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This is turning into one of the great natural experiments of our time. Including an experiment in limits to persuasion on the persuader side. It’s clear most vaxxers have given up trying to persuade even friends/family.
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We’re also seeing a cousin to preference falsification emerge I think… behavior falsification: getting vaccinated on the DL to avoid losing face or something.
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If omicron has a natural vaccine on effect, there’s a chance we’re getting off the Scenario Z path and might be actually done by summer. If it turns out future deadlier breakthrough variants blow past omicron natural immunity, we’re not done. $64m question: which is it?
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Scenario Z: Covid is never brought under control, mutates too much every season to be managed like the flu, and goes endemic with higher base fatality rate and is too costly to chase with vaccines. Joins the top-3 ranks of steady modern killers alongside heart disease and cancer.
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So 4 medium-term scenarios (10y) are based on how well vaccines and mild-variant-immunity work against future severe variants. 1. Both work well, yay. We’re done. Back to normal. 2. Vaccines work well, natural poorly 3. Vaccines work poorly, natural well 4. Both work poorly
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One intriguing thing is weird subculture of jokes about “18th booster lol” I mean… an annual shot is how we already manage flu so unclear why this particular prospect of a recurring shot either cause for alarm over Big State scope creep or jokes.
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I’m guessing if we land there, steady state adoption of annual updates will be lower than flu shots, since side effects do seem worse and more annoying.
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Depends on if the threat profile is higher enough relative to flu that it becomes an ongoing annual trilemma of unpleasant policies: more mandatory vaccination regime, more seasonal disruptions of school/work/services, or more healthcare surge capacity.
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One of the takeaways I got from Pale Rider, which has a primer on human-evolutionary history of flu before getting to Spanish Flu was that flus were much deadlier early in civilization history. And they’re still pretty deadly when they break out (Influenza A variants)
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Next pandemic live-read. Pale Rider, by Laura Spinney, about the Spanish Flu. I'm relentless. amzn.to/2Fg1TaI
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It’s obvious that in the long term, even under Scenario Z, Covid will be a mild endemic disease with occasional severe but limited outbreaks. The question is: how long is “long term”? History of colds and flu are ambiguous on that.
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One of the naive oversimplifications of the idea of herd immunity we saw last year was that if you could just surge to 80% infected or something one time, you’re done for good. Virus domesticated, yay. Unfortunately seems more complex, messy, and longer term.
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Replying to
The studies on T-cells are limited and to be done right will need at least 5-10 years. That said, the early data says T-cell response is strong and durable, i.e. not dissimilar to chicken pox.