As I scan across NJ I see that there are many break through infections, ones where the patient was vaccinated and had already had one or more prior infections. Needless to say the severity is less but it poses a significant immunity question.
Does immunity wane so fast or are the viruses mutation so quickly or both? I have not seen any studies on these issues. It may be that this virus will just linger.
Each year when I see the list of Commencement Speakers ever expand into the most nonsensical choices I recall MIT in 1971. There was none. Commencement was for those being awarded degrees and frankly the attitude was just keep Mom and Dad happy then get lunch.
Today we have a plethora of actors, political figures on the campaign trail, overpaid academic Commissars and their political nonsense. Perhaps today's woke students find this entertaining and justified but perhaps they should just hand out degrees and get lunch!
The old adage that form follows function has been abandoned by young designers who have no clue who uses their products. The NY Times has an excellent piece on the destruction of auto displays by introducing oversized ones that become deadly distractions.
They note:
Thirty-two years later, touch screens are not only back but mostly standard. The complaints are the same: The screens are equally useless and enraging. Distracted, frustrated drivers, of course, are dangers to themselves and everyone else on the road.
We now have designers from what I calls the 30s Club. Young, arrogant, often oblivious to form follows function and people who think their idea is always the best. The highway may become strewn with dead bodies but their new design can still be enhanced.
Imagine if we had these egoists design Apollo to the moon. We would never have gotten their.
The problem is that there are no adults telling them that their ideas are nonsense. That is no longer allowed. Ultimately it will be massive law suits, dead bodies, and bankruptcies.The real problem is the 30s Club.
Back in the late 1950s when I was getting ready for college there was no way my parents could pay and in addition I had no reference of college educated family members. The main option was the Draft and Viet Nam had not yet fully blossomed.
College was cheap. MIT I think was still less than $1000 per years plus room and board. However one could exist in a student hovel, an apartment with multiple room mates at $40 per month each plus food. Food could be purchased at $5 per week if one was cautious. Thus having a summer job as a lifeguard, at $70 per week, less $20 for Fed and NY Tax and SSI, one had $50 per week then subtract transportation, $0.15 bus each way. No cell phone, no laptop, no Netflix, no lunch, one pair of shoes.
Now how to come up with the tuition? The only real solution was a scholarship. By 1960 there were multiple science and engineering scholarships from NASA, to DoD, to even NY State. I got a NY State Science and Engineering one which covered tuition. I was home free along as I continued to perform. Four years later, degree in hand, debt free, and quite slim from my low calorie diet, I was in grad school. Again fellowships and after some six years on multiple degrees I was out in 1971, debt free.
However in 1971, thanks to Viet Nam and Nixon, there were no jobs, not a single one. My only choice was to work for my father who had started his electrical company on Staten Island as an electrician. After-all MIT had awarded me a PhD in EECS so I must be able to do something. My job, connecting methane release systems on the Staten Island Dump! Nothing like the State Island Dump in July! Thanks President Nixon!
The lesson however is twofold. The Government provide scholarships, tuition support, for those who performed and who were seeking to be employed in key areas. Second, the tuition was modest because the overhead at MIT and other schools was low. They were academic institutions not proto-Marxist training and indoctrination camps filled with Commissars paid exorbitant salaries.
Thus when the NY Times writes that:
Those are worries of an out-of-touch chattering class. No one drank enough beer in college for the last 30 years to deserve a student loan balance that increases even as the debtor attempts to pay down the principal. The message that some people don’t deserve debt relief is a politics of grievance. If you cannot craft a political message that acknowledges that we turned the greatest vehicle of social mobility into a debt machine, then you are not good at messaging. This is the right message: We messed up. Our bad. Make it right. Cancel the debt.
In reality the right approach is based upon the euphemism, "prior planning prevents poor performance". College is only a stepping stone if the the steps leads to a productive person. Namely science and engineering, medicine, etc. The extreme Liberal Arts areas are laudable for those who can afford limited opportunities. To say that anyone who goes to college to study anything should be funded by the taxpayer is outright balderdash. (I always wanted to use that word).
One should go back to my Red Queen post. Then read the NY Times piece:
The Biden administration is preparing for the possibility that 100 million Americans — roughly 30 percent of the population — will get infected with the coronavirus this fall and winter, according to the administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The 100 million figure is not as high as the total number of Americans known to have become infected with the highly contagious Omicron variant during the wave in December and January. It is based on a range of outside models, though the official did not specify which ones, and assumes that a rapidly evolving virus in the Omicron family — not a new variant — will spread through a population with waning immunity against infection.
We discussed the current scientific facts regarding mutations. Viruses that mutate at a great rate in humans, such as single stranded RNA viruses and in a highly immune compromised population tend to mutate to a state of continued existence. They failed to kill of the hosts but just become like the common cold.
There does not appear at this time to be any scientific basis for the assertion of 100 million. We know the virus moves back and forth even in immune individuals but in a mild to non-existent manner. Who is positing this number and why!
Back in 2008 and the beginning of Obama's administration the wizards of economics predicted a rapid recovery. It did not happen and for obvious reasons. Now we return to that analysis keeping it updated.
The chart below shows Participation rate of population and the stated unemployment and the unemployment if the participation rate was what it had been before 2008. Note that the participation rate has dropped and thus the lower unemployment. If we had the same participation rate we would have a 7% unemployment rate. One wonders where the participating people have gone. One suspects it has to do with handouts and off the book employment.
The Red Queen Hypothesis is based upon the Lewis Carroll tale of Through the Looking Glass where Alice and the Queen have a foot race and no matter has fast either go the remain in the same place. In genetics the argument is that biological entities must continually evolve, mutate, just to stay existent.
Now we see that COVID variants are continuing to arise. In Nature they note:
Here we go again. Nearly six months after researchers in South Africa identified the Omicron coronavirus variant, two offshoots of the game-changing lineage are once again driving a surge in COVID-19 cases there.
Several studies released in the past week show that the variants — known as BA.4 and BA.5 — are slightly more transmissible than earlier forms of Omicron, and can dodge some of the immune protection conferred by previous infection and vaccination...“We’re definitely entering a resurgence in South Africa, and it seems to be driven entirely by BA.4 and BA.5,” says Penny Moore, a virologist at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, whose team is studying the variants. “We’re seeing crazy numbers of infections. Just within my lab, I have six people off sick.” However, scientists say it is not yet clear whether BA.4 and BA.5 will cause much of a spike in hospitalizations in South Africa or elsewhere. High levels of population immunity — provided by previous waves of Omicron infection and by vaccination — might blunt much of the damage previously associated with new SARS-CoV-2 variants. Moreover, the rise of BA.4 and BA.5 — as well as that of another Omicron offshoot in North America — could mean that SARS-CoV-2 waves are beginning to settle into predictable patterns, with new waves periodically emerging from circulating strains (see ‘Omicron’s new identities’). “These are the first signs that the virus is evolving differently,” compared with the first two years of the pandemic when variants seemed to appear out of nowhere, says Tulio de Oliveira, a bioinformatician at Stellenbosch University in South Africa, who led one of the studies.
So should we sorry? Is this unexpected? Not really. The virus is mutating as per the Red Queen Hypothesis so as to survive. Namely manage to maintain a host, namely us, while not destroying the host and finding itself out of luck.
We made this argument almost a year and half ago. Clearly our useless Government folks seem to be clueless as usual.
In the famous 1890 paper by Warren and Brandeis, The Right to Privacy, the authors noted that there was no Constitutional right to privacy. They noted:
That the individual shall have full protection in person and in property is a principle as old as the common law; but it has been found necessary from time to time to define anew the exact nature and extent of such protection. Political, social, and economic changes entail the recognition of new rights, and the common law, in its eternal youth, grows to meet the demands of society. Thus, in very early times, the law gave a remedy only for physical interference with life and property, for trespasses vi et armis. Then the "right to life" served only to protect the subject from battery in its various forms; liberty meant freedom from actual restraint; and the right to property secured to the individual his lands and his cattle. Later, there came a recognition of man's spiritual nature, of his feelings and his intellect. Gradually the scope of these legal rights broadened; and now the right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life--the right to be let alone, the right to liberty secures the exercise of extensive civil privileges; and the term "property" has grown to comprise every form of possession-- intangible, as well as tangible.
They continue:
It is our purpose to consider whether the existing law affords a principle which can properly be invoked to protect the privacy of the individual; and, if it does, what the nature and extent of such protection is.
Owing to the nature of the instruments by which privacy is invaded, the injury inflicted bears a superficial resemblance to the wrongs dealt with by the law of slander and of libel, while a legal remedy for such injury seems to involve the treatment of mere wounded feelings, as a substantive cause of action. The principle on which the law of defamation rests, covers, however, a radically different class of effects from those for which attention is now asked. It deals only with damage to reputation, with the injury done to the individual in his external relations to the community, by lowering him in the estimation of his fellows. The matter published of him, however widely circulated, and however unsuited to publicity, must, in order to be actionable, have a direct tendency to injure him in his intercourse with others, and even if in writing or in print, must subject him to the hatred, ridicule, or contempt of his fellow men--the effect of the publication upon his estimate of himself and upon his own feelings not forming an essential element in the cause of action. In short, the wrongs and correlative rights recognized by the law of slander and libel are in their nature material rather than spiritual. That branch of the law simply extends the protection surrounding physical property to certain of the conditions necessary or helpful to worldly prosperity. On the other hand, our law recognizes no principle upon which compensation can be granted for mere injury to the feelings. However painful the mental effects upon another of an act, though purely wanton or even malicious, yet if the act itself is otherwise lawful, the suffering inflicted is damnum absque injuria. Injury of feelings may indeed be taken account of, in ascertaining the amount of damages when attending what is recognized as a legal injury; but our system, unlike the Roman law, does not afford a remedy even for mental suffering which results from mere contumely and insult, from an intentional and unwarranted violation of the "honor" of another
The conclusion is that they try to find one in Common Law and Torts, not in the Constitution. Thus the issue of privacy has at best been accomplishe by law not by the Constitution.
In a recent article in The Hill, one of the former "advisors" on the Corona virus from China is noted as saying:
...the U.S. should be prepared for another potential COVID-19 surge after a recent uptick in infections in South Africa. “They’re on an upslope again,” Birx said of South Africa’s infections on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “Each of these surges are about four to six months apart. That tells me that natural immunity wanes enough in the general population after four to six months that a significant surge is going to occur again. And this is what we have to be prepared for in this country,” she added. Birx specifically warned Americans should be “preparing right now for a potential surge in this summer across the southern United States.”
Well the facts seem to bear out a different tale. South Africa seems to be a location for high Covid mutation rates. Why? Perhaps because of the immune compromised people who have massive HIV infections. In a reasonably health person the virus can mutate just so much before the immune system takes over. However in highly immune compromised people the number of mutations are many orders of magnitude more and thus new variants come forth.
Thus the natural immunity argument that the good Doctor promulgates may not be the driver. In fact we now have a US population that is nearly 90% vaccinated and almost 50% previously infected. This means that there may get a variant but that for most the immune system will kick in. That is why we have break throughs but no US based variants.
One suspects this palaver is driven by book sales and not scientific facts. That may have been what we have been facing all along.
So is this disinformation. Speculation without a scientific basis is close. If anything in my opinion it is reckless.
I was amazed to see the move to destroy the First Amendment and how channels such as Time have enshrined it in its propaganda. The writer states:
But “free speech” in the 21st century means something very different than it did in the 18th, when the Founders enshrined it in the Constitution. The right to say what you want without being imprisoned is not the same as the right to broadcast disinformation to millions of people on a corporate platform. This nuance seems to be lost on some techno-wizards who see any restriction as the enemy of innovation.
One must remember that really racist and misogynistic President, Wilson, who had Bernays as his chief propagandist, we now apparently call it misinformation, promote our entry to WW I as well as promote the massive acceptance of cigarettes resulting the death of tens of millions. Bernays was a propagandist supported by Washington.
Now we struggle with information and disinformation. I use as a working definition that information is the transmission of verifiable facts. Namely one asserts something but that something can and should be checked. If one asserts that: "all chickens have blue feathers", then is that disinformation of information which upon a process of verification can be proven wrong. Clearly the latter. Just find a chicken with white feathers.
The problem is that our educational system is devoid of logical thinking. It contains basically religious assertions that students must accept at face value.
The advantage of free speech is that through verification, or as Popper stated verifiability. Free speech allows for, in fact guarantees that false statements see the light of day and are attacked for their falseness. The left's desire to control free speech is in my opinion a clear act of subversion, subversion of what is indeed a verifiable fact.
The challenges of understanding what the "science" was is best exemplified in the polemics during the pandemic. We still do not really know the mechanisms for transfer, and that is good because it makes us continue to search. Also we now know that infection can continue even with those vaccinated. Vaccination mitigates the effects of infection and it does not prevent it. But if one tried to promulgate that at the beginning of the pandemic one would have been accused of disinformation. Science is a process of continual renewal. As we learn more, as we have better means to measure, we often change the very fundamental paradigms.
The challenge in my opinion and my experience is that we must deal with uneducated but politicized users of the public square who want their view and only their promulgated. We have seen this process again and again in our civilizations. It is to eliminate that by asserting the right of free speech that out Founders saw as a mechanism to cleanse society of those who wish to control us.
The following are some samples of the current yield curve as of Friday.
The spread is increasing:
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