BC SOCIETY
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

Modellers believe that spreading out our limited supply of vaccine as single doses for 3 months will save up to 6000 lives. One concern though is whether single doses might lead to 'vaccine resistance' through virus mutation. (1)

 If we assume that over the next 12 weeks 12-20 million people get one dose of a vaccine and are told or believe it gives 90% protection what % will actually go for a second jab? We might assume second dose coverage is at best 70%. (2)
That means between 4 and 6.7 million people might have fading protection. Will the risk of creating a vaccine resistant mutant in this group of people, which could spread rapidly to 7 billion people around the world, outweigh the benefits of 6000 deaths prevented. (3)
I was initially reassured by a paper sent to me by an eminent virologist. https://t.co/UyTQZ0CFsW (4)
Essentially vaccine resistance is rare compared with drug resistance, first because multiple mutations are needed unlike for drugs, and second because vaccines tend to keep pathogens from ever achieving large population sizes within hosts. (5)
Nonetheless, vaccine resistance has been found with hepatitis B, whooping cough (B.pertussis, Strep. pneumoniae and other viruses, although these strains may die out through low transmissibility. (6)
Now I've read an excellent thread on the topic by a paediatrician and evolutionary geneticist. He refers to a study where the virus needed only 3 mutations to escape death from plasma full of neutralising antibodies. https://t.co/F5niMgZtlI.
He concludes: "The longer SARS-CoV-2 is in circulation, + the greater the number of people infected, the more of a chance escape mutants will have to form...and imperil the unprecedented efforts put into vaccine development". (7)
I've also been sent another highly technical paper about Covid mutations. https://t.co/5mzevEUh40 (8)
The paper concludes that "Widespread transmission of an emerging pathogen, such as SARS-Cov-2 can potentially lead to further mutations that affect transmissibility or effectiveness of countermeasures." (9)
The take home message is that where transmission remains high, viral mutations are more likely, which could change transmission rates, virulence or induce vaccine resistance. (10)
Giving single doses of vaccine might be fine in China, Taiwan or Norway, or any of about 70 countries with low transmission rates. But up to three million people in the UK may be infected, so the risks of mutations and vaccine resistance are much higher (11)
We've already seen a variant which appears to increase transmission by 50% or more. The difficult choice is between saving 6000 lives with a single shot policy and the risk of creating a vaccine resistant variant that could quickly cross borders. (12)
Whatever we decide, the message is that suppression of the virus must be at the centre of national strategy, not 'flattening the curve' which has, bizarrely, been official UK policy and advice since February 2020. (13)

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2. @Snakeeater36 posted this screenshot on his TL. He had exposed the page source code on tweet which included an image. Anyone can do this in Chrome by opening a tweet, clicking on the image, then right click on any open space on the screen, select "inspect", then "network".

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Shocking fact: Millennial men are less likely to work than any other age and gender demographic in America.

Today, there are 500,000 young men missing from the U.S. workforce.

Research suggests video games & improved leisure tech plays a role in the problem. 👇 Thread:

Following the 2007 to 2009 recession, 25 to 34 year old men exited high school with fewer middle-skill job opportunities than years prior.

During this time, we saw an increased number of men living with parents & choosing unemployment over lower paying jobs.

It's estimated that 24M millennials live w/ their parents.

1 in 4 living in their parents’ home neither go to school nor work.

What's more surprising? 9 in 10 who lived with their parents a year ago are still living there w/ no plans to leave.

Economists are calling millennial men a lost generation.

According to economist David Dorn:

“If you get to the point where you’re turning 30, you’ve never held a real job and you don’t have a college education, then it is very hard to recover at that point.”

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See this thing that @lymanstoneky wrote:

And see this thing that I wrote:

And see this book that @JamesFallows wrote:

And see this other thing that I wrote:
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Thread: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative Id

On the day of his passing, it's worth doing a brief retrospective on how Rush Limbaugh's personal life almost perfectly paralleled American conservatism...

One thing that's not commonly known about Rush Limbaugh is that he began his career in sports, doing sales for the Kansas City Royals baseball team. That's significant because much of the tribalism and dumbed-down rhetoric in American TV news directly came from sports media.

Television journalism in its earliest days was a fantastic product with real investigative reporting, no filibustering live interviews, and no soundbites. This began changing in the 1970s when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge was put in charge of ABC News.

Limbaugh tried to be a conventional FM deejay but kept getting fired because his personality was too abrasive. After working with the Royals, he began a small political talk show for a Sacremento station. The Reagan repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made his show possible.

Rush Limbaugh's Sacramento show started in 1984 (he replaced Morton Downey Jr) and after 5 years, he was picked up by ABC Radio which was trying to copy some of the sensationalism that ABC News television had started. It was a perfect fit.
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My wonderful @jainfamilyinst colleagues @laura_bmw & @Edi_Nilaj have released their new report "Student Debt and Young America," which pretty comprehensively demolishes many of the myths about who does and doesn't have student debt.
https://t.co/y02KFosRQ3
Highlights to follow
/1

@laura_bmw @Edi_Nilaj First of all, look at this one chart that tells you why the student debt crisis is happening: rising debt; stagnant income, and the gap has opened widest for minority borrowers.
/2


You look at that chart and you see the total failure of the human capital model to explain labor market outcomes, insofar as it even is a falsifiable social science hypothesis.
/3

Second, while it's true that total loan balances are increasing in income, student debt has increased most over time among the lowest-income groups. This tells you that student debt is becoming a marker of the disadvantaged rather than the advantaged.
/4


Third, balances on outstanding loans are rising over time, not declining. As I said in my last report, the student debt crisis is a crisis of non-repayment. This is why it's foolish to think the student debt is ever going to be paid back, whether it's cancelled now or not.
/5
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