Somehow @NYMag isn't using *this* line from the start of the second paragraph of Nicholson Baker's piece for their clickbait pull quotes.
"there is no direct evidence for an experimental mishap"
Meanwhile the story about scientists almost universally denying the possibility of lab release because of "political toxicity" doesn't match my recollections at all. After a conversation with colleagues last April, for example, I posted this.
Little by way of compelling new evidence has come to light, and my perspective remains largely unchanged. It's not engineered; it's most likely natural; and we can't rule out lab escape from captive animals, basic culture, or even gain-of-function studies.
The original plans were depth-first: vaccinate people in the highest risk tiers twice, and move on down the line.
The breadth-first idea is if one dose is better than half as good as two, we could slow the pandemic by getting get vaccines into as many people as possible first.
So with breadth first approaches, we would try for broad single-dose coverage and then circle back around, so to speak, for second doses. This might be e.g. 12 weeks after the first dose.
I lean depth-first, but I'm not certain which is the right approach and it's gnawing at me.
For a host of reasons I have been very skeptical of switching vaccination protocols midstream to a single vaccination approach with later followup. @Bob_Wachter is a very thoughtful doctor and public health leader with greater expertise than mine; his thoughts are worth reading.
Last week, 1.5 million doses of the COVID vaccine were administered. Given that people require two doses, it would over eight years to vaccinate the US population at this rate.
6.8 million doses were delivered—at this rate, it would two years to deliver enough for the whole US.
We're also desperately short of the promise to administer 20 millions doses in December. Of course I don't actually think it's going to take 8 years to vaccinate the entire US population. Hopefully in the next weeks we will greatly ramp up our capacity to administer vaccinations.
Ten days ago, the @RockefellerFdn released a white paper on how we could reopen all US schools over the next new months with aggressive government investment in frequent proactive COVID testing and more.
I think it's an important report. Some highlights:
A central aspect of the proposal is that we take advantage of testing options in the pipeline, aggressively scaling up capacity and using this to test students and teachers alike.
The aim is to test students at least weekly. Teachers, twice weekly.
The first step in the plan is to reopen all elementary schools by February 1. These are a logical place to start. The need for in-person schooling is arguably greatest, the susceptibility of children <10 is likely lowest, and class structure limits within-school outbreak sizes.