Thread by @TTBikeFit

Variants/☠️Scariants👻revisited through the learned and wise words of Oxford's Dr Sunetra Gupta.
(stay tuned to the end of the thread for some fun with clowns 🤡🤡!)
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Unlike the usual pop-scientist riff raff, Dr Gupta has:
✅spent much of her career researching variants in a variety of pathogens
✅has a large NEGATIVE incentive to speak out

I.e., the type of expert that matters.

Dr Gupta:

"One very unlikely outcome is that a virus will mutate to become more virulent and more transmissible. Much more likely the mutations = small marginal changes that will allow the recent version to barely outcompete the old version."

"The fundamental misunderstanding here is this notion that the variants themselves are driving increases in infection. What’s actually happening is seasonality is driving a change, and the virus is able to take off in certain regions where there are still susceptible people."

"Under a very small increase in transmissibility, and sometimes even by chance, you will see these new strains taking over."

"I am frankly astonished that scientists would interpret this race between variants as a sign that one of them is a much faster runner than the others."

"In a competitive race the winner is only marginally faster than the losers. I would be very surprised if any of these variants were significantly more virulent."

"We don’t need to worry about infections rising. We’ve broken the link between infections and death. We could have done that through focused protection earlier and thereby avoided the problems with lockdowns, but now we’re able to do it through vaccination (of the vulnerable)."

"But vaccination cannot confer herd immunity and it is absolutely obscene that in western countries, more developed countries, that they are aiming to vaccinate the entire population in an attempt to achieve herd immunity instead of sending those vaxes where they are needed."

"It is just astonishing how scientific debate has been stifled, and the ways in which it has been stifled. I hope this will be given the scrutiny which it deserves."

quoted from podcast w Omar Khan: soundcloud.com/webfix-incorp/…

Fun with 🤡🤡time! Maybe we should listen to these nimrods instead of Dr Gupta? Tough decision.

Or these nimrods.

Or the king of the nimrods himself, the english major, child-garaging, management consultant and hawker of magic masks. Really tough decision as to who to listen to. /end