Steve Yun posted:

can’t wait to see how the Swiss variant holds up against the Swiss cheese model

Shady Amish Terror posted:

Although actually chin totem may be the weirdest mask-wearing habit I've seen a fair amount of. Like, congrats, you've done something uncomfortable and totally ineffectual in the exact perfect way to piss off liberals, chuds, and progressives all alike. Why??? do you think your chin's susceptible to covid

Shady Amish Terror posted:

It is a step above nothing, and even that's tremendous in our lovely propagandized hell.

I admit I still can't fully wrap my head around it though; if you're going to bother wearing a mask at all, why does such a massive plurality insist on wearing them in the wrongest, most uncomfortable ways possible?

The Oldest Man posted:

I honestly don't know how people wear those cloth or neoprene-ish masks, they're disgusting, clammy, cling to your nose and mouth and feel suffocating, get wet and sodden in minutes, and stink like poo poo at the end of the day.

Yet I still see people wearing them about as often as N95s if not moreso.

tuyop posted:

I’ve had people furiously defend their lovely masks in the face of any of my obsessively hoarded cache of n95s or elastomerics that don’t fit me. not even just a little “nah I’m good”, like they get mad.

tuyop posted:

I’ve had people furiously defend their lovely masks in the face of any of my obsessively hoarded cache of n95s or elastomerics that don’t fit me. not even just a little “nah I’m good”, like they get mad.

Fur20 posted:

people hate a proselytizer. look, know, and move on

tuyop posted:

I mean lol at the idea that I would ever talk to a normie about reality at all at this point.

but in these interactions, I don’t think I’m proselytizing. it’s like, “oh man are you uncomfortable in that cloth/surgical? would you like one of these N95s? they’re surprisingly comfortable and I have literally dozens in my car.”

and the reaction is like mild outrage lol

Anne Whateley posted:

Lost my place in the thread but anyway, boost juice acquired with zero hassle or questions. Apparently now it just has to be 4 months since your last dose, so I didn’t realize, but I could have been honest. (I’m over 5 months, but moved up this dose a little because of the rumors Novavax would be expiring.)

Anyone know what’s up with that change? Are people really aboveboard-ly getting it 3x/year?

(eta: zero copay but obviously it was my first dose of the year. We’ll see in the fall)

Weka posted:

https://twitter.com/nikstankovic_/status/1785324216138514843

Avian cow flu outbreak in Texas

The Oldest Man posted:

i think that's only for olds and only for this most recent shot, once?

Platystemon posted:

I think that the idea with the four months is that people are expected to get two (or zero lmao) doses per year. There’s just some margin baked in so that getting one shot a little late doesn’t screw up the timeline of when they can get their next dose.

Raskolnikov2089 posted:

Welp, good news/bad news.

Bad news: my formerly COVID-doomer primary care doc has been successfully pod-peopled. He had no problem wearing a mask for me, nor admitting that long COVID was a thing, but he now thinks COVID has mutated to be much less harmful, and is no longer masking at large.

Good news: my fear of long COVID and the religiously adhered to exercise program that fear spawned has me no longer pre-hypertensive! 110/78 baby!

I fully recognize that COVID may append an ironic, "lol thought you'd escaped blood pressure meds?" coda after my next infection, but for now I'll take the win it gave me and take a victory lap with a salty bacon cheeseburger.

Nocturtle posted:

This was figured out in a previous version of this thread. People are wearing masks like this in case they meet an obviously sick person, in which case they think RED ALERT and pull up the mask to cover their nose. Otherwise wearing a surgical or cloth mask all day is uncomfortable so if no-one around is sick why not breathe comfortably? It's not irrational.

The failure to accurately communicate what "airborne virus" means or to provide high quality comfortable N95s to everyone that wants them is the underlying problem.

Platystemon posted:

Steve Yun posted:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7194295/

house flies seem to be able to spread h5n1

Steve Yun posted:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7194295/

house flies seem to be able to spread h5n1

maxwellhill posted:

it's crazy to me that they did all this work on this huge project without a word about HOW it could be a transmission risk, how viral particles might even make it into the bloodstream of anything once moved around in fly form. i assume chickens eat flies but could that destroy the virus? the paper doesn't say

quote:

However, the actual ability of infected house flies in disseminating the AI H5N1 virus to the chicken has not been determined in this study.

https://www.ft.com/content/4e7a2bc7-0de7-4948-bfd3-bda210e56c12 posted:

Pfizer plans direct-to-consumer platform for Covid and migraine treatments
US pharma group follows Eli Lilly with website for patients to obtain medication online

Pfizer is developing an online platform for patients to order medicine including anti-Covid drug Paxlovid and a migraine nasal spray, according to people familiar with the matter, in the latest push by drugmakers to cut out industry middlemen and sell straight to consumers.

The website, which is expected to launch later this year, would connect customers in the US with independent telehealth consultants to prescribe the medications, while a drug-dispensing partner would fill and ship the prescriptions, the people said.

The website is part of an effort by pharma companies to sell drugs directly to patients and simplify a system for distributing medication that is facing growing criticism for its complexity. It comes after Eli Lilly, the world’s largest drugmaker by market value, launched a similar platform in an industry first earlier this year.

Pfizer products such as Paxlovid, combined Covid and flu test Lucira, and recently approved migraine nasal spray Zavzpret will be available on the site. Several other migraine medications are also likely to be available to order, to help ease pressure on prescribers amid a shortage of neurologists in the US.
(..)

Pingui posted:

I think this is a good plan for Pfizer; sadly price gouging makes it pretty worthless from a public health standpoint, but at least rich people will have easy access

Pingui posted:

I think this is a good plan for Pfizer; sadly price gouging makes it pretty worthless from a public health standpoint, but at least rich people will have easy access

That last line quoted isn't thread relevant, but lol.

Anne Whateley posted:

Lost my place in the thread but anyway, boost juice acquired with zero hassle or questions. Apparently now it just has to be 4 months since your last dose, so I didn’t realize, but I could have been honest. (I’m over 5 months, but moved up this dose a little because of the rumors Novavax would be expiring.)

Anyone know what’s up with that change? Are people really aboveboard-ly getting it 3x/year?

(eta: zero copay but obviously it was my first dose of the year. We’ll see in the fall)

deadwing posted:

OVER

https://twitter.com/Nature/status/1785600998431481926

quote:

The first participants got the same tiny dose of the ‘ancestral’ SARS-CoV-2 strain as did those in the first trial. When nobody developed a sustained infection, the researchers increased the dose by more and more in subsequent groups of participants, until they reached a level 10,000 times the initial dose. A few volunteers developed short-lived infections, but these quickly vanished.

“We were quite surprised,” says Susan Jackson, a study clinician at Oxford and co-author of the latest study. “Moving forward, if you want a COVID challenge study, you’re going to have to find a dose that infects people.”

Despite their immunity to the ancestral strains, nearly 40% of the participants experienced an Omicron infection after being released from quarantine by December 2022, and one even got it twice.

An ongoing COVID-19 challenge trial at Imperial College London, in which participants have been exposed to the Delta SARS-CoV-2 variant, has also encountered problems with infecting participants reliably, says Christopher Chiu, an immunologist and infectious-disease physician at Imperial who is leading that trial and was involved in the other challenge trials. Some participants have experienced infections, but probably not enough for a study testing whether a vaccine works, adds Chiu.

“We need a challenge strain that’s more representative of what’s circulating in the community,” says Anna Durbin, a vaccine scientist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, who was a member of the board that oversaw the safety of the latest ‘reinfection’ trial.