This comes from the 2023 EIU global risk assessment. The trouble is, lifting China's #zeroCOVID policy is the very thing propelling the evolution of a “new, highly aggressive variant of COVID”🧵 mkto-ab220141.com/NzUzLVJJUS00Mz…
China is too dependent on the productivity of its factory workforce. Factories are ill-ventilated sardines cans ripe for COVID eruptions disrupting manufacturing. Mass death/injury means worker supply is less than demand, pushing up the cost of labour. axios.com/2022/12/16/the…
Mortality from pandemics has historically increased the value of labour. The plague probably helped to end serfdom in Europe. Chinese manufacturing depends on cheap labour, but with #infiniteCOVID, CCP serfdom will struggle, and this critical cogwheel in the economy will stutter.
There is a risk that the resulting economic and social unrest may crash the Chinese property market, mentioned as a risk in the EIU 2022 report. Reduced manufacturing will lessen supply and drive up inflation worldwide, forcing “fast monetary tightening”. mkto-ab220141.com/NzUzLVJJUS00Mz…
Once again, I would issue a stern warning to economists that biosecurity risks to world socioeconomic stability are being gravely underestimated. The socioeconomic impacts of COVID are only just beginning to make themselves felt. The political storm is only just brewing.
Those familiar with infectious diseases in other species will know they can be as much an existential threat to species survival as climate change from asteroid strikes. As with anthropogenic climate change, we are not taking this seriously enough.
Pestilence has forever been accompanied by famine and war. That there are signs of growing geopolitical military instability at a time of worldwide pestilence is likely no coincidence. The more we let rip with the pestilence, the greater the amplification of geopolitical risk.
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I was always suspicious of the thousands of freshly minted clichéd Canadian trucker convoy and MAGA accounts pushing anti-vaxx propaganda. You'd block a thousand only to have a thousand more appear. They'd all repeat the same set of messages over and over.
We clinicians are naive. All we could do in reply to the misinformation campaign was quote some RCT as though it were a scientific debate, when really it was an act of war. Yes, a proxy war waged by atypical means, but a war nonetheless.
As they got the UK to shoot itself in the foot with Brexit, the troll farms politicised the bipartisan issue of vaccination. The result was a civil war waged with biological agents, causing an enormous mortality disparity between left and right.
The paper is now out in @Nature after I tweeted on this oral presentation @ISTH 2023 by @AkassoglouLab. Fibrin/fibrinogen may be a therapeutic target in СОVΙD neuropathology. Link in next tweet.
“...results reveal a role for fibrinogen as a SARS-CoV-2 spike-binding protein accelerating the formation of abnormal clots with increased inflammatory activity”…“fibrin-targeting immunotherapy suppresses SARS-CoV-2 pathogenesis”.
From an #immunothrombosis perspective, this paper now shows fibrinogen to be a far more critical player in this field than previously thought. We used to focus more on contact, TF, and thrombin but now must look further downstream in the fibrinogenesis/fibrinolysis pathways too.
It's not so bad a comparison if you accept that to get a similar “depletion of the susceptibles” by a Darwinian evolutionary mechanism, you'd have to deplete 2-400M vulnerable pheno-/genotypes from the pool.
It's always assumed that “evolve to become milder” means that the virus evolves, when it is just as likely that humans are “evolving” via a survival mechanism involving “depletion of the susceptibles”, leaving only those less prone to a lethal outcome. This, too, is evolution.
GBD types would likely argue that intervention to halt the depletion of the susceptibles is a perversion of the natural selection process and a crime. By opposing it, we are simply prolonging the pandemic.
And this week's Grand Rounds “just a cold” is another young patient with enterovirus-induced fulminant myocarditis needing intubation, ECMO, and an Impella LVAD. I've never seen so many severe post-infectious complications presented in my life.
Last week's Grand Round? Another “just a cold” with Mycoplasma in a paediatric patient who developed encephalopathy, needing IV pulse methylprednisolone and IVIg. It's like every week we see a new case of previously rare infectious complications in young patients.
Another Grand Rounds case. A pregnant woman with severe cardiomyopathy caused by a combined adenovirus and enterovirus infections. Required ECMO.
Subjecting trial subjects to wearing surgical mаsks against an airborne virus is like running a bike helmet RCT with subjects in Tupperware helmets that weren't designed for that purpose. “But we don't know it doesn't work until we run an RCT” isn't good enough.
“But there was a 30% reduction in head injuries in the Tupperware group vs. placebo.” Not good enough! In a high-risk scenario for major head injury, a Tupperware helmet won't do. The magnitude of risk test subjects were exposed to needs investigation and quantification.
Non-pharmaceutical physical protective devices are subject to engineering standards of proof of efficacy. In the case of helmets, that means crash testing in a lab to see how they fare in high-risk situations that live subjects can't be exposed to. helmet.beam.vt.edu/lab.html
A reminder that there was once a titanic struggle between contagionists vs miasmatists over the mechanism of transmission of cholera before the need to cleanse the water of waterborne pathogens was accepted. We are going through a similar struggle today, fighting for clean air. abc.net.au/news/2024-07-3…
If you want to read about how divisive the debates between the contagionists and miasmatists was, you should read “Death in Hamburg” by @RichardEvans36. They didn't need Twitter back then to be almost reduced to pistols at dawn.