As a Canadian (read: lab rat) I'm hoping this forced experiment I'm participating in, run by someone with no scientific background, ends well also. Thousands of lives are depending on what, at this point, amounts to a gamble on minimal evidence.
This was not a personal decision from the prime minister, this is from the National Advisory Committee on Immunization. You can disagree of course, but let's not lie and pretend that this is just Trudeau that woke up one morning and decided to do that, lots of people are behind that decision and they also had the benefit of insight looking at what the UK had been doing.
Yeah. I count 13 doctors and professors out of a team of 14 people. "someone with no scientific background" is not an accurate description of the decision-makers.
Not to mention that the Chief Medical Officer of British Columbia, Dr. Bonnie Henry, came to the same conclusion even before the national level bodies had decided. Dr. Henry implemented the strategy by stopping second vaccinations so more people could get first vaccinations.
Let me attempt to give a defense of "first shots first" as someone who initially wrote it off as foolish, and later came round to it.
In an ideal world, you'd do a few clinical trials and figure out the optimal dose regime and timing. (I'm not really sure why they didn't run 5 parallel trials with different timings to begin with).
In the world we inhabit, alas we didn't have those studies. But that doesn't mean we have no reason to believe that the first shot is protective! You can still look at how vaccines in general work, and our basic understanding of immunology. In general, for vaccines with multiple shots, the model seems to be that the first shot gets you >50% of the protection, and the second shot mainly extends the protection over time. This might not be how the COVID vaccines work, but your priors should be fairly strong that this is what the clinical trials will ultimately show, because that's what they have shown for a bunch of different vaccines with different mechanisms.
If you're in an ideal world where inaction doesn't cost you anything, sure, do the studies.
In the world we inhabit, thousands were dying every day, and so inaction is morally horrifying. Giving a pair of doses as first shots to two >65yo results in far fewer people dead than giving that pair of doses as a full course to one 65yo. The expected value is pretty clear on this one, even though the clinical trials were not.
You should probably have started to feel tentatively confident that the first-dose-first strategy was sound circa mid-Feb, when it the UK's death rate had been falling rapidly for about two weeks: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/GGlgMxEKIoaxyuZbuHjjEBH2er... -- while it's hard to disentangle lockdown effects, EU vs. UK was mainly a difference between "locked down with vaccines" and "locked down without vaccines", at risk of oversimplifying.
If I had to summarize in a sentence: use Bayesian reasoning rather than applying unjustifiably strict error bars on your decision process.
> Giving a pair of doses as first shots to two >65yo results in far fewer people dead than giving that pair of doses as a full course to one 65yo.
In the US, though, I don't think we have ever been forced between these two scenarios: we have always had enough vaccine doses for people in our high risk classes. The question thereby is more whether it is better to have all the essential workers and everyone over 65 years old along with maybe third of everyone else with a single dose or to have the first two classes of people fully dosed... and "I dunno", right? ;P
> I don't think we have ever been forced between these two scenarios
I'm not sure; January->April the US was constrained by vaccine supply. The initial rollout to at-risk groups was not a case of "we got a shipment of 100m doses, now we need to figure out how to use them", it was more "we're manufacturing 1-2m doses per day and trying to ramp that up". It took months to go through the gradually broadening risk tiers. (e.g. see https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d..., which says "deliver 100m vaccines by end of March, 100m more by end of May").
I believe the US was keeping shots back in favor of using them later as second doses, rather than giving them immediately as first doses, though I don't have a citation for that to hand. If that's right, the US could have ~doubled its rate of vaccination, i.e. got to the April 15 "all age group open vaccination" milestone in 2 months instead of 4 months, with first doses only administered to that population. At the very least, we were giving second doses in Feb (21-28 days after first doses in Jan) that could have been given as first doses to the higher-risk groups we were still prioritizing through April.
There's a follow-up question on which I have not run the numbers -- are there any X,Y pairs for which you'd rather hold back a shot to give as a second dose later for a >X year old, instead of giving it immediately as a first dose to a <Y year old. Interesting question, I don't think that's what you were getting at though.
As a fellow Canadian I'm happy that finally we get some common sense in this pandemic. If we hadn't taken this approach we'd still be heading up on case counts instead of heading down, increasing the vaccinated base is what has turned the tide on the third wave and is what's going to end the pandemic here months sooner than it would have ended otherwise.
We don't have time to RCT test all scenarios. That's how life works. The long term immunity as a function of delta between the first and second shot has not been tested at all. J&J vaccine is one shot mostly because it can only be one shot yet it still works. There are other aspects that have not been tested in the trials. We need to make reasonable decisions under uncertainty in an ever changing landscape.
> reduces the risk of the worst symptoms quite significantly.
Right, reduces, but the full dose is needed to render the virus mostly harmless. My partner's coworker has Covid and one does of the vaccine, they are still severely ill.
First of all, when we read or hear about severe illnesses due to COVID in the news and articles, what they mean is hospitalization, ICU, and death. Are your coworkers in the hospital? If so, my thoughts and prayers go to them. I hope they make it.
Second of all, the choice was never between giving two doses to 16 million people (as of today) or giving one dose to 16 million people. The choice was giving two doses to 8 million people or one dose to 16 million people. The total death toll from the pandemic would be lower the sooner we get to the point of herd immunity. Giving everyone one dose gets us there sooner and ultimately saves lives.
FWIW, in the United States, it isn't clear we are ever going to herd immunity... like we are at the point where the New York Times is just reporting on the idea that we've lost that battle. So I can feel sympathy for the strategy of getting our essential workers and old people--at lease the ones willing to take a vaccine--double-doses before moving on to people who are less likely do die from the disease.
If your definition of global leadership consists of 2 world wars, several pan-Asian conflicts, war and conflict in areas like the entire Middle East, much of Africa, and large chunks of Central and South America for practically the entire 20th century, then it is clear that our definition of leadership differs greatly.
Are you trying to go down the NRx rabbit hole of "World War II could have been avoided"? It's basically a Godwin's Law at this point. Most of the other conflicts you mention are actually American and Russian conflicts, so you're also falling into the trap of "America is the world".
I continually get suggested videos that are all already watched. I can't think of the last time I've gotten video suggestions that don't already have a red line at the bottom. At least it has stopped queueing up the same 3 videogame walkthrough videos I always click out of the minute they start.
About half of the videos Youtube throws at me are ones I've already watched. While I will occasionally rewatch something, it's nowhere near half the time. I thought that it was because I use Youtube without being logged in, but I guess not?
> Rufus sucks for this purpose. It uses a weird partition scheme and custom bootloader that doesn't work with secure boot.
Rufus also tends to format the drive strangely for *nix ISO files also. Last time I used it the write operation failed and I was stuck spending more time than necessary repairing the drive's partitions just to make it visible to my machine again. What compounds this is the documentation which can only be described as condescending and hostile.
If memory serves, there's a section in the documentation's FAQ where the author spends a paragraph first telling you that it's good your having problems with your USB drive since it will teach you a lesson. I can never understand why some documentation writers feel the need to take digs at their users. Very odd.
Yes, that's absolutely correct. In my case at least I remember occasionally waking up when I was very young in hysterics because of general existential dread related to death.
I remember becoming interested in finding a life partner from as young as 7 or 8. I spent my teens and early 20s turning off girls with my seriousness and didn't manage to get laid until my late 20s. I was sore about it at the time, but in retrospect I'm glad I didn't meet with more success because I likely would have ended up marrying someone who would not have been a suitable lifelong match.
Would finding a romantic partner help with existential dread related to death? You will not only worry about your own death, but that of your partner's as well. Some degree of this is normal and expected, as it's part of being human, but if it reaches the pathological levels described by the author of TFA...
> Small numbers (1-3) of stuck or dead pixels are a characteristic of LCD screens. These are normal and should not be considered a defect.
Their product line does not really inspire much faith. I can't say I've bought a device in the past 10 years which has dead pixels on the display. To me, this is a defect, given that I can pick up a device, overwrite Windows with Linux, and have a device without dead pixels.
Check out their philosophy[0]. They aren't exactly a company targeting end user consumers. They want to put affordable hardware in the hands of a community of tinkerers.
Good luck with that. See how long that last, if the current trend continues.
Soon you might have to aquire a certified developerversion to unlock your device to tinker with it.
This warning is present, albeit in much smaller print, on all devices with a screen that you buy. The unofficial apple policy appears to be "repair starting from 1 dead pixel on iphone, 3 on ipad". Samsung has a policy which depends on the screen type: 1 for normal LCD, 3 for Super AMOLED, 4 for WVGA-resolution LCD. Every single manufacturer has this kind of clause, you cannot fault pine64 for this.
Though of course as it is a much smaller venture, you can’t hound a sales rep until they accept to repair it nonetheless.
That warning is designed to scare away 'regular' consumers, so it's doing its job. If the prospect of a couple dead pixels scares someone, they are not the target customer for a PinePhone. It is absolutely not a device for the average consumer.
How do you know if you're the target customer for a PinePhone? You read the 'dead pixels' warning and think 'I don't care... I want a Linux phone'. People who would find a couple dead pixels unacceptable would also likely find the features and functionality of it unacceptable as well. For months it couldn't take pictures or (reliably) make phone calls/text.[1] Now we can take poor quality pictures and have marginal phone functionality and think life is good! It's not that we're nuts (ok, maybe a little ;-) but rather that we accept this a long term process/effort and not something that will be even remotely perfect anytime soon.
[1] Hell, mine will never be able to reliably work with most USB-C chargers due to a hardware bug in the first iteration. Didn't care... I want a Linux phone! (and I'm too cheap to replace the board, I'll wait for a v2 to fix that and other issues)
Evolution takes a long time. And there aren't many (any) environments that we've identified and can reach which are conducive to the sort of life we know about. Also it'd be a bit presumptuous for us to colonize a hospitable planet for our own experimentation.
But it's an interesting question. In fiction, I can recommend Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, and sequel Children of Ruin.
a) nobody really knows the chances of abiogenesis or in-system panspermia yet.
b) we’re still guessing at bio-signatures; all we are confident of is there isn’t “a lot of stuff like us”, but that’s a compound claim and we can’t rule out “a small quantity of stuff like us” or “as much life as a desert but very different to us”.
There are so many chance events that could have gone differently and we would not have existed.
If not for an asteroid, the earth might still be populated with dinosaurs. Would they have evolved to our degree of intelligence and civilization? Who knows?
I'm also a fan of this idea. It seems far easier than trying to plant humans in giant bubbles with an Earthly ecosystem that just happen to be on the surface of Mars.
As other commenters have noted, it's probably not very wise, but I imagine it would be the cheapest way to increase the chances of the continuation of life (as we know it).
But why would we want to continue life? Whenever I read something like that I feel life a sociopath but I don't really understand it. I'd care about the wellbeing of the people, not the continuation of the human species or, as here, of life itself.
I mean, I think it's kind of a natural reaction to "well if humanity disappears altogether, what was the point?", so we feel an urge to perpetuate humanity, in order to imbue our own existence with some sort of meaning.
Thank you for your answer. So maybe my lack of such an urge it's not about me being a sociopath or not, but a difference in philosophical views. Although gp was talking about perpetuating life itself, not humanity. Does knowing that a random organism somewhere far away it's keeping the metabolic torch lit satisfy this urge?
Maybe after initial terraforming you could also seed it with a specially engineered retrovirus to help evolution along by tweaking genes associated with prosociality.
