OMG, @rebeccalramirez just put me on to the CDC's "coping with COVID" coloring book for kids, and it's an exercise in anxiety.
Not sure I'll sleep tonight.
I'm the grown-up and I feel ALL OF THESE THINGS!
It's not your fault Timmy. It's happening. You're powerless to stop it. It is affecting every aspect of your life, and your loved ones may be in danger.
A lot of people are tweeting about how this new Pfizer vaccine finding has not been peer-reviewed. That's true, but it's also important to understand that academic peer-review is not the only way to be scientifically rigorous... 🧵
In the case of clinical trials, there are a number of methods to keep bias out of data. One is to "blind" the trial, so that both patients and those administering the vaccine don't know who gets the drug and who gets the placebo. This trial was fully blinded.
In other words, patients, scientists, clinicians, and even Pfizer executives had no idea who got the vaccine and who didn't. Only a small team of statisticians and medical monitors remained unblinded to keep the trial on track. They had no direct contact with the trial team.
First off, if you're in need of big picture view, check out this story featuring @brianweeden and @planet4589, which gives a nice summary of where things stand (an audio version also be on @npratc tonight!).
The airstrip literally appeared out of nowhere in 2016. It's on the edge of an old Chinese nuclear test site called Lop Nur (sometimes Lop Nor). And it's unusual for a couple of reasons....
First, the theory: It's known as "herd immunity". If enough people catch COVID-19 and recover, and if they are immune, then the entire population will be protected. Estimates vary widely, but somewhere between 50%-80% of a given pop would need to catch COVID for this to work.
Herd immunity is real, but historically only discussed in terms of vaccination campaigns.
For example, if 95% of a population is vaccinated against measles (very contagious) then a single case cannot spread into the community.
Wow. Wow. Wow. Reading through the criminal complaint against nanotechnology researcher Charles Lieber at Harvard (courtsey of @relucasz). This is nuts.
Lieber was offered $50,000 a month and $150K+ for collaborating with Wuhan University of Technology.
@relucasz The FBI alleges that this was part of China's Thousand Talents Program, to recruit Western researchers and steal intellectual property.
Lieber was offered cash (and apparently accepted).
@relucasz Wuhan University established the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory based on the agreement with Lieber... But HARVARD never knew anything about it. When they found out about it in 2015, Lieber denied everything.
@nktpnd@mhanham To recap, earlier today, President Trump tweeted a REALLY clear picture of an accident at Iran's space launch facility. The picture is far better quality than what the best commercial satellites (like those operated by @Maxar) can produce. See for yourself.
@nktpnd@mhanham@Maxar Experts like @nktpnd and @mhanham have never seen anything like it. They firmly believe it came from a classified source. Both the White House and the @ODNIgov declined to comment.
. @ctbto_alerts confirms that 4 IMS stations are offline in Russia.
RUP61; Dubna: the last message received in the International Data Centre (IDC) was 2019/08/10 03:16:59 (IDC received time UTC)
RUP54; Kirov: the last message received in IDC was 2019/08/10 06:19:31 UTC
@ctbto_alerts The other two stations went offline on August 13th.
@ctbto_alerts All four outages came just days after an accident that may have involved the nuclear-powered SSC-X-9 Skyfall missile. Five ROSATOM employees were confirmed dead in that incident. It happened on August 8. The stations are CTBTO funded, but operated by local Russian institutions.