Pretty much:

The first ten on today’s playlist:

The unseen covid-19 risk for unvaccinated people.

Shockingly, dipshits who don’t get vaccinated against Covid are getting sick and dying from Covid.

Who would have ever thought?

Interesting that Zeynep has come to the same conclusion that I did, that over the long term Zero Covid absolutism is going to really fuck over countries like Australia and New Zealand.

That’s something I realized a few months ago when it seemed they didn’t really give a rip about vaccinating anyone as they’d “contained” the virus. Australia is still only 1.9% fully vaccinated, which is a fucking joke. If the more-transmissible variants ever get loose there, which is quite likely, those are going to rip through the place like a tornado through a trailer.

Zero Covid is a fantasy version of how the real world works. I wish it weren’t, but in most places it can’t work, and in the places it does work now it will eventually fail.

I don’t agree with some of the ideas in this interview, but it’s been very sad seeing liberals move to this belief system.

Ultimately, I think puritanism contributes to a lot of poor public health messaging and policy. There’s a sense that it’s unimportant or even wrong to want to have pleasure for the sake of pleasure, when it’s actually a human universal and can be critical for health and well-being.

The same damn lib will tell you prudishness hasn’t increased while their fingers are wagging so hard you can hear sonic booms. It’d be funny if it weren’t so generally harmful.

Funny thread. And true, alas.

Tip for those who don’t know anything about retail: the only store that is likely to have anything in “the back” is a shoe store. Most others do not and never do. Think about it. Why would a store keep a bunch of crap they want to sell where no one can see it? It doesn’t make any sense.

Shoe stores have limited shelf space and the boxes are necessarily fairly large, so sometimes they do have other sizes available in the back of the store. Other stores, there’s basically no chance of any hidden stock.

Wow, she’s big fun. What a voice.

It begins to seem to me that the only way for countries to deal with Covid is going to be to get it under control w/draconian methods, then enforce a hard border with mandatory quarantine (backed with prison penalties for breaking it.) https://t.co/ToN02apFfM

— Ian Welsh (@iwelsh) May 29, 2021

This is not really how viruses work, though. I mean, it’s kinda true if you understand very little and need a kindergarten-level comprehension? This all emerges from a reservoir of deep misunderstanding of the complexities involved, and the constraints on viral evolution. The above is just lockdown worship and lockdown life propaganda pseudoscientifically rebranded, which unfortunately Ian Welsh has started to engage in.

I’m not a virologist but I read vastly more than most people. So let’s talk a little about viral evolution and evolution in general. I will avoid most technical terms so my thoughts are accessible to most.

If you model a problem space to be solved, and evolution attempting to solve those problems, there are some solution configurations that evolution will never reach. For instance, it’s nearly impossible, even over infinite time scales, that a biological creature will evolve a jet engine as found on a 747. Why? Some of the steps are too onerous, too much of a leap, for blind evolution. However, obviously, jet engines are possible because we have them. Brute biology just cannot get there no matter what.

Now let’s bring it back to viruses. It’s harder for people to think about these things, I think, because viruses are so very minuscule and barely (or don’t) follow many of our macro intuitions. And because HIV is a highly-unusual virus but also the one that many are most familiar with (sort of). Suffice it to say, the SARS2 pathogen also has tradeoffs and constraints and configurations it can never achieve no matter how evolution influences it just like with my example of a jet engine above.

What are these limitations? Well, we don’t know all of them and probably never will, but SARS2 is definitely not infinitely-adaptable nor infinitely-malleable no matter how many hosts it infects or how it spreads. There are some — many! — states it will never get into no matter the time or infection pool, and even in those ones it can achieve there are large compromises. For instance, it’s highly unlikely that SARS2 will escape vaccines completely (or for long) because its mutation rate is actually very low and the mutations it can express (the problem space it can solve) tend to make it much less heat-tolerant.

That is one example — there are others. But my point is that when you hear this sort of catastrophizing and people becoming alarmingly aroused by the prospect of infinite lockdowns and hard borders forever, realize that though what they are doing might seem scientific, it’s little different than the anti-masker claiming that masks can’t work because their breath is able to go through them.

Don’t believe either group. Neither know even a little of what they are talking about.