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One of the things you didn't hit upon is how wrong we apparently got vaccine spacing. There was an interesting thread yesterday by your boy Topol talking about this.

https://twitter.com/EricTopol/status/1467186981327151105?s=20

It's possible that the reason the booster is so important is not because it's a 3rd dose, but because its spaced out from the first dose.

There is such a dichotomy between the awesomeness of our private companies and their ability to leverage science and technology to provide such awesome tools to fight this virus and our government agencies complete inability to adapt to novel situations. Imagine if the CDC and the FDA (more importantly) were able to shed the bureaucratic nonsense the keeps us from using data from foreign countries to make decisions, or to approve challenge trials.

On a political note: I wonder how much patience the public has for a new round of precautions. Seems pretty clear to me that we are about to have a 4th??? wave over the next two months.

Even if hospitalizations are high because of the sheer number of cases, if the severity and individual risk of hospitalization/death is low, you are going to see the public become even more apathetic.

Politically, another wave is going to hurt Democrats if it is accompanied with more school disruptions.

Finally: why are you always up so late dude. Damn. I wake up here in Argentina, and you are still going strong on Twitter.

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Dec 6, 2021Liked by Noah Smith

Paul Offit and the crew on the TWiV podcast aren't convinced about boosters. Quite the battle going on in the public health and virology space. Just about as a bad as the mask and test battles early on. Unfortunate.

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You sound smart and thoughtful when you talk about the science, but once you start opining about group process you are substantially less impressive.

"In other words, this looks to have been an elite virtue signaling campaign that ended up costing a significant number of lives." This sentence really made my opinion of you plummet, and I am not a member of the group you're accusing of virtue signaling. I personally never managed to decide whether I thought the US should forgo boosters so as to have more vaccine to send to countries with low vaccination rates. What I find lame about your view is that you're missing something that's self-evident, if you just stop and think: The booster shot issue is complicated enough that many fair-minded, non-virtue-signaling people might easily have concluded that we should be sending any spare doses abroad rather than using them for US boosters. Their reasoning might have been that even if we only consider our own welfare, we're better off getting more first doses into the population at large than more third doses into US arms. Or they might have thought that the ethical thing to do is to help non-US citizens get a first dose so that they have better odds, even if one consequence of that choice is that the average US citizen's odds become somewhat worse. Would the people who were swayed by these ideas have been right? Maybe not, but the point here isn't that they were right, the point is that they may well have arrived at their opinion by thinking over the info they had, not by having a virtue-signaling attack.

When you start thinking about the people who reached a conclusion different from yours, you slip into the illusion that you can see right through them, you know just how their tiny little minds were working. You do not know that. You are mistaking your annoyance at these people for insight. In doing so you are engaging in the same kind of process an anti-vaxxer does when he concludes that the people who want him to wear a mask are libtard nazis whose agenda is to take away his God-given rights.

Stop with that shit.

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One thing I'm wondering about the measurements of the speed of spread is, how much are we over-sampling the populations that are likely to have Omicron? My understanding is that in the US and Europe, officials are prioritizing the sequencing of cases related to travel from Africa. Thus, if Africa is in fact the main source of infections, then we are likely over-estimating the fraction of current cases that are Omicron, and if Africa is not the main source of infections, we may be over-estimating the correlation between Omicron and travel with Africa. (This is analogous to the problems facing exit polls after elections that over-sample minority populations, and thus initially seem more favorable to candidates that minorities prefer than the actual results are.)

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Yo, Noah, I saw you tweeted about what "bugman" meant. I found a weirdly long piece explaining the term here. you should write an article about this, considering they basically describe stereotypical weebs. https://hackernoon.com/on-the-infestation-of-small-souled-bugmen-6561ae922e07

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Lots of excellent info in your update, but I confess to appreciating the beginning (bunny taking on 'covid') and the end (Noah highlighting yet another failure of our increasingly failed state) the best. Thanks!

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How is it "symbolism and signalling" to suggest it's immoral to push boosters for those not facing a large risk of hospitalization and to vaccinate young children when each of those doses could be going to people elsewhere in the world who have no vaccine at all and are in countries where the virus is raging out of control? Even leaving aside the increased risk that variants will emerge through under-vaccinated countries, this is just gross on the face of it. Also see...

https://twitter.com/zainrizvi/status/1464348016501043224

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Omicron is the variant that finally convinced me that we're all catching this thing eventually. Hopefully, early reporting that it causes milder illness will pan out as new therapeutics come online. A rapidly spreading, milder virus isn't the best possible outcome (or even a good one) but it's probably one of the better outcomes currently available to us. We'll find out what we're dealing with soon enough.

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What’s the evidence connecting progressive politics to anti booster mentality? I know some folks were talking about not getting boosters so other countries could get them, but I’m not aware this actually changed when boosters were made available. Are other countries so far ahead of us in delivering boosters?

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Man, another wave is a huge bummer. I can’t blame anyone for their apathy anymore. I’ll be getting my booster shot, but I’m not sure it’ll be the last shot I get before this is all over.

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I'm not clear from this what was actually wrong with the argument that boosters trade off against giving vaccines to the developing world? Is there a distribution issue, or was there just not political will to actually do it.

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