Everybody's Right, Everybody's Wrong

Largest Cities in the World
I finally finished The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston. It's all about the CDC (Center for Disease Control), the WHO (World Health Organization), and the campaign to eradicate smallpox. Along the way he visits the military, bio-weapons and virus engineering. Pretty grim stuff.

At the end of book he mentions the largest cities in the world and what would happen if a nasty bug got loose in one of those places. Which led me to look up the largest cities (spreadsheet above, taken from Wikipedia).

If COVID-19 was as contagious and deadly as some people claim, I would expect that we would be hearing about zillions of deaths from some of these places. It might be that I have my filters set too high and that is keeping such reports from reaching me, or maybe America is just so self centered that we don't have time to worry about the zillion COVID-19 deaths all over the rest of world. Or maybe the disease is just getting started and later on this year we will start seeing those reports. I don't think that will happen, and in any case I certainly hope it doesn't happen.

Which got me to thinking that this whole lock down, mask wearing paranoia thing is just people showing that they are part of the in-crowd, kind of like standing in line at Starbucks to pay $5 for a fancy cup of coffee, or waiting in line for 20 minutes to get an ice cream cone at Salt & Straw. Dang, I came across a story about this phenomena not too long ago and I thought for sure I linked to it, but now when I need it, I cannot find it.

And now we've got riots going on all over the place. Some people say it's because of the black man killed by the police in Minneapolis. That might have been the trigger, but I think it's because there are a bunch of people who are not happy about the way things are going. Yes, there are some people who are just attracted to social activity, the more active the better. But most people, if things are going well, have better things to do than protest. You put the screws to a large segment of the population, like our fearless leaders did to about half of the people who work for a living, and you're going to get some push back and this is what it looks like.

Problem is we have this fantasy that everyone deserves the same respect and treatment whereas in reality people range from savages to saints. You send a bunch of saints into the jungle to deal with a bunch of savages and you are very likely to end up with a bunch of dead saints.

COVID-19

I've got a theory about this whole COVID-19 and Fauci's fumbles. Rumor has it that the US was funding a research laboratory in Wuhan China to conduct gain-of-function experiments on certain virii. Then a new virus starts making people sick in that same Wuhan China. Now you're the guy charge with protecting the health of the 330 million people living in the USA, whatchya gonna do? Shit, if this shit that's making people sick came from that lab, this could be really bad. Bad as in 14th Century Black Plague bad. Better go to the public health equivalent of DEF-CON 4 and close all the windows, bolt the doors, and proclaim panic: the bugs are coming!

The problem with any new disease is you don't know how bad it's going to be. Is it going to be annoying or deadly? How contagious will it be? How will it be transmitted? By intimate contact?  By droplets floating in the air? They might only be dangerous until they dry up. Or maybe even dry particles could transmit the disease. Nobody knows until somebody does some research, or until people a bunch of people start showing up dead, and then it's pretty much too late. Better to clamp down early and clamp down hard. Better be safe than sorry.

Turns out that COVID-19 is not all that deadly, maybe 50% more deadly than the regular flu, so in hindsight, the draconian lockdowns and mask requirements were overkill, and there seems to be some doubt that they had any beneficial effect at all. And what about the regular flu? Haven't heard a word about it. That strikes me as kind of weird. Might just be an effect of our distorted news reporting system. Nobody cares about old stuff that might kill you, we want to hear about the new stuff that might kill you.

Back before COVID-19, there was a new variety of flu every year and every year you had to get a new vaccine. You were supposed to anyway. I never got one. I thought it was stupid. Maybe because we didn't have flu vaccines when I was growing up, of maybe I had the flu once when I was a kid and I was sick for a couple of days but it was so long ago I forgot how bad it was. Whatever. But now it's 2021 and I just got vaccinated for COVID-19, a bug that is two years old. Of course we've got new varieties of COVID popping up here and there and I expect we're going to start seeing new vaccines showing up here along with noisy obnoxious campaigns to get everyone vaccinated with the latest and greatest goop. No thanks. It's been five days since I got my second Pfizer jab and while I am walking and talking, I am still not right. I have a low grade headache all over the outside of my head, what feels like a sinus infection behind my left eye, my left eye is prone to watering and I have a red spot on my cheek. I only mention the last because my family noticed and pointed it out to me.

I had no intention of getting the vaccine, but I had a conversation with my wife about it. She is a bit anxiety prone, so I agreed to do it to alleviate her concerns. So all this trivial suffering is my own fault for being agreeable.

P.S. I remember hearing about gain-of-function when I was reading The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston, which was about the campaign to eliminate smallpox. It's kind of fucked up.

Gain-Of-Function

Artist's Conception of a Virion

There are scientists studying the microbes and virions that cause disease. This research is essential if we want to learn more about these disease causing agents, and there is much more to learn because they are very complex and we really don't know very much about them now.

But there are also people / scientists studying these disease causing agents to see if they can find ways to make them more deadly. This is bio-weapons research and is essentially a criminal activity.

However, what can be learned in one area can be applied in the other, mostly because we don't know very much so any knowledge gained is a step towards our ultimate goal of understanding how everything in the universe works.

I say we don't know very much, but that's not really true. We know a great deal, but compared to how much we still need to learn in order to completely understand these things, it is not very much.

A post by David Warren got me started. Pages on the National Institute of Health (NIH) and Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology didn't make me feel any better.

It probably didn't help my state of mind that I have been reading The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston, which is all about recent smallpox and anthrax research / disasters.