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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

Conversational account. For work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian. IKEA builder.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 4
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      Le Corbusier “retreated to his rooms in Paris” drinking and smoking and reflecting on how to impose Modernist Authoritah on the world. Gee thanks Spanish Flu. Wonder what bad ideologies are taking shape in Covid domestic cozy retreat right now 🤔 I’d better get Raoism codified.

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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 4
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      Lots of dubious patent medicines flourished since there was no regulation. Dr. Kilmer’s swamp root was one. https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nmah_714581 …pic.twitter.com/nNDWwOPDmh

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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 4
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      Traditional home remedies also thrived. Mustard poultices and stuff. This stuff is living memory even for me. When I was sick with coughs and colds and bronchitis as a kid in the early 80s (often), I was often administered Ayurvedic remedies like Starbucks turmeric lattes.

      1 reply 0 retweets 10 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 4
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      So basically all treatments being tried were placebos at best (hence the chapter title). Many were nocebos it actually harmful. The only worthwhile advice was to stay hydrated.

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 5
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      Section on fate of Odessa, which had been curiously unaffected by Bolshevik revolution and the only city to even detect the flu. Couldn’t do much with knowing because it kept changing hands through the war and revolution.

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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 5
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      The city was half Jewish and a prominent Jewish doctor/bacteriologist Yakov Bardakh led what efforts could be undertaken. The city was reeling under a flood of refugees from the revolution. It was apparently a famous cosmopolitan city of its time, known as Marseilles of Russia

      2 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 5
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      The Russian silent movie star Vera Kholodnaya retreated to Odessa and died of the flu there at age 25. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Kholodnaya …

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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    8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 5
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      A Jewish “black wedding” was held in a cemetery to ward off the flu. Between beggars. Apparently many such were held around the worldhttps://www.google.com/amp/s/www.myjewishlearning.com/article/black-wedding-marrying-the-spanish-flu-away/amp/ …

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    9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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      Next chapter, titled “Good Samaritans” begins with observation that your best strategy was to to be selfish and isolate yourself and hoard food. This would starve the flu and it would die out. Then as now, people mostly didn’t do that.

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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    10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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      Generally adaptive strategy of “social resilience” (coming closer together in a disaster) is maladaptive in a pandemic. Apparently there’s lots of theories why. Force of habit, fear of ostracization later for bring antisocial, all-in-this-togetherism, expanded sense of self...

      2 replies 0 retweets 4 likes
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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      With few exceptions people generally pitch in to help each other. Notable exceptions were in colonial conditions (Africa, India) where the colonized had learned to distrust white behaviors in crisis and deserted.

      11:06 PM - 7 Oct 2020
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        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          “At some point... group identity splinters and people revert to identifying as individuals. It may be at this point — once the worst is over, and life is returning to normal — that truly ‘bad’ behavior is most likely to emerge” Ah shit. The assholery hasn’t even really started.

          1 reply 2 retweets 16 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          Rio carnival in 1919 was more out of control than before and there was a spike in rapes it seems. And reports of a related ‘sons of flu’ baby boom (“hard to confirm”). Spinney cites Decameron for similar effects after Black Death.

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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          Long bleak account of ravages of flu among Yupik of Alaska. Already dwindling from other European diseases, the Spanish flu hit them hard, wiping out entire villages. Relief ships found dogs eating bodies in some. Weird subplot of Russian orthodox vs American Protestant missions.

          1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          300 orphans were brought to town of Dillingham of population 200. Today most inhabitants claim descent from flu orphans. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dillingham,_Alaska …

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          This was a messy story, hard to summarize. Weird mix of Russian-American-native history, transition to modernity, decidedly mixed role of relief ships that appear to have done some looting of dead villages, but helped others... there’s an Oscar-worthy movie in this episode.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 7
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          Next chapter, “hunt for patient zero”. We stop here tonight. This is an oddly choppy book. Lots of jump cuts and impressionistic dabs. It’s not as enjoyable as Tuchman’s more classical renaissance-painting tale of 14th century but in some ways more effective and comprehensive.

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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          The origins of the Spanish flu are uncertain. We begin with the hypothesis that it emerged in Manchuria in 1910 when China was weak and sick. The mandarins appointed the first western educated Chinese doctor, Wu Lien-Teh, to try and do something https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Lien-teh …

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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          That appears to have been pneumonic plague and looked similar to the another in 1917 that Wu thought was also plague but is contested. Hard to do autopsies due to tradition. 300k men from this region served as a labor force in the European theater the following year.

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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          This region = northern provinces hit by the thing that might have been either plague or flu in 1917. This is the modern Chinese origin hypothesis, not the speculation during the Spanish flu itself, which was more yellow peril mindset than a hypothesis.

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        11. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          So Hypothedys A is Chineze laborers. brought the flu to WWI. Hypothesis B is that it broke out on the western front of WWI (and infected the Chinese labor contingent after it arrived)

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        12. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          Case for both is circumstantial, since there were not tests for the virus and records are poor. So it’s a case of a time-space jigsaw puzzle of outbreaks in 1917 that presented vaguely like the pandemic proper a year later. Hypothesis C is similar — it cane from Kansas.

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        13. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          These 3 are the most likely hypotheses. Apparently the one thing that’s nearly certain is that Spain is not a candidate.

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        14. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          Next chapter on death toll. Already in the 1920s the best estimate 21.6m, 20x the Russian 1890s epidemic of 1 million. Revised up to 30m by 1990d, but likely still an underestimate especially for Russia and China.

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        15. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          We circle back to Odessa, this time with an epidemiological lens, to cross check the Russian estimate of 450k/0.2%. Odessa data as a better documented Russian refugee zone suggests 1.2% and 2.7m instead of 450k.

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        16. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 10
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          China was similarly undercounted. Probably 4-9m, though an estimate via different method landed on just 1m. India was likely 18m. So modern estimates are between 50-100m. 2.5-5x initial estimates. This is all extraordinarily shaky. Literally data as plural of anecdotes.

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        17. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          Next: story of how multiple people converged on conclusion that it was not a bacterium but a virus. One of the first to publish, Rene Dujarric, had himself injected with filtered blood of a patient (thereby eliminating bacterial causes) and getting sick. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Dujarric_de_la_Rivière …

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        18. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          His conclusion was flawed because influenza cannot be transmitted via blood apparently. Right answer, wrong method. Other research pair, Nicole and Lebailley, got it right. FUD of pandemic+war.

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        19. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          So to peek ahead, modern theory is that Spanish Flu was a member of what is known as the H1N1 virus today (Though I did hear alt theory that it was actually a coronavirus)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2391305/ …

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        20. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          So methods were generally sloppy then, so people believed what they wanted to. Richard Pfeiffer, of the incorrect bacterial theory of influenza, stuck to his theory. Others tried and failed to replicate the filterable infectiousness result.

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        21. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          Antibacterial methods seemed to work (likely because they addressed secondary infections). All in all, general confusion like today, leading to strong opinions.

          1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes
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        22. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          Took till 1930s to confirm viral theory and connect to swine flu. 1950s to figure out origins in species crossover, via a ferret sneezing on a British researcher named Wison Smith.

          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        23. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          So of the 3 kinds of influenza A, B, and C, only A causes pandemics apparently. There’s also a 4th kind added recently. It was hard to prove because viruses can’t be cultured like bacteria, in a Petri dish. Only inside living cells.

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        24. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          In 1931 Alice Woodruff and Ernest Goodpasture (solid names) figured out how to grow viral cultures in fertilized chicken eggs. I guess that’s why flu shots are grown in eggs and also why we get flus via birds. Very enlightening factoid.

          1 reply 0 retweets 9 likes
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        25. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          Russian dude Smorodintsev created first attenuated flu vaccine in 1936. Many eggs were needed. https://www.influenza.spb.ru/en/about_institute/history/ …

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        26. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          Aside: as a baby I had a bad reaction to a Russian-made smallpox vaccine (I’m old enough to have received that) that parents say almost killed me. So I have an extra large badass vaccine scar. As a teenager I used to tell other kids I got it in a knife fight. Some bought it 😎

          2 replies 0 retweets 13 likes
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        27. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          The attentuated vaccine was risky since the virus could regain virulence. Russia continued to use the older tech viruses for 50 years. So 1986. Hmm......I wonder 🤔 Inactivated polyvalent vaccines were invented later and by 1944 American troops in WW2 were receiving it.

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        28. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          Jonas Salk apparently worked on the early flu vaccine in 1940s. Alexander Fleming helped prove viral origin in 1918. This story has interesting cameos.

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        29. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          Viruses weren’t actually seen till after 1943 when the electron microscopes were invented. Spinney compares them to Higgs boson before then. Quasi mythical and not entirely believed in.

          1 reply 1 retweet 12 likes
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        30. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          The H and N of HxNy naming scheme refer to Haemaggluttinin and Neuraminidase, which help virus break into and out of cell apparently. Now you know. This is what the villain of this story looks like btw. Bastard.pic.twitter.com/BqFQmdjgb9

          1 reply 0 retweets 12 likes
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        31. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr Oct 11
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          Because flu viruses are single strands of RNA, they are not as stable as DNA and make lots of replication errors. This is why they drift 2% a year and vaccines have to be updated every covfefe. Shit, viruses are liek twetes. Taht’s why their hard to fihgt

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