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OPERATION WARP SPEED vs DR MERCOLA

   From Worldometer:

        DAY  USA  WORLD   Brazil    India    South Africa

June     9     1093    4732        1185       246          82
July    22     1205    7128        1293      1120         572
Aug    12     1504     6556       1242       835         130
Sept     3      1094    5886        830     1083         174
            9      1208    6222        1136      1168          82
Oct      8        957    6420         730       967        160
          12       316     3757           203       710          83
          13       843     5006           354      723       165
          14       970     6075           716       694       123
          19       442     4392           321       594         21
          20       952     6169           662       714       164
          21     1225     6849            571       703         85
          22       973     6470           503       683       102
          23       903     6526          566       656        48 
          24       784     5599          398       575         53
          25       442     4629          237       463         24
          26       529     5095          288       505        40
          27     1039      7023          530       519         45

Summary:
  • Yup, this new wave is looking really bad, with the U.S. new deaths back up to quadruple digits, and  75,072 new cases. Worst day ever.  States with highest number of new cases yesterday (and some are battleground states with the presidential election less than a week away)
    • Texas  6889
    • Wisconsin  5262
    • California  4914
    • Florida  4298
    • Illinois  4000
    • Michigan  2657
    • Missouri  2619
    • Ohio  2537
    • Pennsylvania  2273
    • Minnesota  2164
    • North Carolina  2141
    • Hawaii  64
    • Maine  57
    • Vermont  30
  • The world yesterday had 459,020 new cases, the second highest ever, next to 482,596 the day before.
  • Europe is looking even worse than the USA.
  • China had 16 new cases and no new deaths.
  • I took a trip to Thailand in February when it was #2 in COVID-19 cases to China.  Today?  #147.  Yesterday they had three new cases with no deaths.  Instead, they're in the midst of their regular revolutionary uprising period  that will slowly undermine the influence of the monarchy and military.
  • The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Tampa Bay Rays (and if you weren't aware, Manta Rays) 3-1 in game six of the World Series.  They might have won just in time, for their third baseman Justin Turner found out he tested positive in the 7th inning, and left the dugout.  However, he returned for the celebration (he is the one with the bountiful red beard), and, as you can see, no one is wearing a mask.  It would be a miracle if no else tested positive today.  They might not have a team if they had to play a seventh game today.  Worse, while still in Texas, they are returning home to a resurging infection rise in Los Angeles.  That makes it two-for-two for city, though, for the Lakers were just crowned NBA champions.

A vaccine development plan was introduced by President Donald Trump in early April.  Congress had already allocated nearly $10 billion in the CARES Act the previous month.  It took the administration until May 15 to officially announce Operation Warp Speed (OWS). Virtually every federal organization is involved.

The FDA on on June 30 indicated that this vaccine would need to be at least 50% effective to gain approval.  At this early stage Rick Bright head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority resigned because he said there was political pressure to too dangerously accelerate the process.  Plus, he wore a mask, which Trump hates.  Moncef Slaoui of Moderna was selected to head OWS.

In August eight companies were chosen with a budget of $11 billion to expedite development of their vaccine candidates:

The goal is to distribute hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccine doses by the end of the year.

The USA purposefully did not want to cooperate with China, European Union (except that AstraZeneca is working with the University of Oxford) or the World Health Organization.  Not sure how much China has spent so far, but the European/WHO coalition has raised $8 billion.

Virtually everyone seems supportive of a need for a vaccine.  Then there are some quibblers.  I'm mixed in my reaction to Dr. Joseph Mercola, an alternative medicine promoter.  As most in osteopathy, he is anti-vaccine in nature.  However, many seem to follow him, and I was sent this rather long summary of where COVID-19 vaccine stands, from his point of view.  

The confusion about osteopathy is that their views are sometimes right, yet medically controversial, not in actual science, but in mixed truths and some unnecessary hype.  I've come to a conclusion that Mercola's followers believe him because they are healthy and think that is because of listening to his advice.  The truth is that most people are relatively healthy no matter who they believe, even medical science.

From The Ringer:

Mercola offers himself up as the only honest man in medicine, ready and willing to refute the arrogant lies of other doctors. He is rewarded for this effort. Business research firm Hoover’s estimates that Mercola.com LLC brings in around $9.8 million annually, with additional income from Mercola.com Health Resources LLC ($5.2 million) and Mercola Consulting Services LLC (around $320,000). His website bills itself as the “#1 Natural Health Website.” It is the top “Alternative Health” website, according to Alexa, more popular than Tony Robbins’s self-help page. (While “alternative health” is a vague category, in Mercola’s case, it means he gloms onto nonsense about the dangers of modern medicine — not that he is a champion of experimental but evidence-based procedures.) 

But what is The Ringer?  It is a sports and pop culture network founded by Bill Simmons in 2016.  They were  recently acquired by Spotify.  Bill Simmons is a 41-year old sports guy from ESPN who studied the Middle East in college and was a comedy writer for Jimmy Kimmel.  

So who do you believe, the Operation Warp Speed spokespeople or Joseph Mercola?  This is almost like asking, do you think Donald Trump lied more before he caught the coronavirus, or after?  The problem is that both sides are flawed. OWS because Donald Trump will influence what they say, and natural medicine advocates just don't like vaccines and Big Pharma. 

The answer will come in the timing.  If Joe Biden becomes president, chances are that his science dominated decision-making will be more believable, even though pharmaceutical firms are not exactly angels.

It's clear to me that anything like herd immunity through vaccinations will not come for another year or longer.  Initially, no matter what anyone says, people will be reluctant to take those injections, and you'll probably need to take two.  Historically, less than 50% of the population takes the annual flu shot, and, after all these years, this vaccine is sometimes less than 50% effective.

Did you know that the flu vaccine has been this ineffective?

If you can't read that fine print, it says the 2010-11 vaccine was the best at 60% and the 2014-15 injection was only 19% effective.  In case you were wondering what happened last year (2019-20), the efficiency was 39%.

What can be expected of the COVID-19 vaccine?  Well, to begin with, no vaccine has yet been found for the previous coronavirus SARS virus.  If you look at what path these pharmaceutical partnerships are taking, like linking to a chimpanzee infection, you need to be a really optimistic to hope for an efficiency of 70% or higher.  

Then, how do you get citizens to take the shot?  When the seasonal flu vaccine was made available in 1989, only 9.1% were brave enough to do it.  Even today, 50% is a high annual figure.  On the other hand, for children from 19 months to 35 months old, 90% regularly get inoculated for measles, mumps and rubella.

A president will probably not want to make the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory for the simple fact that no one knows what will be the long-term effects of a new vaccine until a year or two passes.  Especially if it turns out that "only" 0.5% of people who get infected actually become a terminal statistic of this coronavirus.  The Spanish flu had a mortality rate of 2.5%, while the seasonal flu stands at 0.1%.  At what point does mandatory kick-in for a virulent virus?

Favorite song #63 will come from:

7 July 1990, the eve of the FIFA World Cup Final in Rome.  There was a live audience of 6000, with global television.  Jose Carreras, Placid Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti were in concert with conductor Zubin Mehta.  It was Carreras' return from leukemia.  Their live album won the Grammy and became the best-selling classical album of all time.  They repeated this for the 1994 World Cup in Los Angeles, 1998 in Paris and 2002 in Yokohama.  The wow factor still stands out as the peak of popular classical music, and this article published this summer announced a special 30th Anniversary CD/DVD set.

There is a question mark because just about any Impossible Dream performance is good enough for me.  My life has been dotted with a series of impossible dreams:  laser fusion, hydrogen, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the blue revolution.  I remember turning in my final report to the NASA Ames Research Center on a better way to search for extrasolar planets with a symbol of the Man from La Mancha on the cover entitled, To See the Impossible Dream.  This was in the mid-70's, and a planet outside our solar system would not be confirmed for another two decades.  The concept I advanced was not well-received, maybe because of the cover.

The song was composed by Mitch Leigh and Joe Darion for the 1965 Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, sung by Richard Kiley, who won a Tony.  The film followed in 1972 with Peter O'Toole.  Simon Gilbert was the voice of O'Toole.  There have been others:
There are of course many more.  They're all good.  I have a #63, Impossible Dream, with no performer.  Just the song.  This will happen a lot when I get to classical music.

Hurricane Zeta should strengthen into a Category 2 and make landfall over Louisiana in a few hours:


Around the same time as Zeta touches Louisiana, Typhoon Molave at around the same strength will make landfall over Vietnam, just south of China Beach, or Danang:

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