C'est étrange mais je n'ai pas le souvenir que, quand Fillon avait fait une visite très médiatique à Niamey en décembre 2016, votre ministère s'était fendu d'un communiqué pour dire que c'était contraire aux règles 🤔 Vous ne nous prendriez pas un peu pour des cons par hasard ?
Fillon avait carrément débarqué avec Jeudy dans ses bagages pour qu'il couvre sa visite dans Paris Match, mais les mecs veulent nous faire croire que Zemmour a violé une règle dont tout le monde ignorait l'existence jusqu'à aujourd'hui (parce qu'elle n'a jamais existé), mdr.
Ce qui s'est passé c'est que Macron avait tranquillement commencé à s'empiffrer de foie gras quand il s'est aperçu que Zemmour était en train de faire une opération de com à Abidjan et qu'il a passé un savon à Parly qui a envoyé Grandjean inventer cette histoire de toute pièce 🤷♂️
Le plus drôle c'est que demain vous pouvez être sûrs que tout un tas de consultants à la mords-moi-le-noeud vont défiler sur les plateaux en expliquant doctement que Zemmour est entouré d'amateurs car "tout le monde" connaît très bien cette règle qui en fait n'existe pas 😂
Je suis sûr que @HerveGrandjean, qui est très honnête, va nous retrouver ça ou, mieux encore, publier les emails qui ont été échangés avec l'équipe de Zemmour pour voir quels étaient exactement les termes du "contrat moral" qu'il n'aurait pas respecté 😏
If you're interested in European politics, you should check my post on Zemmour, who has shaken things up in the French presidential election and made it a lot more interesting. I summarize below some of the points I make, but you should read the whole thing, it's not very long ⬇️
After explaining who Zemmour is and how he ended up running for president after a career in journalism, I briefly describe his platform. Zemmour's main focus is immigration, which he strongly opposes, but he also has unorthodox views on foreign policy.
Many people in both France and the US have compared him to Trump. As I explain in the post, this comparison is correct in some respects, but misleading in others. Zemmour is also politically incorrect and abrasive, but unlike Trump, he is well-read and knows the issues.
This is from the latest Imperial College report. They project that, even in the best case scenario, the daily number of deaths at the peak would be ~3 times as high as before vaccination in the absence of new restrictions or behavioral changes 🙃 imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-inf…
It's the same thing every time: take the VOC's initial growth advantage, turn that into a *transmissibility* advantage, plug that into a model that assumes quasi-homogeneous mixing with no behavioral changes and, congratulations, you got yourself a nice apocalyptic prediction!
My bad, you must insist that it's not a prediction but a *projection* (as if the reason why it has zero chance of coming true were because of scenario uncertainty and not model misspecification 🤪), so that when it doesn't happen you can say that your *projection* wasn't wrong...
This is basically the conclusion I have reached after the second wave and why I have been endlessly frustrated by otherwise smart people coming up with technocratic solutions that will never happen because they fail to take into account the political reality.
In theory, I may even agree that some of those plans are good (although I think more often than not they're just magical thinking), but in practice their chances of being implemented are essentially zero and the main effect of those proposals is to keep the hysteria alive.
I oppose even plans that can be implemented, such as vaccine passports, because I think that at this point the main effect of any restriction will be to prolong the pandemic by delaying the moment people accept that we have to move on.
I found those observations by Gregory the Great particularly insightful, because they might explain why I was unable to comfort people I care about in the past, since I couldn't feel the way they did while I was trying to comfort them.
It's easier said than done though, because in the cases I have in mind, doing so would have required that I see the world in the same way they did, which is not something you can do at will. So I felt bad because they felt bad, but I couldn't really feel bad *with* them.
Does anybody know a good review article that can serve as an introduction to virology, preferably focused on the medical and public health aspects rather than on the evolution, that is suitable for non-science university students without any scientific background?
Perhaps some extra details on what I'm looking for would help. Basically it should explain what viruses are and how they infect organisms/cells, give a sense of their variety (without going into the Baltimore classification though, which is already too complicated for that
audience), explain how organisms react to infection and how they cause diseases, talk about properties that are relevant from a medical and public health point of view (virulence, transmissibility, etc.), say a few things about how they mutate and their evolution. In 30-50 pages.
I expect that Omicron's transmission advantage will also fluctuate wildly across time and place, but one thing that suggests to me it really is more transmissible than Delta or more capable of evading prior immunity is that incidence in SA was very low when it started expanding.
Indeed, the theory I proposed to explain why Alpha's and Delta's transmission advantages had eventually collapsed requires a large outbreak associated with the variant somewhere, as I explained back then.
Thus, if Omicron is taking over in Europe despite low seeding from South Africa (which seems to be the case now and is what you'd expect with low incidence in South African before borders closure), it doesn't work.