COVID Transmissions for 6-3-2021
Mixing different vaccines? Let's find out.
Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment. Welcome to COVID Transmissions.
It has been 564 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19. Around 564 (maybe 565), St. Columba reportedly encountered the Loch Ness Monster.
That story makes me think about all of the speculation around SARS-CoV-2 origins; I’m worried we’re never going to know what happened there. In the meantime, I will place my faith in science.
Today’s newsletter is relatively short—just a piece about a new trial on mixed-dose vaccine combinations.
Bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.
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Now, let’s talk COVID.
Mixed-dose vaccine trials are beginning
I saw an exciting tweet today:
There are no data here yet, but this is an important step. Right now, we don’t have clinical trial data where the various options are mixed in the dosing schedule. We don’t know if they still work as well. Maybe they work better! I’d like to find out. And I think there are good reasons to want to find out, in a practical sense.
Something that is worrying me is what things might look like a few months from now if there are issues with escaping variants, or with waning immunity, or some other specter that looks unlikely right now but might become a problem in the future. Being able to mix doses of different vaccines might help us better respond to such a future. If Moderna is first to market with a vaccine booster against a new variant, it would be best if people who got different vaccines didn’t have to wait for their chosen brand to catch up. It would be better to just be able to get them vaccinated.
This new study should help us determine if that’s going to be an option.
What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:
Watching: The Man in the High Castle
Some of you will know that The Man in the High Castle is a novel by Philip K Dick that represents the first entry in the speculative fiction subgenre of alternate history. It envisions a world where FDR was assassinated in the 1930s and so the Axis Powers won World War II. The book focuses mostly on the Japanese-occupied West Coast of the US, and doesn’t discuss the Nazi side of the country very much.
Amazon made a TV series that is loosely based on the book, as many more of you may know. The series involves a lot of Nazi characters and substantial action takes place in Germany and the US. For a long time I avoided watching it, largely because with actual Nazis trying to gain increasing influence in US politics, I really wasn’t interested in exploring the possibility of a Nazi US much more deeply.
With political winds having changed, I find it a little more palatable to contemplate. I’ve been watching the show, and, it’s decent. I think it’s much too charitable to the Nazis, and implies that they would have been able to produce a stable worldwide society that seems remarkably libertine and progressive, if only they had been able to win the war and proceed with exterminating all their undesirables. I definitely don’t buy that and I think the show shouldn’t make Nazism seem like something that could ever be sustainable. It would be a police state that would collapse in on itself when it ran out of enemies, with various factions fighting each other in an endless pursuit of ever greater “purity.”
Incidentally, the Nazis did collapse in on themselves when they needlessly attacked formerly neutral parties, so I feel kinda reasonable saying that.
Anyway, the show itself isn’t really about Nazism. It’s about people put in impossible situations by the presence of two fascist Imperial powers in their lives, and I think that is pretty interesting. Average characters struggling against that and trying to make due are what makes it worth watching, to me at least. And perhaps in the long run, as I get further through it, it will show just how likely it would be for such a world order to disintegrate completely.
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See you all next time. And don’t forget to share the newsletter if you liked it.
Always,
JS