Medical Discussion of Coronavirus

[EyeOweYou]

Would highly recommend listening to TWiV (this week in virology) podcast from last week for those interested in learning about the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis.

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-762/

spoiler: lab leak possible but evidence does not support it

[Shant]

Air trapping potentially underlying long COVID symptoms https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...44v1.full-text

[Tim]

Would highly recommend listening to TWiV (this week in virology) podcast from last week for those interested in learning about the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis.

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-762/

spoiler: lab leak possible but evidence does not support it

"US virus researcher Kristian Andersen and Sir Jeremy Farrar, who runs a global health charity in Britain, were on the receiving end of the email.

‘This just came out today. You may have seen it. If not, it is of interest to the current discussion,’ wrote Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Andersen, who runs a viral genomics lab at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, wrote back, ‘The problem is that our phylogenetic analyses aren’t able to answer whether the sequences are unusual at individual residues, except if they are completely off.

‘The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.’

Andersen also noted that he and others ‘all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory’ but added that ‘there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.’

On March 30 and April 1, Andersen sent dozens of tweets in a thread after the World Health Organization released its report about the origin of the coronavirus.

In the thread, he included a tweet saying, ‘First of all, I have very carefully considered the possibility of a lab leak, dating back to January, 2020. A committee under the White House OSTP/NASEM was set up in response to these enquiries and I remain a member of that committee today.’

On Wednesday, after Fauci’s emails went viral, he tweeted a reply to Australian reporter Sharri Markson downplaying the idea of a cover up.

‘I know it’s super mundane, but it isn’t actually a “massive cover-up,” Sharri. It’s just science. Boring, I know, but it’s quite a helpful thing to have in times of uncertainty,’ Andersen tweeted.

Two days later – February 2, 2020 – Farar sent an email to Fauci and other US health officials sent a ZeroHedge article wit the headline ‘Coronavirus Contains “HIV Insertions,” Stocking Fears Over Artificially Created Bioweapon.’

The messages were included in a batch of more than 3,200 of Fauci’s emails from January to June 2020 that were obtained and published by Buzzfeed on Tuesday.

The emails show Fauci received ‘a flurry of correspondence about the theory that coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan,’ Buzzfeed reported, including one email sent to Fauci on April 16, 2020 by Francis Collins. "

I am not qualified to judge any of the science. Fauci seems to have some pretty close "unusual contacts". Zuckerberg and Gates and Collins seem to have personal phone calls, but much of his communications about the lab possibility were handled by his PR person. Amazing when he finds things as TLDR please handle.

I just wish he would tell the "truth".

[Perry Ict]

And there is a thing such as right and wrong. Unintentional error or mistakes is one thing, no pass on the intentional and coverup and obstruction. The reason it is an issue is that the "desired message" is being documented as intentionally false and caused great harm.

I'm sure there are many varied reasons for the suppression of the information by the people who participated - journalists, scientists, health care officials, politicians, lay people, etc. I suspect for many it was unintentional, for others, maybe not.

For some, it was group think, and trusting authority (a very understandable thing, in my opinion, even if it doesn't make it right). For others, sadly, it was (and perhaps continues to be) a convenient political football that they must handle carefully to fit the narrative of their political tribe.

For others, they may have an even more direct interest. For example, in one of the Fauci emails just released, a certain scientist and president of an organization which received money from the NIH to fund the virology research at the Wuhan Lab thanked Fauci for backing the natural origin theory of the Covid. So, do scientists like that have a special interest in making sure the natural origin theory persists, rather than being supplanted by the one that could lose them their funding?

And that last bit is something that worries me, because I think too many interest groups - the Chinese government, the NIH (and maybe the US government as a whole), and various other groups of people - have a stake in this not being a lab leak, or never finding out whether it was. So, we give in, shrug our shoulders and say "we'll never know, oh well", and meanwhile we keep on funding the virology research (which may have, for all we know, contributed to this pandemic) full steam ahead, until (if/when) the next pandemic happens.

[Tim]

“So, we give in, shrug our shoulders and say "we'll never know, oh well", and meanwhile we keep on funding the virology research (which may have, for all we know, contributed to this pandemic) full steam ahead, until (if/when) the next pandemic happens.”

This is so ironic. We shutdown a Chinese embassy, expel “diplomats” as being an espionage hub of scientific data, prosecute US and foreign researchers for medical espionage and the answer is simple. Just allow our government to fund the research in China and say it’s perfectly fine? Oh well . Sounds like lunacy out of control in a bureaucratic mess. Silence is deafening, and fatal. The process needs to be fixed. By the way, Fauci’s eventual replacement will have the same issues, it is a defective process that needs to be fixed.

[Rando]

Air trapping potentially underlying long COVID symptoms https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...44v1.full-text

My guess is air trapping is a component of prolonged COVID symptoms, but I don't know if I like this study very much. The controls are matched for age but not for comorbid conditions. A smoker with COPD in the ICU is going to have more air trapping and small airway disease whether he's had COVID or not, so it seems to me to compare him to a non-smoking healthy control introduces possible error. I know there are some pulmonary docs here who could probably give a better opinion.

[pulmdoc]

My guess is air trapping is a component of prolonged COVID symptoms, but I don't know if I like this study very much. The controls are matched for age but not for comorbid conditions. A smoker with COPD in the ICU is going to have more air trapping and small airway disease whether he's had COVID or not, so it seems to me to compare him to a non-smoking healthy control introduces possible error. I know there are some pulmonary docs here who could probably give a better opinion.

It's important but not surprising data. post-COVID patients can have a pulmonary fibrosis/restriction phenotype, an asthma-like phenotype, or both. The study simply shows that even in the people with ground-glass on CT and restriction, they can also have airway obstruction (air trapping seen on CT and high RV/TLC on PFT's). This is therapeutically useful because the post-COVID patients with airway obstruction/asthmatic symptoms do get symptomatic relief from inhaled steroids and bronchodilators.

[FIREshrink]

"US virus researcher Kristian Andersen and Sir Jeremy Farrar, who runs a global health charity in Britain, were on the receiving end of the email.

‘This just came out today. You may have seen it. If not, it is of interest to the current discussion,’ wrote Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Andersen, who runs a viral genomics lab at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, wrote back, ‘The problem is that our phylogenetic analyses aren’t able to answer whether the sequences are unusual at individual residues, except if they are completely off.

‘The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered.’

Andersen also noted that he and others ‘all find the genome inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory’ but added that ‘there are still further analyses to be done, so those opinions could still change.’

On March 30 and April 1, Andersen sent dozens of tweets in a thread after the World Health Organization released its report about the origin of the coronavirus.

In the thread, he included a tweet saying, ‘First of all, I have very carefully considered the possibility of a lab leak, dating back to January, 2020. A committee under the White House OSTP/NASEM was set up in response to these enquiries and I remain a member of that committee today.’

On Wednesday, after Fauci’s emails went viral, he tweeted a reply to Australian reporter Sharri Markson downplaying the idea of a cover up.

‘I know it’s super mundane, but it isn’t actually a “massive cover-up,” Sharri. It’s just science. Boring, I know, but it’s quite a helpful thing to have in times of uncertainty,’ Andersen tweeted.

Two days later – February 2, 2020 – Farar sent an email to Fauci and other US health officials sent a ZeroHedge article wit the headline ‘Coronavirus Contains “HIV Insertions,” Stocking Fears Over Artificially Created Bioweapon.’

The messages were included in a batch of more than 3,200 of Fauci’s emails from January to June 2020 that were obtained and published by Buzzfeed on Tuesday.

The emails show Fauci received ‘a flurry of correspondence about the theory that coronavirus leaked from a lab in Wuhan,’ Buzzfeed reported, including one email sent to Fauci on April 16, 2020 by Francis Collins. "

I am not qualified to judge any of the science. Fauci seems to have some pretty close "unusual contacts". Zuckerberg and Gates and Collins seem to have personal phone calls, but much of his communications about the lab possibility were handled by his PR person. Amazing when he finds things as TLDR please handle.

I just wish he would tell the "truth".

Copying and pasting Tucker Carlson's latest diatribe really doesn't qualify as reasoned analysis, IMO.

[Tim]

Copying and pasting Tucker Carlson's latest diatribe really doesn't qualify as reasoned analysis, IMO.

Is it true or false is the question. Was there a legitimate reason to question the accuracy and appropriate handling of the pandemic? I guess Pompeo characterizing NIH as actively trying to derail any investigation is garbage. Something is not making sense. Go back to Fauci, that is the question.

[FIREshrink]

I was asked not to be political when I pointed out the varying vaccination rates by political beliefs and state vote in the presidential election, now you're on a witch hunt for Fauci. Let's keep this medical. We're mostly doctors here, Fauci is one of us and as such imperfect and most of us do not treat him as a god.

In the meantime, about 97-98% of Covid cases are occurring among unvaccinated people:

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/health/the-two-societies-97-of-new-covid-cases-are-among-people-who-havent-gotten-the-shots/

and vaccination rates continue to vary widely by red state/blue state:

Top ten:
1. Vermont Number of people fully vaccinated: 354,287
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 56.78

2. Maine
Number of people fully vaccinated: 742,131
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 55.21

3. Massachusetts
Number of people fully vaccinated: 3,740,479
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 54.27

4. Connecticut
Number of people fully vaccinated: 1,922,629
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 53.93

5. Rhode Island
Number of people fully vaccinated: 552,367
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 52.14

6. New Hampshire
Number of people fully vaccinated: 675,168
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 49.66

7. New Jersey
Number of people fully vaccinated: 4,389,480
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 49.42

8. Maryland
Number of people fully vaccinated: 2,931,258
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 48.49

9. New Mexico
Number of people fully vaccinated: 1,009,421
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 48.14

10. Hawaii
Number of people fully vaccinated: 677,530
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 47.85


bottom ten:

41. South Carolina
Number of people fully vaccinated: 1,750,335
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 34.

42. Oklahoma
Number of people fully vaccinated: 1,340,489
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 33.88

43. Idaho
Number of people fully vaccinated: 589,073
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 32.96

44. Utah
Number of people fully vaccinated: 1,042,991
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 32.53

45. Georgia
Number of people fully vaccinated: 3,409,346
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 32.11

46. Wyoming
Number of people fully vaccinated: 185,170
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 31.99

47. Tennessee
Number of people fully vaccinated: 2,182,063
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 31.95

48. Louisiana
Number of people fully vaccinated: 1,462,006
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 31.45

49. Arkansas
Number of people fully vaccinated: 946,639
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 31.37

50. Alabama
Number of people fully vaccinated: 1,435,719
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 29.28

51. Mississippi
Number of people fully vaccinated: 817,730
Percentage of population fully vaccinated: 27.48
What are we going to do about this? How are we going to encourage those unvaccinated majorities to vax up?

[bovie]

Copying and pasting Tucker Carlson's latest diatribe really doesn't qualify as reasoned analysis, IMO.

He also had several "diatribes" last summer which detailed, in depth, with first-hand accounts and sources, why it was quite likely that this all started in a lab. Then of course was widely criticized for conspiracy theory, xenophobia, racism, blah blah blah. Shouted down, and promptly swept under the rug by the entire national media.

Seems now that he was way ahead of the curve. Wouldn't be the first time.

Doesn't matter how you feel about the person making the argument. The argument either stands on its own, or it doesn't.

[bovie]

I was asked not to be political when I pointed out the varying vaccination rates by political beliefs and state vote in the presidential election, now you're on a witch hunt for Fauci. Let's keep this medical. We're mostly doctors here, Fauci is one of us and as such imperfect and most of us do not treat him as a god.

Irony. Keeping it medical would have been a good idea for Fauci.

[CordMcNally]

What are we going to do about this? How are we going to encourage those unvaccinated majorities to vax up?

Just by looking at the states, I would recommend having those that are unvaccinated move to smaller states.

[Lithium]

What about withholding tax refunds for the unvaccinated? That was how the individual mandate was enforced.

there is some evidence that the vaccination lotteries are effective.

[bovie]

What about withholding tax refunds for the unvaccinated?

Wow.