Monday, October 26, 2020



If Trump loses, Trumpism will live on

Some excerpts below from a Leftist hate screed. In their own way they recognize that Trump has revived basic conservatism

He has lost some voters in the course of four years. He won 46 per cent of the popular vote in 2016 and today has about 43 per cent on the average of the polls.

But he is still President unimpeached. He is still supported overwhelmingly by the Republican Party. And he is still a real chance of winning re-election, with the betting markets giving him about a 40 per cent chance of victory. Another way of expressing this probability is that if the election were held under the same circumstances 100 times, Trump would win 40 times. In spite of everything.

"They say I have the most loyal people – did you ever see that?" He said that four years ago, and it remains true.

"That's the thing that's most distressing," Francis Fukuyama tells me. "He still has the support of more than 40 per cent of American voters and they love him – they love the fact that he's wrecking the US government," says the world's most famous political scientist.

Or, as the election analyst Charlie Cook of The Cook Political Report puts it, "Voting for Trump is a cultural statement." It's not subject to events.

The pandemic has exposed the limits of Trump's nonsense populism. Fukuyama says Trump would be easily re-elected if not for the plague. But it also has revealed the power and persistence of his appeal.

Even if Trump loses, it's "scary because Trumpism survives Trump," says Fukuyama. The movement lives on even if he's voted out at the November 3 election.

"The core of Trump's support is still going to be there. He will be encouraging them. A lot of Republicans [in Congress] have thrown their lot in with him." He would become ex-officio leader of the opposition.

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Oxford coronavirus vaccine 'works perfectly' and builds strong immunity to virus, researchers find

But only in the lab so far

The Covid-19 vaccine developed at Oxford University works perfectly and builds strong immunity to the virus, a study shows.

Great hopes rest on the vaccine, which is a global frontrunner and has been shown to safely trigger an immune response in volunteers given it in early trials.

But, unlike traditional vaccines which use a weakened virus, or small amounts of it, the innovative Oxford jab causes the body to make part of the virus itself.

Now researchers led by the University of Bristol have found this daring technology works for the coronavirus, just as it has for similar viruses in the past.

A study using cells in the laboratory found the vaccine effectively delivers the instructions for the Covid protein, which cells copy thousands of times to produce it in large amounts.

This means a person's immune system is then primed to recognise the disease and fight it off without them falling ill.

Dr David Matthews, from Bristol's School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine (CMM), who led the research, said: 'Until now, the technology hasn't been able to provide answers with such clarity, but we now know the vaccine is doing everything we expected and that is only good news in our fight against the illness.'

While the world waits for the results of trials on whether the Oxford vaccine actually works, the new findings are the next step forward.

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What the lockdown lobby gets wrong

There has been uproar over the past week or so over the Great Barrington Declaration, an initiative that puts the case for an alternative and less destructive approach to dealing with Covid-19 than the current cycle of lockdowns. In response, a group of academics, medics and policy wonks has put forward a response – the John Snow Memorandum. Though the memorandum claims the veneer of scientific authority, the arguments are dubious.

The memorandum begins with some relatively uncontroversial statements. ‘SARS-CoV-2 spreads through contact (via larger droplets and aerosols) and longer-range transmission via aerosols, especially in conditions where ventilation is poor. Its high infectivity, combined with the susceptibility of unexposed populations to a new virus, creates conditions for rapid community spread.’ Certainly, this is a serious and nasty disease that kills a significantly higher proportion of those infected than seasonal influenza. Unpleasant, even debilitating symptoms can continue for months after, even among the young and relatively healthy.

The authors argue that it is ‘unclear’ how long post-infection immunity lasts for and that there appear to be cases of reinfection, as with other coronaviruses. They say the spread of the virus is slowed down by measures of social distancing, face coverings, avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated spaces, plus good hand and respiratory hygiene.

Ongoing debates about masks aside (I think they may be useful where distancing is difficult or for people with symptoms, as the World Health Organisation suggests), there would be few disagreements so far from those who want to take a different approach.

But one clear difference would be over the assumption that lockdowns were ‘essential to reduce mortality, prevent healthcare services from being overwhelmed and buy time to set up pandemic-response systems to suppress transmission following lockdown’.

We seem now to be at a point with cases rising again where we need to make policy choices that could have hugely damaging impacts if we get it wrong. One, suggested in the original Imperial College modelling report back in March, led by Professor Neil Ferguson, would be to have a cycle of lockdown and release to keep a lid on case numbers and to protect healthcare.

The authors of the John Snow Memorandum clearly believe that this cycle may not be necessary:

‘Continuing restrictions will probably be required in the short term to reduce transmission and fix ineffective pandemic-response systems in order to prevent future lockdowns. The purpose of these restrictions is to effectively suppress SARS-CoV-2 infections to low levels that allow rapid detection of localised outbreaks and rapid response through efficient and comprehensive find, test, trace, isolate and support systems so life can return to near-normal without the need for generalised restrictions.’

This all sounds very reasonable, apart from the fact that in many countries (including the UK), attempts to implement test, trace and isolate (TTI) systems have been a failure, despite enormous investment. Suggesting that continued generalised restrictions, or one more ‘circuit breaker’ lockdown, could buy enough time to fix the problems with TTI seems very optimistic. Realistically, we will likely end up going back into lockdown and kicking the can down the road in the hope of a vaccine arriving sooner rather than later.

The alternative, epitomised in the Great Barrington Declaration, but a view that is by no means exclusive to its promoters, is to protect the most vulnerable members of society while allowing the virus to spread. There seems to be a fairly strong correlation between advancing age and the risk of severe illness. Children seem to get serious illness very rarely while the vast majority of deaths are in older people, with risks rising for every additional year of life.

By isolating only those sections of the population at greatest risk, the damage from Covid-19 could be greatly reduced even while allowing the majority of society to return to something like normality. At some point, when most of the less-vulnerable population has been infected, the spread of the virus will decline to a trickle. This is how epidemics throughout history have ended, even if infections continue at a much lower rate as populations change.

But the memorandum authors simply dismiss the idea. ‘Proponents suggest this would lead to the development of infection-acquired population immunity in the low-risk population, which will eventually protect the vulnerable. This is a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.’ This is a bizarre claim. This is exactly the approach suggested by the government’s scientific advisers until mid-March, when lockdown fever took over.

Their first argument is that there would be ‘widespread’ morbidity and mortality among younger people. These risks are real, but the memorandum exaggerates them. The vast majority of younger people suffer at most a mild illness.

As of 14 October, the UK government coronavirus dashboard states that 153,163 people have been hospitalised with Covid-19 – or 0.23 per cent of the population. One study examining the period up to 18 April, based on figures from 166 UK hospitals, suggested that the median age of hospital admission was 72. Of the 16,749 patients covered, over half had an existing comorbidity. The median age of death was 80. If we can protect both older people and those with existing chronic illness, the risks to the rest of the population are relatively small.

Another argument put forward in the memorandum is that ‘there is no evidence for lasting protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2 following natural infection, and the endemic transmission that would be the consequence of waning immunity would present a risk to vulnerable populations for the indefinite future’.

This is just silly. Naturally acquired immunity has always been the way that epidemics have ended. The idea of turning around a vaccine in just a year or so, on the other hand, is entirely new. Achieving durable herd immunity will probably require a vaccine, but we need to act now and we don’t have a vaccine that has been proven to be safe and effective as yet. Indeed, continuing to impose harsh restrictions only adds to the pressure to rush out a vaccine without going through the necessary trials.

Indeed, naturally acquired immunity could result in a lower herd-immunity threshold than could be achieved through a vaccine. The most connected people are also the ones most likely to get the disease earliest. They are the ones most likely to pass it on to a higher-than-average group of contacts. When these people achieve immunity, they break more potential chains of transmission than others who have fewer contacts. A vaccine programme, on the other hand, would (rightly) prioritise the most vulnerable people, with less impact on transmission. As for people being reinfected, this still seems to be very unusual. It is hardly cause to reject a herd-immunity approach.

The third argument in the memorandum is about practicalities and ethics:

‘Prolonged isolation of large swathes of the population is practically impossible and highly unethical. Empirical evidence from many countries shows that it is not feasible to restrict uncontrolled outbreaks to particular sections of society. Such an approach also risks further exacerbating the socioeconomic inequities and structural discriminations already laid bare by the pandemic. Special efforts to protect the most vulnerable are essential but must go hand-in-hand with multi-pronged population-level strategies.’

Threatening vulnerable people who do not abide by isolation rules would clearly be unethical. But that is exactly what ‘population-level’ strategies are doing to everyone. So narrowing those measures to specific sections of society would seem to be better.

Nonetheless, compulsion must be avoided. We must allow everyone to decide for themselves what measure of risk they are willing to accept, with ample support and advice for vulnerable groups to enable them to avoid social contact if they choose to do so. The memorandum authors are right to point out that there are practical difficulties. They are wrong to dismiss the possibility. We need to apply thought and resources to the issue, not simply wave it away.

In any event, how is it ethical to cause businesses to close, students to be imprisoned in halls of residence, free movement to be restricted and basic rights like free association and the freedom to protest to be junked? The authors’ understanding of ethics is very one-sided.

What about the ethics of the smear operation in progress against those who are putting forward a herd-immunity strategy? The fact that the Great Barrington Declaration was coordinated by an American libertarian think tank has been used to dismiss it with feeble ‘who funds you?’ arguments, claiming it is simply a callous attempt to put profit before lives. If we are to make progress, the first step must be a more sophisticated level of debate, conducted in good faith.

John Snow, whose early epidemiological work pointed to the true means by which cholera was spreading in Victorian London, contradicting the scientific consensus of his time, would surely have been appalled at this approach to scientific debate. The authors of the John Snow Memorandum are taking his name in vain.

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My other blogs: Main ones below

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://awesternheart.blogspot.com.au/ (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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