TWiV: Vaccines for COVID19 & Silent COVID19 in Young Carriers

TWiV Episode 631 is one of their more important episodes.
Brianne Barker (immunology), Rich Condit and Vincent Raccaniello discuss papers which actually, this week, are very relevant to what our thinking and behavior should be, at least this week.
As always, they could use an editor, but if you have time walking the dog or on the bicycle, it's rewarding.

Key points:

1/ There is a saliva test from Rutgers available at some CVS's for the virus PCR, i.e. you can tell if you are shedding virus particles, which would suggest you are actively infected.

2/ An Italian study of 20,000 people suggest that in people below 30 years old as many as 70% infected with SARS CoV-2 (Covid19) are asymptomatic, i.e., could be silent spreaders--although previous episodes note more than 80% of infections were spread by 10% of infected people, "super spreaders."

3/ Some people who were infected no longer have the antibodies to the virus, made by B cells, but may retain immunity through their T cells.
Tests for T cell immunity are not clinically available.

4/ Vaccines now being rushed to production overwhelmingly are designed to attack the T spike of the virus. But other components may be more important.  In fact, in order to be well protected vaccines might have to use more parts of the virus to achieve really adequate protection against the virus.

This is really worth listening to.

https://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-631/

Bostock, Gorsuch, SCOTUS & The Emperor's New Clothes

"The only statutorily protected characteristic at issue in today’s cases is “sex”—and that is also the primary term in Title VII whose meaning the parties dispute. Appealing to roughly contemporaneous dictionaries, the employers say that, as used here, the term “sex” in 1964 referred to “status as either male or female [as] determined by reproductive biology.” 
The employees counter by submitting that, even in 1964, the term bore a broader scope, capturing more than anatomy and reaching at least some norms concerning gender identity and sexual orientation. 
But because nothing in our approach to these cases turns on the outcome of the parties’ debate, and because the employees concede the point for argument’s sake, we proceed on the assumption that “sex” signified what the employers suggest, referring only to biological distinctions between male and female. 
Still, that’s just a starting point. The question isn’t just what “sex” meant, but what Title VII says about it. Most notably, the statute prohibits employers from taking certain actions “because of ” sex. And, as this Court has previously explained, “the ordinary meaning of ‘because of ’ is ‘by reason of ’ or ‘on account of’” ...In the language of law, this means that Title VII’s “because of ” test incorporates the “‘simple’” and “traditional” standard of but-for causation...
That form of causation is established whenever a particular outcome would not have happened “but for” the purported cause... In other words, a but-for test directs us to change one thing at a time and see if the outcome changes. If it does, we have found a but-for cause. This can be a sweeping standard. 
Often, events have multiple but-for causes. So, for example, if a car accident occurred both because the defendant ran a red light and because the plaintiff failed to signal his turn at the intersection, we might call each a but-for cause of the collision. ... 
When it comes to Title VII, the adoption of the traditional but-for causation standard means a defendant cannot avoid liability just by citing some other factor that contributed to its challenged employment decision. So long as the plaintiff ’s sex was one but-for cause of that decision, that is enough to trigger the law."
--Neil Gorsuch, opinion

With his Bostock v Clayton County decision Justice Neil Gorsuch reasoned that a company cannot fire a man or refuse to hire him because of his sex, and that means if his sex is "homosexual"  or "transgender" the company has violated his rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Mad Dog was delighted with the outcome, i.e. preventing homosexuals from being fired for being homosexual, but had to wince at the means by which this happy outcome was achieved, not that Mad Dog was at all surprised by this legal sleight of hand--after all Justice Scalia did even more back flips in his Heller decision giving any individual the right to own a howitzer whether or not he was a member of a militia, as stipulated by the 2nd Amendment. Scalia did a back flip with a full twist on that one, whereas Gorsuch did a simple back flip. 

As is now common in Supreme Court decisions, the justice writing the opinion goes to the meaning or possible meanings of words we all thought we understood like "sex"

"Sex" to most people means gender, i.e., are you a male or female, as defined by your genitalia, or, if you've paid attention in class, to your chromosomes, or your hormones.

If you are really sophisticated and have followed the case of the track star, Caster Semenya, you know that sometimes sex chromosomes and even sex hormone blood levels do not settle the issue of gender, and that gender is something of a definition, a semantic thing more than a biologic thing. 

Gonads are testes; male testosterone levels

But for Justice Gorsuch, if you consider the woman who on Sunday marries another woman and on Monday gets fired because she has publicly declared she is a homosexual, then you have been fired because of your "sex" which is to say the way you prefer your sex, which would, no doubt have surprised every Congressman or Congresswoman who voted for the 1964 act. 

By the same reasoning, if a man is convicted on Monday of having had sexual relations with an eleven year old girl and is fired on Tuesday for his version of "sex" then that man's civil rights have been violated by the company which fired him, because, after all, it fired him for the way he prefers his sex, i.e. with under aged children. (Yes, yes, I understand you could fire him for having committed a felony, but then we could argue about the various understandings of the word "felony.")

You will object, the pedophile is a very different beast from the homosexual and from the trans sexual, but if you are defining sex as "sexual preference" or the way you desire to have sex and with whom, then the pedophile has also been fired because of his sex.

Not the outcome we want.

That's the problem with making rules based on outcomes.

Ross Douthat calls Gorsuch's reasoned decision "an act of sophistry, not interpretation" and of course Douthat is simply stating the obvious.

Gorsuch anticipated the objections, of course.  He tried to disguise his ruling as proceeding merely from step to step: if you accept this, then you must accept that.  And there is that lovely, "there but for this, goes that."  So he claims his hands were tied. He simply had to rule as he did once he read the text of the 1964 law which so clearly stated you could not be denied employment because of your religion, color, or  your sex. 
Of course what Congress what saying was you could not be denied because of attributes which ought not be considerations in whether you can do a job: your religion, which you embrace, your color which you cannot help or whether you are male or female, which is what "sex" meant in the days before transgender medicine. 

Anticipating objections from his colleagues that if Congress had wanted to protect homosexuals it would have said you cannot be fired on the basis of your "sexual preference" and it had plenty of opportunity to do that later but voted that down. And Gorsuch is right to say Congress's failure to be brave subsequently does not relieve you the duty of respecting the law they did pass. 

The problem is, the law they did pass was clear as day: They didn't want your boss firing you for being Black, Catholic or female. If you were gay or transgender or an anti vaxer or and advocate of Free Love or a Free Mason or a nudist or a Communist, you were not protected; out of luck. Congress would protect some classes of people, but not others.

Among Friends

Of course, Justice Alito got to the heart of Justice Gorsuch's claim he was simply constrained by the "text" of the 1964 law and Alito replied this was like a pirate ship flying a false flag while lulling its prey into proximity. Fact is, the text itself was clear and there is no question about what Congress meant by "sex."

You may say this opinion belies Mad Dog's long held contention that he could predict the outcome of any Supreme Court case with significant social/cultural content based on a one paragraph description, that Alito, Thomas, Kavanaguh, Gorsuch and usually Roberts would vote one way and the liberal justices the other, and here Gorsuch surprises. It's the old, "Don't tell me about the law; tell me about the judge" thing from Roy Cohn. 


But in Gorsuch's case, while he is conservative about most everything, he is not about homosexuality; he belongs to an Episcopal church which has gays and the Episcopalians have split over embracing gay clergy and he is with those tolerant of gays. So he voted, had you known this about the man, exactly as you would predict.

Mad Dog got advanced warning of this side of Gorsuch from a Colorado judge, who, at the time Gorsuch's name was proposed as an archetypal conservation told Mad Dog, "He may, occasionally, surprise you...and the Federalist Society."

Mad Dog has long argued that Supreme Court justices decided cases in reverse: Supreme Court law works backwards. You start with where you want to wind up, say legalizing personal ownership of guns, or permitting abortion, or outlawing segregated schools, or endorsing slavery and you work backwards from there, finding laws and reasons or definitions of commonly understood words and arguing or redefining and you claim you began with an open mind, but the text of the law, the original intent of the lawmakers or the founding fathers compelled you to the opinion you wanted to reach all along.

In this case, it worked to benefit society. In the Dred Scott case, in Citizens United, it did not. 

Rachel Carson: Revisiting The Silent Spring

"Will Google be paying similar tribute to any of the other mass killers of the 20th century? Hitler? Stalin? Mao? Pol Pot? Probably not. But then, none of the others have had the benefit of having their images burnished by a thousand and one starry eyed greenies. Nor, unlike Carson – as I note in The Little Green Book of Eco Fascism –  do they have named after them a school, a bridge, a hiking trail, three environmental prizes and an annual “sustainable” feast day (at her birth place in Springdale, Pennsylvania)"
--James Delingpole, Breibart News

"The list of diseases and their insect carriers, or vectors, includes typhus and body lice, plague and rate fleas, African sleeping sickness and tsetse flies, various fevers and ticks and innumerable others.
These are important problems and must be met. No responsible person contends that insect borne disease should be ignored. 
The question that now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are rapidly making it worse. The world has heard much of the triumphant war against disease through the control of insect vectors of infection, but it has heard little of the other side of the story--the defeats, the short lived triumphs that now strongly support the alarming view that the insect enemy has been made actually stronger by our efforts."
--Rachel Carson, "The Silent Spring."

Reading "The Silent Spring" again, I first read the objections to Ms. Carson's seminal screed upon the industrial, widespread and wanton use of chemical pesticides, but I also saw her argument through the lenses of my latter day education in biology and the environment, chiefly the fantastic TV series narrated by David Attenborough, including "Life Underground" and "Blue Planet." And, with time, I've learned that criticism and analysis ought to be used with equal vigor examining the arguments of those we love as on those we despise. 

Warning: I surely learned more biology from David Attenborough than I ever got from the professors of biology at my undergraduate college. Truth be told, I had four main professors in college biology, and only one was really good. What passed for biology at my college in the mid 1960's was mostly descriptive and "fund of knowledge" stuff which did not allow much for critical thought or, for that matter, for anything really useful. "The Voyage of the Beagle" was superior to most of my courses, though no less descriptive and iterative. Memorize. Regurgitate. Consider yourself "educated."

But back to Carson. 

One might say, if one had no time to investigate further that any woman who could earn the title of "eco fascist" from Breibart must be hero, ipso facto and be believed simply by virtue of the enemies she has made.

Carson makes all sorts of allegations about the destructive effects of DDT, mostly coalescing around the triad of ideas: 1/ DDT destroys birds, their eggs and other unintended creatures 2/ Target insects become resistant and the survivors are even more of a problem 3/ that once DDT kills off the pest at which it was aimed, new insects, mites, spores replace it which are even more destructive to the cows, people or crops the DDT was meant to protect. 
She does not use the standard footnoted references to support each claim so it can be examined based on the source study but rather a "List of Principle Sources" to cover arguments presented over a span of pages. This can be forgiven as this book was intended for the general public. 

A University of Wyoming entomologist, J. Gordon Edwards, goes page by page listing and "refuting" the "lies" he find in Silent Spring, to the effect only of revealing his own psychopathology, but she does leave herself open to this sort of thing by publishing as she did, a layman's book about science. But these attacks are trivial and often driven by other agendas.

The real problem I have with Ms. Carson is her proposed solution for malaria and other problems is in no way proven to be less potentially havoc wrecking on the environment than the pesticides she decries: namely genetically manipulated mosquitoes who are released into selected biological systems to breed in sterility, resulting in a decline of the mosquito targeted, mostly Anopheles.  

She says,  "Examples of successful biological control of serious pests by importing their natural enemies are to be found in some 40 countries distributed over much of the world. The advantages of such control over chemicals are obvious: it is relatively inexpensive, it is permanent, it leaves no poisonous residues."

Defending the biological warfare she likes: "To some the term microbial insecticide may conjure up pictures of bacterial warfare that would endanger other forms of life. This is not true. in contrast to chemicals, insect pathogens are harmless to all but their intended targets...outbreaks of insect disease in nature always remain confined to insects, affecting neither the host plants nor animals feeding on them."

Oh, Ms. Carson, beware that word "always."  In science, "always" always calls for the exception to always.

The other operative word here is "pests."  What is a "pest"? I would have to imagine a pest is some insect, plant or organism people, or at least some people do not like or consider harmful to a human enterprise or offensive to someone's taste.

(In New Hampshire, the horticulture department at the University of New Hampshire does not like, aesthetically, purple/ maroon leafy maples, the Norwegian maple. The UNH department prefers green. The faculty testified before a committee of the New Hampshire House of Representatives the Norwegian maple, with its dark leaves of deep maroon is "an invasive species" [another choice phrase.]You cannot legally buy, import or plant a Norway maple in the state to this day, unless, somehow, you plant them around the Hampton Academy school grounds, which, somehow, is exempt from the problem of an invasion by Norway maples. It might be noted, you rarely find a Norway maple growing wild in the woods and forest around Hampton or anywhere along the Seacoast--they are almost always ornamental trees planted by some stealthy gardener, likely before they were outlawed--Except when it comes to governmental planters.)

The most famous example of biowarfare run amuck, of course, was the effort to rid the Hawaiian islands of rats by importing mongoose. Turns out, rats being nocturnal, were not much bothered by the mongoose, which likes to hunt by day and wound up killing a lot of lovely Hawaiian birds but few rats. Best laid plans oft' do go astray, or at least occasionally. It doesn't take much googling to discover other misadventures:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_pest_control

The problem for Ms. Carson and for all of us, is biology is interwoven and like that wonderful Simpson's Halloween episode, when Homer goes into the past, where he steps on a butterfly and thereby changes evolutionary destiny for the planet, over and over and in unpredictable ways is worth re watching. This "butterfly effect" was not original with the Simpsons, which only made it most entertaining, but is a cautionary tale we ought not forget. 

Ms. Carson spends chapter after chapter, citing example after example of how ridding a micro-environment, a field, a state of one insect, one mite results in the emergence of another, even more troublesome insect, mite, fungus, cautionary tale after cautionary tale, only to then lay out for us a fool proof, trouble-free solution of competitor based, predator-under-our control solution.  She does strike the refrain that the whole notion of "nature under our control" is an exercise in hubris, but she cannot help herself.

Obadiah Youngblood "Church"

Ms. Carson alerted us to the problem; she was not as strong on the solution. 

Defund Police v DeFang Police: Right Idea, Wrong Marketing

Recently, on Twitter, Mad Dog received a reply to a posting pointing him to a newspaper report from a London paper showing unarmed Bobbies having been beaten by a crowd, and forced into retreat.

This Tweeter's photo shows a Marine in dress blues with his medals displayed across his chest saying that police cannot be cowards, implying, of course, that police who do not mow down demonstrators with bullets and clubs are cowards as they are caught in flight by photographers.

Mad Dog suggested the police who confronted the crowds, outnumbered and unarmed showed far more courage than their helmeted, shielded, club and gun toting American counterparts.

Those Ohio National Guardsmen who shot unarmed demonstrators at Kent States never took a step backward, but were they not cowards?

The two men in the famous flower power poster showed one brave man and another with a gun.

But to market the idea of disarming police as "defund police" telegraphs a message of anarchy. Of course we need police. We just need the right sort of police.

That Marine might well join a police force after he leaves the Marine, precisely because they will give him a gun to brandish, to show all the ladies and his buddies how brave he is.

But men who are brave when they have the gun and the firepower behind them, facing only unarmed civilians are, to Mad Dog's mind, phony tough guys.

Somehow, the idea of American Bobbies, braver than Wyatt Earp, has got to be marketed. Defund is not that.