Ebola

–Still not much news. No new confirmed cases in Guinea, and again, as near as I can tell, there are still 5 suspected cases being treated. Community alerts to possible new cases are sparse, and follow up of alerts is still “poor” per the WHO. On the plus side, all the known contacts of the last case are now out of the incubation period window, with no new cases among them. Still on pace to wind down officially in the next couple weeks.

Coronavirus

–For the most part, slow week. Most of the action has shifted overseas as cases in the US continue to fall. Between vaccination and successful recovery from previous infection, the US looks dangerously close to herd immunity. The only wild card will be the fall now, as the virus does indeed appear to spread more efficiently when people are forced together indoors as the temperature drops. Personally, I think we are still very much on pace to dwindle the spread of coronavirus in the US long before then where we will not see a major bump in cases in the fall. That said, I would also -not- be completely surprised if there was a pocket of unvaccinated that had a flare up in the fall. There will be headlines about it, and doooooooom it portends–but mostly because it will re-glue your eyeballs to your screens, and it’s your attention they sell. I still think the US is on pace to medically end the threat of SARS-CoV-2 in July–which is to say that the pockets of unvaccinated which remain, the virus’ ability to penetrate them, is not enough to threaten a collapse of the local-ish health care system

Again, cannot stress it enough, THAT is the real threat of SARS-CoV-2. But between immunity levels and therapies effective at keeping people out of the hospital and/or getting them out of the hospital sooner (including a few more coming online from a variety of pharma manufacturers, plus tweaks to improve coverage against variants), I don’t think that threat is viable in the states much longer.

–Very much a threat to be headline fodder to try and weaponize and monetize your attention though : )

–The variant first identified in India (that is the Delta variant under the WHO’s new nomenclature) has found a foothold in China. While admitting only a small cluster of cases, China has locked down Guangzhou, a city of 15.3 million, including cancelling all flights in and out and prohibiting citizens from leaving without a special “green” virus passport.

A reasonable rule of thumb is that if China is publicly announcing this, the situation on the ground is probably sufficiently alarming.

This is not a surprise, however, following updates over the last couple weeks suggesting China was probably a little slow to close its border with India along the Himalayas, and unclear data on how effective vaccination rollout within China has been (plus some questions about efficacy of some of their vaccines in other countries).

Also in the neighborhood, Malaysia continues to climb a big wave. Honda and Toyota announced closures of car manufacturing plants in the country, just as an example of continued supply chain roiling.

On the plus side, India’s new cases continue to plummet and it looks like the worst of a very bad wave is now in the rearview mirror.

South Africa is imposing new lockdown measures. They are not as strict as previous lockdowns, but are in response to persistently rising new cases there as the country soaks in the Fall weather. There is no indication at the moment that this is due to reinfection (and we have looked, believe me). International news reports have focused on South Africa’s vaccine roll out. Despite having sourced 50 million vaccine doses, only 1.3 million are in country and ready to roll, with a shade under 2% of the 60 million South Africans having received at least one dose thus far. In short, there is probably still a sizeable susceptible population in South Africa, and SARS-CoV-2 has taken advantage of the fall weather to find a foothold among them.

–Back to nomenclature. The WHO announced this week that it will be using Greek letter designations for the various variants of special concern.

I am going to adopt these, if only because I am a lazy bastard and typing “COVID alpha” is shorter than typing “the variant of COVID first identified in the United Kingdom”. The big four are as follows:

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

I think this is also much easier for you, the lay reader especially, to follow. Shorter, and avoids the alphabet soup of numbers and letters that designate either the phylogeny or the mutations present–which might as well be Greek to the vast majority of the current readers.

That said, I think part of the WHO’s reason for making this change is utter crap. In news reports of this change, there was much pious assertion that making this shift would avoid “unfair stigmatization” of countries and their citizens where variants of concern had first been identified. I am certain that the readership here is wise enough to NOT discriminate against, for example, the UK, or the Scots/Brits/Irish/Welsh citizens of the islands simply because they identified a variant of COVID that was a little more contagious there.

It’s equally difficult to hate on the country of the girl from Ipanema and the beautiful game, the land of the Springboks, or the home of the Taj Mahal and Mahatma Gandhi.

But apparently, we must be concerned that someone, somewhere on the internet, might be an idiot and use the scientific achievement of rapidly identifying a possibly clinically significant variant of SARS-CoV-2 and announcing it to the world against the country that did that.

For fear of idiocy, then, we must self-censor it seems.

First, if you think merely by eliminating words in association with something that you can stop idiocy and bad ideas, you have been reading George Orwell as an instruction manual, and not the cautionary tale “1984” was meant to be. Second, if you must self-censor because of idiots, the idiots are winning since their idiocy is going effectively unchallenged. You haven’t changed their dumb ideas–you have merely avoided them. And then congratulated yourself on being a concerned and conscientious person in doing so.

One of Socrates’ subtler arguments was that the only way to harm a good person was to make them a worse person. The corollary to that is if you let a bad person continue to be a bad person, you are doing them harm–at least via your inaction.

Speaking of famous Greeks, how is this not now potentially discriminatory against Greece, whose entire alphabet will now be associated with every SARS-CoV-2 variant of concern? Should we not be worried about that potential discrimination on the same reasoning the WHO commended itself for using in prompting a change to avoid potentially discriminatory association?

Minor rant aside, I get the good intentions of the WHO here. I do. I don’t think the change was necessary. I think there are better uses of the WHO’s time.

And frankly, the only country that benefits from conscious dissociation of SARS-CoV-2 from mention in association with specific nations is China. The cynic in me would point out they pay an awful lot of the WHO’s bills, and the have a government that is extremely sensitive regarding their perception of how the world perceives them. Easier to sell an idea to remove any nation associations to SARS-CoV-2 (even if they are triumphs of recognition and publication in the interests of world health) if it’s in the “interest” of “avoiding discrimination” of other, already well liked nations.

–So all that said, yes, I am still going to be lazy and use the new Greek letter designations for brevity and simplicity in communicating to you about the virus variants.

But I am not going to like at least part of the WHO’s reason for them, dammit! : )

–The Fauci Files. Again, opinions expressed here are purely my own.

I want to start with a few observations first.

Most, if not all of you reading this, will not take the time to read through all of the e-mails the Washington Post pried loose with its FOIA request. I certainly did not, and have absolutely no plan to do so. This means whatever you have learned from the released Fauci emails has come through a filter–a news report about them. If you have not found the Ground News app, it shows you which stories are being amplified, or which headline set is being amplified, to which side of the political spectrum. What selection of Fauci emails you read, and how they were interpreted, came entirely down to the filter you chose to engage. Outlets and outlooks sympathetic to Dr. Fauci present them as evidence of a man under immense pressure and trying to respond as best as possible to a challenging situation. Other outlooks and outlets are apparently calling for his criminal prosecution. I have only seen a couple e-mails in their entirety from an article about the e-mails where I was asked for direct comment by a reader (specifically one from a NIH scientist about the phylogeny of SARS-CoV-2 versus other bat coronaviruses, and rare oddities in its genome). That was 2 out of… however many? A couple hundred at least I think?

My own bias, my own filter, to put it on the table for you, is to expect little more than corruption and incompetence from government. That expectation has only grown with greater experience with government, particularly in response to major events, such as the pandemic. On the plus side, government can only pleasantly surprise and impress me in the those rare moments of honesty and competence.

So if you’re shocked that Fauci’s messaging was a little…confused… or appeared in contradiction to other statements he was making around the same time, well, I’m not. You can attribute that to malice or stress–certainly your chosen news filter appears to have chosen one horn of that dilemma or the other. I don’t really care. Doesn’t undo the pandemic, and again, and I cannot stress this enough and have mentioned it several times in these updates, Fauci lost me when he deliberately lied about the necessity of masks to slow the spread of the virus and allow testing and hospital capacity to catch up. He admitted that directly, as part of his volte face on mask requirements. We don’t need his emails to prove that happened. Were I King of the World, well, most likely this–but I would have also fired Fauci on the spot for that lie, because that came at the cost of credibility of the government at a time when the government needed to be most credible, honest and competent. This gave license to many a conspiracy theory since then, and the difficulty in dispelling them all.

As for the specific email sent to me for comment, what the NIH scientist is saying is that SARS-CoV-2 is closely related to bat coronaviruses and is quite plausibly descended from them. However, there are rare instances in the genome, <0.1% of the genome as quoted in that email, that would be less probable. These are not clear evidence of a manipulated virus, such a gene from another virus or another species spliced in with no modification flanked by sequences to make that happen. Instead, they are scattered small sequences that are plausibly naturally occurring, but also plausibly inserted or modified, especially if one was trying to accelerate changes in the virus without making huge leaps away from its parent bat coronavirus. So this particular email has the unique property of proving exactly nothing. What it says is that SARS-CoV-2 is closely related to bat coronaviruses, and could be naturally descended from them. It has some mutations suggesting a rapid mutation away from a closely related bat coronavirus. That might have happened naturally. That might have had some help, either via those direct manipulations (which are scattered enough that this explanation is less likely) or indirectly as swaps with other closely related viruses that were all being tinkered with in the same lab.

Again, I think our kids or grand kids will get the real story. The rest will be lost in the fog of the US/China Cold War.

I would encourage you to read either all of the released emails yourself and make your own judgment, or at least read your chosen filter using your own filter, knowing that you are being presented only a selected portion of the emails, which they are trying to interpret for you. Think of the “Fauci Files” as a low risk way to practice mass media manipulation resistance : )

–Your chances of catching Ebola are equivalent to the chances the Fauci Files have the truth about aliens, Epstein, and the Kennedy assassination encoded in them.

–Your chances of catching coronavirus, in many parts of the world still, are equivalent to the chances that these guys are working the Fauci Files as we speak…

<Paladin>