sales at a number of the major suppliers of fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides etc. are up year over year, on lower volume. This is, indeed, consistent with higher price per volume that the farmers and others interviewed in the article body mention.

While sales are important for profits (you don’t get profits without sales, after all), they are not the same thing. What our intrepid reporter fails to tell you out of some combination of ignorance, laziness, or editorial decision is that BASF (just as one specific example mentioned in the article) has seen its cost of revenue go up. Profits are the sale price minus the cost of goods/services sold. Telling you just the sales, like the reporter does here, does not give you enough information to conclude that “agrichemical profits climb” per his heading.

In fact, a quick review of publicly available and FREE financial information shows BASF’s cost of revenue is up ~20% in the last 6-9 months. That happens to directly coincide with the ~20% increase in gross sales. Which again, were on less volume–so if BASF’s cost of revenue is going UP with less product made to sell, it’s highly likely BASF is getting hit hard in the cost of the raw goods it is turning into fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide etc. You know–all the stuff that makes modern industrial farming able to feed all the humans and livestock on the planet. The correlation of cost of revenue and gross sales percentage increases implies that some of the cost is being passed along to the farmers and other BASF customers, but BASF’s pretax income is also down ~20% in the same time span too. Again, I’m not an expert on all things finance, but that suggests to me that BASF is eating some of their cost of manufacturing too. Indeed, earnings per share were 1.87 in March of 2021 at BASF; they were down to 1.34 per share in March of 2022….

–Anecdotally, travel this week saw me headed south this time. This, too, passes long stretches of farms near the interstate. The rate of fallow fields was less than heading north about a month ago, but they are still there.

–Also still on farmers this year, Dutch farmers are protesting at ministers’ houses and blocking highways with tractors as the Netherlands looks to reduce nitrous oxide emissions in the country. The farmers are upset because many of them will have to reduce their livestock herds or abandon livestock farming entirely. Additionally, the government is flat out buying some farms just to close them. The timing of this seems… less than ideal.

–And probably not unrelated is the Swiss government announcement to increase its stockpiles of food from the current 3-4 month reserve to at least 6 months. I didn’t realize it, but according to that article, Switzerland has to import 40% of its food–which makes sense, given the terrain and population size, I guess…

–Finally, chanced across a discussion on another topic entirely, but the guys on the podcast brought up a book written almost 40 years ago now that raises some interesting points about language and how we think. Called “Metaphors We Live By”, it argues that implicit in our language around concepts are metaphors, and these are how we make sense of concepts. One of the best examples, and an early one in the book, relates to argument. In modern culture, we describe arguments with similar language to war. One “attacks” the opponents position; “undermines” or “counters” their argument; we must “defend” our ideas. They argue (no pun intended) that this implicit metaphor of argument as war, or at least of adversarial content, with a zero sum winner and loser shapes how feel and approach arguments and disagreements. Instead of an argument being a discussion that seeks to draw out differing opinions, the reasons behind them and values, and decide jointly on the best solution (which may be a combination of ideas), arguments become a power contest where one idea will win and the other lose. Studies in psychology have shown that your brain chemistry will take a loss of argument the same as if you had lost a physical fight or contest, and it’s an interesting question as to whether that feeling was the chicken or the egg in the way the metaphor for argument developed in our culture. It’s also why you, in the heat of the moment, will tend to emotion and extremes when really getting into argument with someone. And why an argument in the comment section or social media can completely wreck your zen : )

If there is a new idea with parts of the two arguments that comes out as a solution in our modern metaphor of argument, it is only because the two sides have tired of fighting each other and negotiate a compromise. This approach to arguments is not the same in every culture. In fact, there are good historical reasons to suspect the famed salons of the enlightenment were heavily influenced by what the European West learned from the way politics functioned in the Eastern Woodlands tribes of America they were encountering, where chiefs were not the absolute monarchs of Europe of that period, but instead had to drive consensus and only had power insofar as they could persuade others in the tribe. Political argument within the tribes was a discussion might to arrive at the best consensus solution. It could be painful slow and difficult to get everyone on board, but it was a different metaphor and purpose for argument.

Now, in our society, seemingly everything is argument these days. And our metaphor is argument as war, or zero sum contest. Within the two main tribes that our schismogenesis drives us towards, to acknowledge the other side may have a point on something is to risk being voted out of the tribe. Accused of being a RINO or one of varying shades of “right wing” and “supremacist”. Again, one has to wonder about the chicken and the egg here. Is it the schismogenesis between the tribes, with all the catalyzing accelerants we have discussed before, that has turned metaphors and concepts of argument into a zero sum, warlike frame? Or did that zero sum, warlike metaphor that developed over time in our society help hasten the schismogenesis, as that concept, that metaphor, forced us to take lines and defend them like a trench in 1917?

Worth considering as we grapple with a world in flux this decade, especially with election rhetoric in the US like ramp up over the next couple of months. Are you using argument with your friends and family in a zero sum metaphor, and furthering the divide by committing to a zero sum concept of it? Or can you change the metaphor, the way you think about argument, to one that is more constructive and seeks to learn the values and logic of the others’ position, and arrive together at the best decision?

Been pondering that myself, and figured I would share the thought…

–Your chances of catching norovirus in the Grand Canyon are directly proportional to the time you spend there in the next couple of months, drinking straight from streams like a savage, and eschewing hand washing to live wild, feral and free.

–Your chances of catching monkeypox are directly proportional to the amount of time you spend getting it on like a bonobo.

–And finally, your chances of catching coronavirus in most places in the world are equivalent to the chances that we will be having our own unique celebration around the British monarchy, in this, her majesty’s 70th year of rule, with our tea brewed up American style at the local harbor and steeped in liberty. We remind our expatriate US citizen readers residing in the UK, or other Commonwealth nations, that it is their patriotic duty to go full ‘Murcia this Monday… : )

<Paladin>