Month: December 2020

Dr. Fauci’s Warning

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Dr. Fauci is warning us that it may take more than we thought to get to herd immunity. Now that anti-science Donald Trump is on the way out and Fauci is advising President-elect Joe Biden, he’s telling us what he thinks.

A year ago, we knew next to nothing about SARS-CoV-2. Since then, experts have bootstrapped us all the way to effective vaccines. The bootstrapping started from what we know about other coronaviruses and pandemics in general. It’s a matter of informed guesses, testing them against each other and observations, modifying them, and testing again.

Because the math of epidemiology is similar to the math of chemical kinetics, I’ve been following the modeling. It is also bootstrapping, guessing parameters, testing them, and modifying them. It’s a set of multiple parameters (an unknown number of them) being fitted to data that has serious limitations. The estimates get better as we get more data. That’s what Fauci is saying. Our first guess for herd immunity was around 70%. With almost a year of data, it looks like that could be as high as 90%.

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Pwned!

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Alexei Navalny is a Russian critic of the Putin government. He was nearly killed by a Novichok nerve agent in August. Yesterday, he talked to the FSB agent who poisoned his underwear and got a full confession.

Bellingcat is an investigative organization that developed out of Eliot Higgins’s investigations of Syrian munitions, particularly nerve agent munitions, when he blogged as Brown Moses. They worked with CNN and Navalny in this operation.

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The Pandemic Cabinet

Posted on by Cheryl Rofer

Job One for the Biden administration is controlling the pandemic. The economy won’t recover until people feel safe going shopping, to restaurants and movies, and all the rest. We can’t effectively work with other countries until we can think beyond full hospitals and people sick and dying and losing housing and going hungry. The justice system can’t work well with Zoom hearings and prisons as hotbeds of infection. We need to sort out priorities among education, bars, gyms, and yoga classes.

Simultaneously, the Biden administration must repair the government, hiring back to full agency capabilities and reversing malign policies. Assessment of the situation has already started in the transition. We need a fully staffed government, not hobbled by ridiculous policies, to control the pandemic.

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