Note, first, that neither the delta variant nor the likely-to-be-called-nu variant is “South African” any more than the 1918-1920 influenza plague was “Spanish”. The South African public health authorities are doing a global service in tracking and analyzing, and have long been doing so, and deserve much kudos for this global service they are performing—perhaps Pfizer and Moderna could mark such kudos with more aggressive mRNA supplies for South Africa? Just a thought:
John Burn-Murdoch: ’Five quick tweets on the new variant B.1.1.529. Caveat first: data here is very preliminary, so everything could change. Nonetheless, better safe than sorry. 1) Based on the data we have, this variant is out-competing others far faster than Beta and even Delta did. 2) This is coinciding with a wider rise in cases in South Africa. Again, currently we’re talking about small numbers (both of B.1.1.529 and of cases in SA overall), but there’s a clear upward trend. This may be a blip, but this is how waves start. 3) Aside from its rapid rise in South Africa, the other key reason for concern here is that the specific mutations that B.1.1.529 has are — based on what we’ve seen with other variants — known to be associated with greater transmissibility & immune evasion. 4) Caveats: • This variant wasn’t known about last week. V[ery] early days. • Case rates v[ery] low when it emerged, so some of this could be a founder effect. Nonetheless it’s outcompeting Delta. • Urgent search for more data means some growth could be due to targeted testing/sequencing. 5) But what data we do have is clearly cause for concern…. To be clear: • I dearly hope this turns out just to be a blip. • If it does I’ll gladly walk thru the charts I’ve made here & talk thru why they looked alarming at the time despite not ending up to be significant, and what that would mean for future variant emergence charts/data…
My view: we are going to need 20 billion worldwide doses of mRNA vaccine every year going forward, provided on a six-month cycle with mRNA-platform doses tuned to the most recent case data available. That means no trials: design, start manufacturing, inject, and use your first injections as your trails (with some placebos for RCTs inserted for the first 100,000 vaccinated or so). How long are we going to need this? Maybe for our lives and beyond. Maybe this would be an overreaction. But, as Jim Stock told me (and others) in February 2020: “if you don’t think you are doing vastly too much, and if you don’t look back and conclude that you did vastly too much, you are not doing enough.” That statement of his has proved true every month since then.
But there is a lot of COVID good news. At least at European levels of past infection, a 75% vaccination rate does appear to provide enough semi-herd immunity that the virus becomes only a background threat. And as long as we keep up our boosters, things will only improve as real, effective therapeutics come on line:
Right now Germany has a wave—a serious case-count wave. But few people are likely to die of it:
On the other hand, the Trumpists and the grifters and Fox News appear to have given six out of every 100 people in states like Wyoming and Florida cases of COVID serious enough to be recorded:
On the other hand, the Trumpists and the grifters and Fox News appear to have killed one out of every 1000 people in states like Wyoming and Florida:
And for what? Political advantage, and ad revenue.
A woman called “Toad”, because of her highly-prized and attractive yellowish-brown skin tone, as painted by Victorian-Era Polish painter Henryk Siemiradzki in 1889: Phryne at the Poseidonia in Eleusis:
Ewen Callaway: Heavily Mutated Coronavirus Variant Puts Scientists on Alert: ‘Researchers are racing to determine whether a fast-spreading variant in South Africa poses a threat to COVID vaccines’ effectiveness… <https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-03552-w>
Ewa Stanisławska & Maritta Paloviita: How Euro Area Consumers Adjust Their Medium-Term Inflation Expectations in Turbulent Times: ‘Consumers adjust their medium-term inflation views in response to changes in short-term inflation expectations and inflation perceptions. Covid–19 contributed to an increase in consumer inflation expectations, but greater trust in the ECB is associated with more muted responsiveness of inflation expectations… <https://voxeu.org/article/how-euro-area-consumers-adjust-their-medium-term-inflation-expectations-turbulent-times>
David Glasner: High-Inflation Anxiety: ‘Again, Summers is simply recycling the same argument. We know that there has been a short-term increase in inflation. The question we need to grapple with is whether this short-term inflationary blip is likely to be self-limiting, or will feed on itself, causing inflation expectations to become “unanchored”. Forward prices of oil may not be showing that the price of oil will decline rapidly, but they aren’t showing expectations of further increases. Without further increases in oil prices, it is fair to ask what the source of further, ongoing inflation, that will cause “unanchoring”?As it has in the past, the threat of “unanchoring”, is doing an awful lot of work. And it is not clear how the work is being done except by way of begging the question that really needs to be answered not begged…
Dienekes Pontikos: Bell Beakers from Germany: Y-haplogroup R1b: ‘A Bell Beaker sample from Germany… a cultural phenomenon epitomized by burials with the eponymous Bell Beaker pottery… [or] a true invading population[?]…. I have always been on the “people” side of the conflict…
Bret Devereaux: Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving & Losing an Empire: ‘While there is certainly some continuity between the Late Antique and the early Middle Ages, the fall of Rome (in the West) killed lots of people (precipitous declines in population in societies without reliable birth control; probably this is mostly food scarcity, not direct warfare) and that living standards also declined to a degree that the results are archaeologically visible. As Brian Ward-Perkins notes in The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (2005), the collapse causes cows to shrink, speaking to sudden scarcity of winter fodder (which in turn likely speaks to a general reduction in available nutrition). Some areas were worse hit than others; Robin Flemming, Britain After Rome (2010) notes, for instance, that in post-Roman Britain, pot-making technology was lost (because ceramic production had been focused in cities which had been largely depopulated out of existence). The fall of Rome might have been good for some people, but the evidence is, I think, at this point inescapable that it was quite bad for most people. Especially, one assumes, all of the people who got depopulated)…
Alexis Coe: Chernow Gonna Chernow: ‘Jessie Serfilippi, a 27-year-old part-time interpreter at the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New York… published a paper that clearly hit a nerve. “‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver” offers persuasive evidence that the first Secretary of the Treasury indeed owned Black people. This time, Chernow had comments for all the major outlets. In an email to the Times, he wrote that Serfilippi’s paper “seems to be a terrific research job that broadens our sense of Hamilton’s involvement in slavery in a number of ways,” at the same time dismissing her for focusing too much on slavery…in a paper explicitly about slavery. As he put it to Smithsonian Magazine, “There is, inevitably, some distortion of vision by viewing Hamilton’s large and varied life through this single lens.” Chernow bemoaned Serfilippi’s “bald conclusions,” but never offered a defense of his own claims. In his biography, he writes that “the memories of his West Indian childhood left Hamilton with a settled antipathy to slavery.” In her paper, Serfilippi counters that “there is no indication, either in documents from Hamiton’s childhood or adulthood, that the horrors of slavery he witnessed on St. Croix turned him into an abolitionist.” Did Chernow cite the missing documents? No. Instead, he told the Times that Serfilippi “omits all information that would contradict her conclusions.” This is false; in her paper, Serfilippi notes that there are documented instances in which Hamilton criticized slavery and that he was a member of the New-York Manumission Society, which advocated gradual emancipation. But Hamilton worked as a lawyer, and as Serfilippi points out, it’s hard to imagine that his pro-slavery clients, whom he advised on the issue, would have sought his services “if he were known among his peers as having only abolitionist leanings”…
John Ganz: Thank You All!: ‘Almost One Year Later. In the spirit of the holiday, I just want to say thank you to all the subscribers of Unpopular Front for (almost) one whole year…. All your support has been deeply encouraging and allowed me to not only keep this effort going, but to branch out to other projects as well. It has—quite literally—sustained me this past year, which I know has been a difficult and frustrating one for everyone. Writing full time for a living is a wonderful privilege I never fully dared imagining myself doing and I am very grateful to all of you for making that possible. Please have a happy a Thanksgiving and a wonderful holiday season…
Ryan Avent: Crypto: ‘Is there any there there?… Cryptophiles seem to view what they’re involved in as fundamentally about Technology rather than Finance, in such a way that all the things we think we know about finance don’t apply. As a consequence, they seem fated to repeat all the mistakes that people in finance have made, then forgotten and painfully remade, over the past half millennium or so…
Crypto is the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" of finance. Matt Levine's newsletter periodically describes amusing examples of crypto bros reinventing some financial wheel that's been around for centuries and making it square.
Despite the UK rapidly instituting a travel ban on SA, 2 cases of the Omicron variant were detected in England. A number on the SA-NL flight were also infected. History repeats. It would not surprise me if cases emerge in the US and we are off to the races again, especially as the Thanksgiving and Xmas partying season is underway, recreating last year's surge. It just remains to be seen how effective our current vaccines are, and if we need new versions ready in a few months.
As ex-PM Gordon Brown noted, this pandemic is proving to be the largest health care failure in our lifetimes, as vaccines have been hoarded by rich countries and inadequate supplies shipped and dispensed to other countries with low vaccination rates (although my US county is barely over 50% vaccinated due to half the population being "vaccine-hesitant" - ie mis-/disinformed and just plain selfish about their rights vs. community health.
Crypto is the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" of finance. Matt Levine's newsletter periodically describes amusing examples of crypto bros reinventing some financial wheel that's been around for centuries and making it square.
Regarding the Nu variant, please allow me to draw your attention to this Stephanie Nolan twitter thread: https://twitter.com/snolen/status/1464226622127677476?s=20
Despite the UK rapidly instituting a travel ban on SA, 2 cases of the Omicron variant were detected in England. A number on the SA-NL flight were also infected. History repeats. It would not surprise me if cases emerge in the US and we are off to the races again, especially as the Thanksgiving and Xmas partying season is underway, recreating last year's surge. It just remains to be seen how effective our current vaccines are, and if we need new versions ready in a few months.
As ex-PM Gordon Brown noted, this pandemic is proving to be the largest health care failure in our lifetimes, as vaccines have been hoarded by rich countries and inadequate supplies shipped and dispensed to other countries with low vaccination rates (although my US county is barely over 50% vaccinated due to half the population being "vaccine-hesitant" - ie mis-/disinformed and just plain selfish about their rights vs. community health.