Fear and Loathing, a Rat Flu Odyssey

[AK47bp]

All the religious bullshit is really just expected and sad.

How do we expect people who think the earth is 6k years old, creation, etc. supposed to believe in a science that takes away their income streams.

Fight like hell!!!

God’s will and whatnot.

I’d say let them reap what they are sowing but these idiots mix into the general population and get non-idiots sick.


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

[Benny Profane]

Up to five months for paper stimulus checks to arrive. I understand the delay but what a mess.

Right after we get universal testing.

[rideit]

Up to five months for paper stimulus checks to arrive. I understand the delay but what a mess.

Maybe they are secretly counting on a few million of those to go uncashed in five months.

[Dantheman]

I bought his book here years ago, and it was an enjoyable read. Brains that think up those kind of characters aren't normal (whatever tf that is), but doesn't make it bad. Why be normal?

I answered the question, I did not make a value judgement as to whether being "normal" is good or bad.

Here's video of Spats (albeit from 8 years ago), acting rather intelligent and non-unhinged:



But, that's also a restrained version of himself and lacks Twister-themed parachute pants and a recumbent bike. Like iceman said, he's not unintelligent, which makes it all that much stranger that he now seems to be one of those people who non-ironically talks about being "red pilled."

[Rideski]

I’ll tip my hat to Spats.
About a decade ago I had a free airline ticket to burn and not much time. So I put a post up on trg that I wanted to visit San Francisco and did anyone want to hang. Traded just a few messages with Spats, had never spoken to him personally before. I flew to SFO, took the BART to the bay where he picked me up. Drove across bay, hung out a bit, rode bikes (he loaned me a conventional normal bike) had some drinks, met up with his cute gf, went out to dinner. Found an awesome hole in the wall spot, clearly not on Frommers. Went out for a few drinks after, crashed in his spare bedroom. Next morning he loaned me some city specific bike maps and dropped me off at the ferry. I floated across the bay, rented a bike, and went on an awesome 8 hour bike tour along the coast, down over the Presidio to Golden Gate Park, looped through there and Pacific Beach and then back up to the bay. Had a great trip. Spats seemed friendly and intelligent. Not sure what the definition of normal is but I’m not very mainstream.

He’s certainly going overboard on the link repost and hater wall but whatev. As for the points, it’s good to open your mind to other points of view. That’s how shit gets figured out. I certainly don’t agree with all of his, but I hate the bandwagon pile on aspect just as much. By pile on I don’t mean the current discussion, I mean the debased flame war thing. Hate that shit, always have.

[Core Shot]

Dude if that’s spats irl delete the video

No one is here to be doxxed

No matter how unhinged

But wait. Is he rocking a skullet?

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[Dantheman]

Dude if that’s spats irl delete the video

No one is here to be doxxed

No matter how unhinged

But wait. Is he rocking a skullet?

He has a link to his blog in his signature. The blog has his real name and the link to that video. I doxxed no one.

[Core Shot]

He has a link to his blog in his signature. The blog has his real name and the link to that video. I doxxed no one.

Cool.

He’s nothing like I imagined.

I did not see a skullet in his posts.

But it’s a skullet Mohawk.

Is there a word for that?

Skullhawk?

[Mustonen]

Patriots cheated to buy the masks in 3 2 1

The French were bitching that an unofficial US customer bought a plane full of masks out from under them on the Chinese tarmac.

So.

Sounds like probably.

[Bunion 2020]

Met him briefly in Tahoe when I was there for a snow workshop. Gave me a bunch of stickers that carried the tag, "Die while biting the Throat".

I tagged a bunch of vehicles with the stickers, company vehicles from places like Vail.

[jono]

I've met spats more than once, he's a pretty smart guy (or was), not sure how he got on Team Orange but the science-y aspects of his posts are not ridiculous. The political parts on the other hand...

Crazy but true: for once the science is unclear but the politics are undeniable. It doesn't matter which way you analyze the data or what model or thumb-in-the-air guess you pick, there isn't a single one that absolves the present administration of $2.5T-$5T or more in costs to the US Treasury. Because whatever the truth about R0 or mortality rates is, we could have saved most of that money by getting tests ready about 3 weeks to the left on the curves. Probably would have saved a lot of lives, too, but best case (aka lowest mortality rate) the money was spent because we failed to gather necessary information sooner.

In dollar terms the CDC cuts and nominal/ineffective ban on Chinese nationals etc is literally the single greatest risk management error in history. On 2/7 Pompeo announced $100M in materials donated to China to help. 1/50,000th of the government's costs.

That should shock us out of post-factualism. Should.
/poliass

[Mofro261]

Vaccine designers take first shots at COVID-19
Science 03 Apr 2020

The coronavirus that for weeks had been crippling hospitals in her hometown of Seattle changed Jennifer Haller's life on 16 March—but not because she caught it. Haller, an operations manager at a tech company in the city, became the first person outside of China to receive an experimental vaccine against the pandemic virus, and in the days since, she has experienced an outpouring of gratitude. “There's been overwhelming positivity, love, and prayers coming at me from strangers around the world,” Haller says. “We all just feel so helpless, right? This was one of the few things happening that people could latch on to and say, ‘OK, we've got a vaccine coming.’ Disregard that it's going to take at least 18 months, but it's just one bright light in some really devastating news across the world.”

The vaccine Haller volunteered to test is made by Moderna, a well-financed biotech that has yet to bring a product to market (Science, 3 February 2017, p. 446). Moderna and China's CanSino Biologics are the first to launch small clinical trials of vaccines against coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) to see whether they are safe and can trigger immune responses. (The CanSino vaccine trial also began on 16 March, according to researchers from the Chinese military's Institute of Biotechnology, which is collaborating on it.) As Science went to press, a World Health Organization tally of other vaccine candidates that could follow stood at 52 (see table, p. 15).

“This is a wonderful response from the biomedical community to an epidemic,” says Lawrence Corey, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who has run many vaccine trials but is not involved with a COVID-19 effort. “It's both gratifying and problematic in the sense of how do you winnow all this down?”

Broadly speaking, these vaccines group into eight different “platforms”—among them old standbys such as inactivated or weakened whole viruses, genetically engineered proteins, and the newer messenger RNA (mRNA) technology that is the backbone of the Moderna vaccine—and their makers include biotechs, academia, military researchers, and a few major pharmaceutical companies. On 30 March, Johnson & Johnson (J&J) announced what it said could be a $1 billion COVID-19 vaccine project, with about half the money coming from the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority if milestones are met.

Many viruses, including HIV and hepatitis C, have thwarted vaccine developers. But the new enemy, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), doesn't appear to be a particularly formidable target. It changes slowly, which means it's not very good at dodging the immune system, and vaccines against the related coronaviruses that cause SARS and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) have worked in animal models. Corey heads the United States's HIV Vaccine Trials Network, which has seen one candidate vaccine after another crash and burn, but he is optimistic about a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. “I don't think this is going to be that tough.”

One concern is whether people develop durable immunity to SARS-CoV-2, which is crucial given that vaccines try to mimic a natural infection. Infections with the four human coronaviruses that typically cause minor colds don't trigger long-lasting immunity. Then again, researchers have found long-lasting immune responses to the viruses causing SARS and MERS, and genetically they are far more like SARS-CoV-2. And unlike cold-causing viruses, which stay in the nose and throat, the new coronavirus targets the lower respiratory tract, where the immune response can be stronger, says Mark Slifka, an immunologist who studies vaccines at the Oregon National Primate Research Center. “When you get an infection in the lungs, you actually get high levels of antibodies and other immune cells from your bloodstream into that space.”

Even with an all-out effort, Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), predicts a vaccine “is going to take a year, a year and a half, at least.” Side effects, dosing issues, and manufacturing problems can all cause delays. Already some are calling for an ethically fraught shortcut to speed up clinical trials: giving people candidate vaccines and then intentionally attempting to infect them (see sidebar, p. 16).

A vaccine candidate might also be made available to health care workers and others at high risk even before final efficacy trials are completed. Stanley Perlman, a veteran coronavirus researcher at the University of Iowa, suggests a vaccine that only offers limited protection and durability could be good enough—at first. “In this kind of epidemic setting, as long as you have something that tides us along and prevents a lot of deaths, that may be adequate,” he says.

[Mofro261]

con't

A better spike
On 13 January, 3 days after Chinese researchers first made public the full RNA sequence of SARS-CoV-2, NIAID immunologist Barney Graham sent Moderna an optimized version of a gene that would become the backbone of its vaccine. Sixty-three days later, the first dose of the vaccine went into Haller and other volunteers participating in the small trial at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute. In 2016, Graham had made a Zika virus vaccine that went from lab bench to first volunteer in what was then a lightning-fast 190 days. “We beat that record by nearly 130 days,” he says.

The effort benefited from lessons Graham learned from his past vaccine efforts, including his work on respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). The search for an RSV vaccine has a checkered past: In 1966 a trial of a candidate vaccine was linked to the death of two children. Later studies identified the problem as vaccine-triggered antibodies that bound to the surface protein of the virus but did not neutralize its ability to infect cells. This antibody-viral complex, in turn, sometimes led to haywire immune responses.

Studying structures of the RSV surface protein, Graham discovered that it had different orientations before and after fusing with a cell. Only the pre-fusion state, it turned out, triggered high levels of neutralizing antibodies, so in 2013 he engineered a stable form of the molecule in that configuration. “It was so clear at that point that if you didn't have structure, you didn't really know what you were doing,” Graham says.

The experience came in handy in 2015, when a member of Graham's lab made a pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia, and came back ill. Worried that it might be MERS, which is endemic in Saudi Arabian camels and repeatedly jumps into humans there, Graham's team checked for the virus and instead pulled out a common cold coronavirus. It was relatively easy to determine the structure of its spike, which then allowed the team to make stable forms of the ones for the SARS and MERS viruses, and, in January, for SARS-CoV-2's. That's the basis of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine, which contains mRNA that directs a person's cells to produce this optimized spike protein.

No mRNA vaccine has yet reached a phase III clinical trial, let alone been approved for use. But producing huge numbers of doses may be easier for mRNA vaccines than for traditional ones, says Mariola Fotin-Mleczek of the German company CureVac, which is also working on an mRNA vaccine for the new coronavirus. CureVac's experimental rabies vaccine showed a strong immune response with a single microgram of mRNA, suggesting 1 gram could vaccinate 1 million people. “Ideally, what you have to do is produce maybe hundreds of grams. And that would be enough,” Fotin-Mleczek says.

Many companies are relying on time-tested techniques. Sinovac Biotech is making a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine by chemically inactivating whole virus particles and adding an immune booster called alum. Sinovac used the same strategy for a SARS vaccine it developed and tested in a phase I clinical trial 16 years ago, says Meng Weining, a vice president at Sinovac. “We immediately just restarted the approach we already know.”

Florian Krammer, a virologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, says inactivated virus vaccines have the advantage of being a tried-and-true technology that can be scaled up in many countries. “Those manufacturing plants are out there, and they can be used,” Krammer says.

CanSino is now testing another approach. Its vaccine uses a nonreplicating version of adenovirus-5 (Ad5), which also causes the common cold, as a “vector” to carry in the gene for the coronavirus spike protein. Other vaccine researchers worry that because many people have immunity to Ad5, they could mount an immune response against the vector, preventing it from delivering the spike protein gene into human cells—or it might even cause harm, as seemed to happen in a trial of an Ad5-based HIV vaccine made by Merck. But the same Chinese collaboration produced an Ebola vaccine, which Chinese regulators approved in 2017, and a company press release claimed its new candidate generated “strong immune responses in animal models” and has “a good safety profile.”

Other COVID-19 vaccine platforms include a laboratory-weakened version of SARS-CoV-2, a replicating but harmless measles vaccine virus that serves as the vector for the spike gene, genetically engineered protein subunits of the virus, a loop of DNA known as a plasmid that carries a gene from the virus, and SARS-CoV-2 proteins that self-assemble into “viruslike particles.” J&J is using another adenovirus, Ad26, which does not commonly infect humans, as its vector. These approaches can stimulate different arms of the immune system, and researchers are “challenging” vaccinated animals with SARS-CoV-2 to see which responses best correlate with protection.

Many researchers assume protection will largely come from neutralizing antibodies, which primarily prevent viruses from entering cells. Yet Joseph Kim, CEO of Inovio Pharmaceuticals, which is making a DNA COVID-19 vaccine, says a response by T cells—which clear infected cells—proved a better correlate of immunity in monkey studies of the company's MERS vaccine, which is now in phase II trials. “I think having a balance of antibody and T cell responses probably is the best approach.”

Kim and others applaud the variety of strategies. “At this early stage, I think it makes sense to try anything plausible,” he says. As Stéphane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, says, “Nobody knows which vaccines are going to work.”


Final products
Spurring many of the efforts has been the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a nonprofit set up to coordinate R&D for vaccines against emerging infectious diseases. So far, CEPI has invested nearly $30 million in vaccine development at Moderna, Inovio, and six other groups. “We have gone through a selective process to pick the ones that we think have the greatest likelihood of meeting our goals—which we think ought to be the world's goals—of speed, scale, and access,” says CEPI CEO Richard Hatchett.

But he is rooting for other candidates as well. “We don't want to be in a situation where we have [one] successful vaccine and we have a contamination event [during manufacturing] and suddenly we don't have any vaccine supply.”

CEPI invests in manufacturing facilities at the same time it puts money into staging clinical trials. “By doing things in parallel rather than in serial fashion, we hope to compress the overall timelines,” Hatchett says. After reviewing phase I data and animal data, CEPI plans to move six of the eight products into larger studies to arrive at three that are worthy of full-scale efficacy trials that enroll perhaps 5000 participants. CEPI has less than $300 million in its coffers for fully developing a vaccine, however. and Hatchett estimates the price tag at $2 billion.

Seth Berkley, who heads Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, argued in an editorial in Science last week that the world needs to come together even more to streamline the search for a COVID-19 vaccine. “If ever there was a case for a coordinated global vaccine development effort using a ‘big science’ approach, it is now,” Berkley wrote, stressing that there must be extraordinary sharing of data, coordination of clinical trials, and funding. “You can't move 100 vaccines forward,” he says.

Moderna and J&J both say that if everything goes perfectly, they could launch efficacy trials with about 5000 people in late fall and determine by January 2021 or so whether the vaccine works. Meng says, depending on approval from Chinese regulatory agencies, Sinovac could move its vaccine through small phase I and II tests by June. But, because of China's success at controlling its epidemic, the company may have to find another country that has high transmission of SARS-CoV-2 to stage an efficacy trial quickly.

Haller has had no serious side effects from the mRNA injected into her arm, but realizes that the phase I study will not determine whether the vaccine is effective. “The chances of the one that I got being really anything? I don't know,” Haller says. “This is just the first of many, many vaccines, and it's just stupid luck that I was the first one.”

[Core Shot]

Maybe the word is mullet hawk?

I didn’t watch the video. But honestly it’s hard to seriously watch a lecture from someone rocking a mullet hawk.

[jono]

The French were bitching that an unofficial US customer bought a plane full of masks out from under them on the Chinese tarmac.

So.

Sounds like probably.

Taken alongside the Forbes story about all the domestic masks being bought up by overseas buyers (43M from a single lot in a NJ warehouse sounded to me like just a part of the day's sales) this whole escapade confirms that we are shipping/flying more masks back and forth than are actually being used. Awesome.

[The AD]

I heard the delay is because Trump wants his name on all of them.

Maybe he wants to actually write them all like Navin Johnson did in "The Jerk."

[bennymac]

Spats comes on here and states TGR is ignoring the evidence and he has told us the truth and we're just not listening

And then proceeds to make such bold predictions as
- covid is not the end of the world
- covid is easier to be spread in higher population density areas
- he alerted us to chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine (although he kept mixing them up)
- he was here to alert frontline health care workers to the side effects of these medications (despite also acknowledging that these drugs have been used for many years/decades and the side effects are well known)

He mixes in vague hard to deny statements with pure bullshit. And when called on it he snaps. I criticized Trump's dissolution of the US's pandemic readiness programs and he said I was a "literal psychotic" for wishing death on Americans so that I can hate on Trump.

I've got no problem if people want to come on a ski forum and brainstorm ideas and ask questions and they shouldn't be judged for it.

But this delusional fucktard doesn't deserve any respect or acceptance for the way he has been approaching this topic - as an expert in all topics whose predictions have all come true and are not to be questioned or disagreed with.

His dream journal of links and quotes is just further proof of his delusional state.

But yeah, crazy people can be fun to ski and party with.

[Core Shot]

Spats comes on here and states TGR is ignoring the evidence and he has told us the truth and we're just not listening

And then proceeds to make such bold predictions as
- covid is not the end of the world
- covid is easier to be spread in higher population density areas
- he alerted us to chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine (although he kept mixing them up)
- he was here to alert frontline health care workers to the side effects of these medications (despite also acknowledging that these drugs have been used for many years/decades and the side effects are well known)

He mixes in vague hard to deny statements with pure bullshit. And when called on it he snaps. I criticized Trump's dissolution of the US's pandemic readiness programs and he said I was a "literal psychotic" for wishing death on Americans so that I can hate on Trump.

I've got no problem if people want to come on a ski forum and brainstorm ideas and ask questions and they shouldn't be judged for it.

But this delusional fucktard doesn't deserve any respect or acceptance for the way he has been approaching this topic - as an expert in all topics whose predictions have all come true and are not to be questioned or disagreed with.

His dream journal of links and quotes is just further proof of his delusional state.

But yeah, crazy people can be fun to ski and party with.

Well. Yeah.

Covid is not the end of the world. As we know it.

Based on statistics and death rates. You can say this is no big deal.
And once it’s done, the percent death rate will be in line with other flus.

But the crazy shit. That I know second hand from my first hand wife is that this is different
Highly contagious. Some have minimal symptoms
But if you get it bad. It’s ugly. And ugly quick

It’s the rapid decompensation
The quick crumping
Then frothing intubation

Healthcare workers ain’t seen this before

[bennymac]

Well. Yeah.

Covid is not the end of the world. As we know it.

Based on statistics and death rates. You can say this is no big deal.
And once it’s done, the percent death rate will be in line with other flus.

But the crazy shit. That I know second hand from my first hand wife is that this is different
Highly contagious. Some have minimal symptoms
But if you get it bad. It’s ugly. And ugly quick

It’s the rapid decompensation
The quick crumping
Then frothing intubation

Healthcare workers ain’t seen this before

Trust me - I'm not discounting the seriousness of this pandemic.

I'm criticising someone who says "covid is not the end of the world" and because that is vague and true and hard to argue with we therefore need to accept he has been right about everything since this started and we need to swallow the other 99% of his bullshit

[Rideski]

I'm not discounting the seriousness of this pandemic.

I'm criticising someone who says "covid is not the end of the world" and because that is vague and true and hard to argue with we therefore need to accept he has been right about everything since this started and we need to swallow the other 99% of his bullshit

You sound like you need a punch straight to the throat.
Can you quit fucking quoting him?
It’s not a gotcha moment when you quote him.
It just makes a lot more scrolling.
How about you just ignore him if he riles you up so much?
Go post on some religious or political board.
Who the fuck are you?

[Benny Profane]

Covid is not the end of the world. As we know it.

I think it's a bit early to say that. Did you see the UE report today? Next week should be worse. Do you think we're going back to just last year, next year? Highly doubtful. But, we've just started. The NYC hospitals are this (forefinger and thumb an inch apart) from running out of protective gear. Respirators? Hahaha. Bad joke. So, by the end of the month, when the shit starts hitting the fan in the rest of the country, especially the parts of the country that STILL think this is not what it is, a good old pandemic, get back to us how this isn't the end of the world as you know it. This is major deep shit, as far as I can see.

[Mofro261]

Who the fuck are you?

answers question with: who the fuck are you?

[CarlMega]

anyone glances at his blog or watches that video for more than 3 seconds before acknowledging this guy is loon has their own judgment problems. you can feel the schizo-bipolar thru they cray-cray eyes, weird body movements before ever getting into the paranoid and delusional ranting. Yes, geniuses and nuts are, by definition, in opposition to the establishment. But JFC are we that fucking broken that we can't discern the difference between a compelling opposition augment with a supporting body of evidence VS some conspiracy nutty shit where you first have to suspend all disbelief and then string together a bunch of non-sequitur events like a delicate string of pearls to get it to try and close the loop. Shift the prism of his presented narrative even 1/2 a degree and it all goes to shit. Get fucking real.

[bobz]

Yup. Alabama is indeed projected to be fucked.
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections

Well, it's of utmost importance that Alabama does things differently from California, because Alabama is NOT California! Wait, let me find the quote...

Y’all, we are not Louisiana, we are not New York state, we are not California, and right now is not the time to order people to shelter in place.

Oooh, sick burn, "y'all"! That guv, she owned the libs right there!

[Core Shot]

I think it's a bit early to say that. Did you see the UE report today? Next week should be worse. Do you think we're going back to just last year, next year? Highly doubtful. But, we've just started. The NYC hospitals are this (forefinger and thumb an inch apart) from running out of protective gear. Respirators? Hahaha. Bad joke. So, by the end of the month, when the shit starts hitting the fan in the rest of the country, especially the parts of the country that STILL think this is not what it is, a good old pandemic, get back to us how this isn't the end of the world as you know it. This is major deep shit, as far as I can see.

Well yeah. Technically not teotwawki

But not the end of the world of human useless eaters

A few will die. Sorry. Vibes.

But most will live. And do useless shit for years.