Tweet

Matt Ridley

29 Jun, 12 tweets, 4 min read

A thread on the misuse of the word "virulent".

I'm seeing articles saying that the delta variant is more virulent.

eg: "citing the spread of the more virulent Delta coronavirus variant in the United Kingdom"

nytimes.com/2021/06/28/wor…

Earlier in the year the same was said about the alpha (Kent) variant, that it was more "virulent".

That was untrue.

Virulent means "harmful", not "infectious".

“The suggestion that the Indian variant is more pathogenic needs to be taken with a big dose of salt. The same was initially suggested for the Kent variant but was later shown not to be true." Prof Ian Jones.

sciencemediacentre.org/expert-reactio…

If anything the evidence is suggesting that the delta variant may be less virulent, but more transmissable (infectious).

Hard to be sure this is true, though, given that the vulnerable old are now protected by vaccines.

dailytelegraph.com.au/coronavirus/ns…

Respiratory viruses tend to evolve to be more transmissable but less virulent: they do better if you go out and about meeting people.

Not true of insect-borne or water-borne viruses, which don't care how sick you are:

insects or water do the going out about about for you.

That's why there are 200 kinds of common cold, none of which is virulent.

Including OC43, a coronavirus that probably caused a terrible pandemic in 1889 but is now a fairly mild and common cold:

rationaloptimist.com/blog/covid-and…

But there is one situation in which respiratory viruses will stay virulent or even become more so.

That's if mild cases meet fewer people than severe ones.

This appears to be what happened in 1918, Paul Ewald argued, when severe flu cases were evacuated from the front line to a series of staging posts, field hospitals and trains, while mild cases slept it off in a dugout.

rationaloptimist.com/blog/stresses-…

And I think it is what happened last year when mild cases of Covid-19 stayed locked down at home while severe cases went to hospital. Many cases of the virus were acquired in hospital.

theguardian.com/world/2021/may…

In other words, lockdowns (whether necessary or not) probably delayed the evolution of the virus into a milder form.

That is now happening, and is our least worst option given that eradication is impossible and the virus may become more transmissable in response to vaccination.

@RandyNesse

In general, there is not nearly enough thinking along the lines of "Darwinian medicine" within the medical establishment, as @RandyNesse has long argued.

Repeat 100 times: Evolution is not mutation. It is mutation and selection.

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More from @mattwridley

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

2 Jun

1/ When analysing the actions of Shi Zhengli, Peter Daszak, Kristian Andersen and others who insisted on shutting down doubts about the lab leak origin of SARS-CoV-2 in Jan and Feb 2020, it's worth remembering that at that stage it looked likely to be a minor Chinese epidemic.

2/ Almost nobody expected that millions would die, the entire world would be convulsed and therefore that every detailed action by scientists would later come under intense scrutiny.

3/ Thus you might expect to get away with publishing the genome of a bat virus without mentioning its origin, or the fact that you are renaming it without saying so, or the fact that three people died of a mystery viral pneumonia caught at the site.

Read 7 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

10 Apr

Thread: About 20 years ago I was invited to give the Prince Philip lecture at the Royal Society of Arts. I chose "reasons for environmental optimism" as my topic.

At the end, Prince Philip chaired a lively question session...
1/6

A man from Greenpeace put up his hand: "There's so much wrong with this lecture that I don't know where to start."

"Well, you've only got one minute, I'm afraid", said Prince Philip to a ripple of laughter.

The man then made his points for about 2 minutes, uninterrupted.
2/6

The next day a journalist from a big newspaper called me and said:

"We're running a story about how Prince Philip was very rude to a man from Greenpeace at a lecture at the RSA yesterday. Apparently, you were there. Can you confirm this?"
3/6

Read 6 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

19 Dec 20

Thread on the new strain of SARS2 in the UK.

It's more than just a single mutation: 14 non-synonymous changes and several deletions.

virological.org/t/preliminary-…

1/5

It was first detected in Kent on 20 September.

"As of 15th December, there are 1623 genomes in the B.1.1.7 lineage. Of these 519 were sampled in Greater London, 555 in Kent, 545 in other regions of the UK including both Scotland and Wales, and 4 in other countries."

2/5

"The accrual of 14 lineage-specific amino acid replacements prior to its detection is, to date, unprecedented in the global virus genomic data for the COVID-19 pandemic...may have resulted, at least in part, from virus evolution with a chronically-infected individual."

3/5

Read 5 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

19 Apr 20

@thesundaytimes

Thread on the origin on the virus.

Many media outlets including the @thesundaytimes are speculating about whether the virus leaked from the Institute of Virology in Wuhan (WIV). Please note this is almost certainly the wrong lab to look at.

thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/…

1 of 15

Although WIV is where the “bat woman” Shi Zhengli worked,

scientificamerican.com/article/how-ch…

and although she initially worried about a leak from her lab,

2 of 15

and although the biosecurity of the lab was questioned last year,

washingtonpost.com/gdpr-consent/?…

3 of 15

Read 15 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

28 Apr 19

@ChrisGPackham

Thread. 1. As Natural England bans crow control at the behest of @ChrisGPackham, remember why curlews thrive mainly in the North Pennines. Controlled experiments showed that their success at fledging young went from 15% without predator control to 51% with predator control.

2. Curlews are declining all over Eurasia. Two species of curlew have already gone extinct: Eskimo curlew and probably the slender-billed. This vulnerability is because they are large, slow-breeding waders that rarely lay eggs before they are 3 years old.

3. The British Isles is the breeding heartland of the “common” curlew with nearly 30% of the world population nesting here. But they are now v scarce in Ireland and Southern England and rare even in some upland areas of the Lake District and much of Wales.

Read 12 tweets

Matt Ridley

@mattwridley

3 Feb 19

@lorddeben

Thread:

This is shocking. @lorddeben often accuses others of vested interests, but has been paid by green energy clients w/out declaring them while chairing the govt’s Climate Change Committee and pushing for policies relevant to those clients. 1.

dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6…

@lorddeben

Code of conduct says to declare 'any private interests which may, or may be perceived to, conflict with your public duties'. @lorddeben’s wholly owned business Sancroft took money from biomass energy firm Drax while his committee was writing a report on biomass. 2.

@lorddeben

Exeter university academic warned @lorddeben in 2015 that payments from green energy fund Temporis Capital were a 'clearly unethical' conflict of interest which would cause 'embarrassment' if made public. He ignored this and his firm got a further £37,000 from Temporis. 3.

Read 9 tweets

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