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

Transmissibility: All the +

Immune Evasiveness: All the +

Vaccine Effectiveness: Check (for hospitalization)

Also as a reminder:

Odds and Ends:

–So about the exigent circumstances last week that kept the update a little abrupt…

After a little over 8 years, my employer and I are parting ways. I got an offer I couldn’t refuse from one of the leading companies applying artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) to pathology images and clinical data who want my help in narrowing the astounding array of the possible to the most urgently medically useful. They are particularly focused in oncology, where I have unfinished business, as you may recall from previous requests for reader help in understanding how a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) actually works since it became a buzzy way for Web3.0 start ups to organize and fund. I think low hanging fruit in AI/ML helps speed development of new drugs to fight cancer, and for more than just my current employer’s portfolio. I start in a couple weeks, and while yes, it frees me to avoid some of the “thank you for your understanding” limits to my commentaries here, it does not completely take the brakes off.

These updates may be a little altered in time of release and length as I settle in to the new role as well. Just to warn you.

–With the current stage of the pandemic, the timing seemed right too. It would certainly have been impossible for me to feel comfortable leaving in some of the earlier stages. Yes, I suppose you can infer from that my handicapping of SARS-CoV-2’s ability to reverse its “more contagious, less severe” variant trend of late.

–Speaking of DAOs, I did not ask for reader help understanding those better lightly. I know I have a very diverse readership here, who are among the most intelligent and beautiful people on the planet.

They are my readers, after all.

Despite that, no one could really explain how DAOs solve a gap in existing law and/or will not inevitably fall afoul of existing business law. In my admittedly inexpert understanding, they try to establish themselves as what is basically a LLC, but fund operations of the organization by selling either tokens or shares (explicitly in some cases, somehow without the necessary registration as a financial security) to the public, which should require the extra set of controls on companies whose ownership is a publicly traded security. If “trust” among the members is the issue that DAOs “solve”, a properly structured LLC will contractually bind the members, with existing law, and clear steps for resolution if there is disagreement among the members on the direction or behavior of the organization. The workings of a LLC are indeed not often publicly transparent–but an LLC can already absolutely decide to make them transparent should it choose. Most don’t simply because they are not taking public money, but are privately funded, often by the members putting their own funds in as a demonstration of trust and skin in the game. With a DAO, though, you somehow?!?!? improve?!?!?! trust by creating a token or share on a blockchain, assigning a bunch of it to the members directing the project regardless of if they put their own money up for those tokens/shares as skin in the game, and then funding it by public sale of the remaining tokens/shares, which may or may not grant voting rights, or profit shares if the organization is for profit and manages to generate cash flow, to the public buyers. If it all falls apart, there is no well trod law like those governing LLCs and public traded companies for recourse for token/share holders.

Basically, I don’t see how existing corporate structure law is a problem that a DAO is a solution for–unless your goal is to “go public” but keep control private. If that was your goal, well, I can see how a DAO would be attractive. After all, you avoid those pesky SEC regulations on actions of officers of publicly traded companies. Many of the Silicon Valley and Wall St types now touting DAOs are very familiar with those regulations if they have ever taken a previous venture to IPO (or know someone who has). There is also less legal recourse for the token/shareholders if the voting membership of the organization goes in different, or even outright criminal, directions. So again, if that is your goal, then I think a DAO would be attractive. I question your goal, of course, but I get why you prefer a DAO to something that already exists and would legally stop you from that goal.

But I’m not an expert, and maybe there is someone out there who knows what limitation of LLC/public company law a DAO fixes. I couldn’t see it, and neither could anyone else who got back to me.

–The NFT as an option for the commemoration of our time on these updates together (I expect to hear back soon from the design team with some options to vote on for the t-shirts, BTW) was, admittedly, a sneaky trial balloon for me to see how much uptake on NFTs there really was. Because again, I have difficulty seeing the value in digital provenance of something you can easily “CTRL-C.” Based on the voting, seems like the rest of stunningly attractive and brilliant readership did not either. So probably no coincidence that this happened in the last week out in the NFT world…

To keep perspective, though, the offers for the NFT of Jack’s first tweet are still way higher than my bid for Chelsea FC. If the current ownership of Chelsea FC is reading as the final bids are still under review, my $1 offer is all cash. No financing involved–I will bring the necessary funds to the table.

Dollar, dollar bill y’all.

-Literally-.

Give me a call–we’ll get this done.

–Alright, enough of the odds and ends and on to the content you actually care about…

Coronavirus:

–Starting around the horn, most places in the world continue to come off their BA.2 and/or omicron waves. We’ll get to China in just a second. In the US, cases in the bigger cities, particularly those we highlighted with wastewater data, are trending slightly up. You can even make an argument that there is a slight bump spreading to the Midwest now too. However, hospitalizations remain down, and certainly for cities like New York, if we were going to get a bump in hospitalizations, we should be seeing it now. The argument that “there is more at home testing, so positives are not being reported at the same rate!” is losing steam as well, because again, you cannot hide the hospitalizations.

This is, so far, sticking to our base case of a slight, alpha-like bump in new cases from BA.2, with BA.2 being even less likely to cause severe disease than its cousin omicron. Less likely doesn’t mean zero–I do still hear of rare hospitalizations, even deaths, but they are becoming noteworthy because they are increasingly exceptions.

Again, all of this is consistent with the general pattern of pandemic agent evolution to become more contagious, less severe over time.

This prompted the New York Times this week to delve into the “surprising” discrepancy of slightly rising cases but unmoved hospitalization numbers across most of the country. They attributed this to vaccination (of course, even as other headlines bemoan the fact that only about half of those eligible for a first booster have gotten it), but also, to their credit, increased availability of effective therapy -AND- previous infection, providing natural immunity.

We agree.

Although none of this surprises our readership, of course, because you are gifted and gorgeous people, blessed with the infinite patience to watch us flog several of those dead horses for months now.

Once the mainstream media is acknowledging that the virus has, indeed, mutated in a more contagious, less severe form and is most likely to continue that trajectory into the fall, we’ll know they are all the way through our archive.

–Bellweather South Africa continues to have more problems from flooding than COVID, with cases muddling along in a low range. June/July has been peak winter activity months for South Africa and COVID, and if there is no lift off there in that time frame, again, I think the worst will truly be behind us.

–China is still admitting to fairly brisk case numbers and many cities remain in some degree of lockdown. There is a HUGE, even for last year, log jam of container ships outside of Shanghai, which will make for an adventurous fall in supply chains. Many automotive manufacturers are already warning of upper limits on the number of cars they will be able to build at all this year. However, at least 4 million of Shanghai’s 26 million saw a reduction in restrictions, and Tesla was able to re-open its Shanghai plant. So the worst is likely behind China’s most economically important city.

Still very much worth going back to January where we ran through the math that shows that China’s “Zero COVID” policy, if they stick with it, is doomed to failure though. Hint: that Shanghai happened to China, and at least in terms of COVID containment (or lack thereof) unfolded as it did, should not have been a huge surprise if you read that section of one of our January updates…

–The other big news is the abrupt end of mask mandates, as a Federal judge declared CDC lacked authority to impose mask mandates on air travel. This led to viral videos of entire planes, in flight, demasking to cheers and celebration as the policy was spread within hours throughout entire domestic carrier fleets. Disney also lifted its mandatory mask policy in short order.

However, the Department of Justice, at the behest of the Executive branch of government, has announced it will file suit to contest this ruling on CDC’s behalf. I am neither politician nor pollster, but based on the videos from planes and airports, I have some guesses as to how that will poll…

Now, I will concede that the argument the DoJ is making is that the CDC, as the government authority charged with responding medically to pandemics, should have the authority to influence policy for medically emergent reasons.

However, I view the continued wrangling over this in courts as a soft, but clear, sign that the CDC’s institutional credibility is charred carbon on the bonfire right now. If the public perception was that CDC had exercised its duties well, and had NOT scored so many own goals of policy reversals and appeals to Science!^TM in its publications (we have levied some serious peer review criticisms of methodologically questionable CDC MMWR publications here–and linked to other well qualified physician scientists who have been far more critical than us of some of CDC’s pandemic science), CDC would have no need to ask DoJ to try and salvage some institutional dignity for it.

We need a CDC. However, this iteration of CDC will need to change to be more effective than it was during this pandemic. That should be one of the key public health goals moving forward.

–Finally, we had a reader question about seasonal allergies. A few seasonal allergy sufferers have noticed that as mask use has dropped this year that their allergies are back in particularly severe form. The exact question was if graduated exposure to the allergen is a common way to reduce severity of an allergy by getting the immune system “used” to the allergen and less likely to react so strongly, did we inadvertently prime the immune system for a snapback season of more severe allergy with masks, blocking exposure to all the pollen etc.?

I don’t see an obvious flaw in the hypothesis. There are only a few small studies that took the opportunity afforded by mask and/or lockdown policies during the pandemic to try and measure the effects on allergy sufferers. For example, a couple studies showed that self reported symptoms and medication use went down for those who suffer from pollen allergies due to less exposure from lockdowns and masks. One even postulated that masking during high pollen count weeks/days might be a way to reduce some symptoms without more medication in the future. Those whose allergens live indoors, such as those with dust mite allergies for example, had the inverse; lockdowns caused their self reported symptoms to increase. The major limitation was that since no one expected SARS-CoV-2 or the government response to them with lockdowns…

…all of the data in these studies was self reported memory comparing symptoms during the COVID period to the year or years before. That could easily introduce a lot of bias. The “suddenly more severe” season this year could also be the same. Since mask use and lockdowns made allergen exposure for outdoor allergens less, the tendency will be to remember that as the baseline, and thus what would be a normal year of bad allergies on a high pollen count week is now the worst allergy ever. I mean, that’s possible too. But so is an immune system that was starting to forget the allergen, and is now freaking out because you reversed a large natural immunotherapy treatment of graduated exposure during a normal year by enforcing masks and lockdowns that stopped the graduated exposure to the allergen. Ideally, there is a set of patients with some before and after allergen antibody testing that we can get some better ideas as to memory bias versus truly reactivated allergies to account for the anecdotal “bad start to allergy season…” that seems so common this spring.

If there is, no one has published them yet. So ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Socioeconomic:

—-Oil, natural gas, fertilizer prices continue to be near all time highs, with little relief in sight. More emerging economies are taking drastic actions to keep some semblance of stability running. I’m not going to run the list here; if you have been headline scanning, you have probably seen these.

–Food prices are already much higher, adjusted to constant dollars, than they were during the Arab Spring, when food inflation and shortages are thought to have toppled multiple Middle Eastern dictatorships. So yes, could be a real riveting sequel shaping up this fall, and into spring 2023…

–Looking towards possible solutions, I had no idea this had already been accomplished, although not used terribly often. An awful lot more is going to be on the table though as the world sorts through a serious mismatch of energy supply versus demand over the next several years.

–A good review of how increased nuclear power use is a possible, and surprisingly green, solution going forward is here: https://twitter.com/FrusRealist/status/1516988519817912321

Of course, new plants needed to have been started 10 years ago to help us now.

If we are going to be making infrastructure investments for energy, though, something to keep in mind.

–And we are going to be making energy infrastructure investments this decade, for reasons ranging from climate change to geopolitics of where and what kind of government controls current natural gas and oil reserves…

–Finally, odd story this week where a major fertilizer producer in the US warned that major agricultural reasons like the Midwest could be short fertilizer for a few months in the critical spring planting period because Union Pacific railroad abruptly announced that to reduce congestion on their rails, they would reduce traffic of non-Union Pacific rail cars on them. The fertilizer producer is not the only company to have issues with rail delivery. Apparently, the congestion is so bad and the transit time increasing so much that the major railroads are being called before Congress’ Surface Transportation Board at the end of the month. The railroads state that COVID absences are still reverberating through the system, and they are are bringing more engines on line, training more engineers, and have improved retention plans to keep engineers from joining the Great Resignation. On the other hand, while obviously looking like a way for Union Pacific to “encourage” use of its rail cars (which I am sure it -happens- to charge for), it does kind of seem like said fertilizer company could just do that. I’m sure the upcharge would either erode the fertilizer company’s margin AND/OR increase the price of their fertilizer as they pass that upcharge from the rail road on to the consumer. I also note that both UP and CSX beat earnings estimates this week on higher revenue, despite this apparent congestion problem, although warned that higher fuel prices, more trains, engineers, higher wages for engineers etc. might erode margins through the rest of the year.

Either way, I’m not an expert on this, and both the big railroads, and companies who use these railroads to move their goods, are clearly positioning themselves and their arguments via traditional and social media before they take what is, in essence, a “whose margin eats this” argument before Congress. Basically, there’s good reasons on both sides to be a little creative in their interpretation, and I don’t know engineers or fertilizer shippers on the ground, doing it every day enough to know what the truth is here.

You can read some freight industry focused articles on it here and here though.

–Your chances of catching coronavirus are dropping like Jane Goodall’s masterclass on conservation and animal behavior. Before you buy, though, realize a few things. First, few know what you, dear readers, know. Look at what simultaneous scourging with pandemic, supply chain disruption, geopolitical instability and outright war, and near constant messages of schismogenesis have done to human society. To our world. To our psyches.

This masterclass tops off at ~5 hours of instruction. That is your main tip off that it is NOT a masterclass on Jane’s true vocation. Instead, it is, indeed a rundown of her thoughts on how primate psychology and conservation from her years in the field might address some of that list of current threats we just ran down.

But not the main threat. For this is not that class.

However, I can tell you now, dear readers, that class is being offered. After all, Jane is not getting any younger, and her fight in the darkness, the vanguard against what we know truly goes bump in the night, has been long, valiant, and thus far victorious. The time has come for new champions to rise though. By invitation only, they are being selected as we speak, trained and tested in a secret location. They sang of the US Army Special Forces that 100 hundred would test today, but only 3 would win the Green Beret. Those are “safety school” admission numbers compared to Jane’s masterclass.

In the end, those with the nerve, strength and courage to last the most grueling, intensive training mankind has ever conceived, under Jane Goodall’s personal tutelage, will stand in rare air. The few. The proud. Those who will one day carry the standard of humanity forward against its true, greatest threat:

<Paladin>