Exactly! America is a free country. We should be free to vaccinate and microchip our employees as we see fit.
I don't know about you, but I like to keep my employees COVID19-free.
I don't understand why they make such a fuss about it! The employees are free to vaccinate and microchip their pets and their children, so why can't we vaccinate our employees? This is clearly a double standard.
Whenever I read such extreme action verbs as "slam", "bash" etc. in a headline, I have to assume the underlying article is a populist piece of garbage.
Populism does seem to get used as a bit of an insult, but there is a definite tendency towards the idea that big, complicated problems have simple solutions that the evil government is just refusing to use for malicious reasons that fits the term and this seems like a good example.
For example, Gates insists that people should be able to get test results within 24 hours no matter what and that it is unbelievable and inexplicable that the US isn't encouraging people without symptoms to get tested. There's an inherent trade-off between those two things - push people without symptoms to get tested and it overloads the testing capacity, impeding access to testing and contact tracing for everyone - which can't easily be fixed by expanding testing. There's an extremely limited global supply of everything needed to carry out testing, the US already has pretty much the biggest testing program out there excluding a handful of really small countries, and the availability of further supplies is not being helped by the fact that Europe is having major outbreaks right now and is trying to expand testing there up to US levels. You wouldn't know this from the article, which just makes it sound like the big bad government is doing these things to make this worse because they're big and bad.
(There also seem to be some pretty fundamental limitations as to how useful testing potentially-exposed people without symptoms can even be in the first place. Test them too early and it'll likely give a false negative. Test them too late and you'll only find out they're positive after they've been contagious for some time, plus they may also test negative too. I've also seem it claimed that the optimal time to test people is about 3 days after the peak in infectiousness, which probably doesn't help - though without symptoms it's not like there's really any way to tell when the optimal time is anyway. This really fundamental reason why what he's calling for wouldn't work as described is just ignored, even though the CDC's literal stated reason for discouraging it is that it would lead to false negatives which would cause people to think they're in the clear and go out and spread the virus.)
this whole place is turned into Reddit man there's people up top in this comment section complaining that there's not enough testing while they're frolicking around the countryside. Complaining that they want free testing. Imagine a virus so bad you have to get tested to know if you have it or not
What do you mean when you say this place has "turned into reddit"? Are you referring to the generally lower standard of comment quality there? If so, that's ironic.
Imagine a virus so unpredictable that you might take anywhere from 0 to 14 days to become infectious, and you could end up anyhwere from unknowingly and asymptomatically shedding the virus to dead from it. Imagine that.
I guess Gates wasn’t paying attention during those decades when we hollowed out our public institutions to make people like him (and to be honest, like me) richer. But sure, get mad now, that will probably help
If you are wondering why someone like Michael Levitt [1] doesn't get wall to wall coverage by media (including outfits like RT) [as an 'expert voice on pandemic response'], the above article has a few clues.
[1]: He's just one example. There are many others.
-- p.s. relevant pull quote asking the timely question --
During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.
Michael Levitt, though almost certainly a smart guy, has not had the best track record, making predictions both accurate and not. Also, predictions alone are...not that useful? From your Wikipedia article:
> In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that Levitt correctly forecasted in February that the COVID-19 pandemic in China would soon peak and that China would end up with around 80,000 cases and 3,250 deaths from COVID-19.[41] However, it has been noted that Levitt actually made a number of predictions, including incorrect forecasts, in February about China's COVID-19 trajectory[42], including one on February 7, 2020 claiming that "by 14-Feb. we will have reached 95% of the eventual death count of 928".[43] Levitt also has stated his belief that achieving natural herd immunity to the virus is possible[44] and has spoken against lockdown orders.[45]
> Levitt also wrongly predicted that Israel would suffer no more than 10 COVID-19 deaths[46]. On July 25, 2020, Levitt predicted that COVID-19 in the United States would be over "in 4 weeks with total reported deaths below 170,000".[47] However, this prediction about the reported death count also ended up being wrong as the number of reported deaths from COVID-19 in the United States exceeded 170,000 on August 16, 2020, only 3 weeks after Levitt's prediction.[48]
Sounds like he does get some coverage. As for why it’s not wall-to-wall? Maybe his predictions have been wrong too many times?
Don't focus on one guy. He is just one example. There is a pattern of a whole range of individuals with very credible credentials that are entirely ignored.
Track records don't seem to matter. The famous Imperial College model was by a worker with a rather alarming track record. How is the track record of Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, btw? Or the unqualified man currently serving as head of WHO? His C.V. is alarming enough.
So side arguments aside, the question remains as to why Bill Gates, are granted such a global megaphone. The article from Columbia Review of Journalism tells us why that may be the case.
I find it entirely irrational and unreasonable that decisions that will affect the entirety of humanity today, and will definitively alter the course of human development are to be made by individuals such as Bill Gates, and that other input by far more qualified individuals is entirely ignored, if not blackwashed.
It not unreasonable to seek a second opinion even for relatively minor health matters. And here we are talking about metaphorical open heart surgery on the very nature of society: how we are governed, how we interact, and how we make collective decisions.
There has never been a more timely moment to ASK QUESTIONS.
I appreciate a lot of Gates' statements here, since they are substantive and not just posturing. The issue is that the US medical system is rotten to the core. There are hundreds of thousands of wonderful individual practitioners and even thousands of excellent teams, but the system as a whole is broken.
His idea that no one should be paid for a test result if it takes more than 24 hours to result is not bad, but the existing system is not set up for it. Decades of regulation of all aspects of the US medical system, from billing codes even to electronic health records, would prevent that kind of change from being adopted overnight. If we adopted this change, you'd very likely see almost no one running any COVID tests at all - the risk and infrastructure investment would be too high, for too little payout. (Recouping the cost of lab tests is generally hard as is, since the costs of running a medical lab are almost entirely fixed, both in terms of labor and capital. Routine maintenance must be performed, the lab must have a certain contingent on duty to handle stat tests, etc.)
I'm not sure the US system can be improved unless we have some practitioners who want to make a clean break from the existing regime, and they get some cover from the government to actually innovate. I'm not holding my breath.
I have been worried for some time the only solution is the democratization of healthcare due to advances in biology and chemistry. People are 3d printing their own prosthetic mounts and getting better results than trained and heavily credentialed professionals. Maybe some day people will be able to design their own medication and targeted supplements.
> Maybe some day people will be able to design their own medication and targeted supplements.
> What worries me is this may be decades away.
First the good news: That day is here!!
Now the bad news: that medication isn't working out great for them. Apparently some wingnut told people that drinking bleach was a potential cure for some ills. Didn't go great.
And thats the problem with what you wish for - a popular facebooker, youtuber, instagrammer, president tells people that they can design their own medication, people are going to do it.
While stopping short of suggesting injestion of bleach trump certainly posited whether bleach used internally (on the lungs) could be an effective medication - so yeah, maybe he didn't mean drinking it, maybe he meant injecting it?
Never once does he mention the word 'bleach'. He uses the terms UV light and disinfectant. But I guess using disinfectant, to the average American reader, is synonymous with literally injecting bleach into your body or guzzling it down your throat...
Remember when NPR came out with this article entitled: "No, You Don't Need To Disinfect Your Groceries", and the media was outraged because millions of Americans were dumb enough to start soaking their food in bleach? Yeah, me neither.
The problem is that without strict regulation any health care market will be flooded instantly with quacks.
Quackery is much easier than actual medicine. Quacks don't have to spend anything on R&D and quack medicines are a lot easier to manufacture (look up the synthesis pathways for popular pharmaceuticals!), and this means quacks can spend more on marketing and operate with much higher margins. This translates into a huge market advantage. Pretty soon you'll have nothing but quacks.
Medicine has a unique and extreme case of the "uninformed consumer problem." In medicine it's incredibly difficult even for professionals to tell whether something actually works, let alone individuals.
"Do your own research" doesn't work at all in medicine unless you have a billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket and can assemble your own research lab. Excluding emergency medicine and the most instantly and dramatically effective drugs, it's really hard as an individual consumer of health care to tell whether a treatment is working over the short term. Check out gwern.net and how much work he's put into trying to tell if various nootropics work and how much uncertainty remains.
The fact that individual discernment is so hard in medicine means defrauding people is incredibly easy. It's a market that is inherently vulnerable to massive fraud, and there is no easy way (that we know of) to fix this. Even with the FDA there is still a tremendous amount of quackery. Without the FDA and strict licensing and supervision there would be only quackery.
BTW news seems to suffer from a similar problem. Actual investigative journalism is expensive, hard, and sometimes dangerous. (Old PI joke: How do you know if a conspiracy theorist might be right? They are missing and presumed dead.) Fake news is cheap and easy, and since it's fake you can craft your stories for maximum click bait appeal without having to be limited by pesky "reality" and "honesty" constraints. The reader meanwhile has neither the time nor the ability nor the expertise to really fact check anything.
In general markets where the consumer is unable or unwilling to discern tend to be flooded with and overcome by fraud.
> Medicine has a unique and extreme case of the "uninformed consumer problem." In medicine it's incredibly difficult even for professionals to tell whether something actually works, let alone individuals.
It's extreme but not unique. Do you know what's running in any of your devices? Almost not, I believe. Yesterday I had the pleasure of needing to copy some medical reports of mine on a multipurpose printer I own. I shortly gave it a pause being not sure whether the contents would be sent immediately to the mothership. I then realized that when the printer was set up initially that I set up the router to prevent calls to the outside for this machine. But: although I configured the router, I would need to go to great lengths to actually verify that the printer can't phone home.
And don't get me started about quality (as in endurance and serviceability). It's a nightmare as price is not a deciding factor in my experience. Neither is brand.
As our technology becomes more complex this becomes a growing problem in every area. Things are becoming more and more opaque even to end users with specialized expertise, let alone the average person.
Is that web cam sending pics of you to China? Is your fridge listening to your private conversations? Is your printer sending confidential PII to a poorly secured server somewhere? Is your car tracking you and selling the info to insurance companies? Is your home security device allowing a stalker to watch your every move?
It's pretty hard to answer any of those questions unless you are a security researcher with deep understanding of network protocols and systems and a good deal of time on your hands.
> The problem is that without strict regulation any health care market will be flooded instantly with quacks.
Yes, many more quacks would advertise services.
> Quackery is much easier than actual medicine. Quacks don't have to spend anything on R&D and quack medicines are a lot easier to manufacture (look up the synthesis pathways for popular pharmaceuticals!), so they can spend more on marketing and operate with much higher margins.
Good point!
> Pretty soon there will be little legitimate medicine left in the market.
I'm not so sure. Even the canonical example of this phenomenon, Gresham's Law, requires legal tender laws or some similar mechanism which requires the acceptance of the "bad" money on par with "good" money. It's not clear that a requirement would happen in laissez-faire medicine.
> Medicine has a unique and extreme case of the "uninformed consumer problem." In medicine it's incredibly difficult even for professionals to tell whether something actually works, let alone individuals.
>
> "Do your own research" doesn't work at all in medicine unless you have a billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket and can assemble your own research lab. Excluding emergency medicine and the most instantly and dramatically effective drugs, it's really hard as an individual consumer of health care to tell whether a treatment is working over the short term. Check out gwern.net and how much work he's put into trying to tell if various nootropics work and how much uncertainty remains.
Agree. "Do your own research" in medicine doesn't work very well for a host of reasons. Chief among them: physicians don't understand the complexity of the body as a system. Microbiologists don't even understand the complexity of a single cell. We (humans) understand human life in certain aspects, and it's remarkable what competent physicians can do with the knowledge they do have. But if even they have no idea what is going on beyond essentially sophisticated educated guess-and-check, what hope does the layperson have?
> The fact that individual discernment is so hard in medicine means defrauding people is incredibly easy. It's a market that is inherently vulnerable to massive fraud, and there is no easy way (that we know of) to fix this. Even with the FDA there is still a tremendous amount of quackery. Without the FDA and strict licensing and supervision there would be only quackery.
I'm not sure the FDA is the only way. We could have stronger laws that punish fraud in civil court, or make practitioners liable financially (or in severe cases, criminally) for ineffective or harmful treatments. Things like the Internet make the information problems less daunting than in the bad old days of patent medicine salespeople roaming from town to town (though today we have unregulated MLMs).
I also think that the regulation to which I refer is much broader than simply FDA regulation. Billing, electronic records, purchasing, distribution of medical equipment, pharmaceutical distribution, laboratory testing and just about everything else in the US medical system are regulated beyond belief. Many of these regulations were introduced with the goal of "improving efficiency," and have instead resulted in protected, rent-seeking firms with zero gains in efficiency. They've resulted in the death of the private practice, and have siloed practitioners into Kafkaesque organizations, each of which is a single point of failure.
I'm skeptical that the FDA should do much beyond determining the safety of treatments, but there is a host of other regulatory nonsense in health care that could be innovated around, including many of the things GP was talking about.
I disagree. These are problems everything experiences. Having immediate feedback to a potential solution helps immensely in determining its effectiveness. As instrumentation and analytical methods improve it is entirely reasonable to expect people to create their own treatments that are effective.
Right now most of the necessary equipment is siloed in research institutions and hospitals.
It seems medical quackery gets a disproportionate platform, I think in an attempt to educate people about how dangerous it can be. But go look online or even in a brick and mortar store: there's plenty of stuff designed to take your money that won't improve your life.
> If we adopted this change, you'd very likely see almost no one running any COVID tests at all
This is especially true for providers who aren't running the tests in-house. If your doctor takes a test and sends it out to an external lab like LabCorp, who is responsible if the complete process takes more than 24 hours?
In reality, your doctor would simply stop testing for Coronavirus and instead refer you to a LabCorp collection center, where they could keep you waiting in line until they had enough testing capacity to take your sample and start the 24-hour clock. Everyone loses.
Not to mention all of effort required to retool billing and accounting systems to account for time-based costing. This alone would drive the cost of testing upward by huge amounts. Or more realistically, providers would simply not offer tests unless patients paid in cash to avoid this mess.
This is a great example of how regulation can end up making the situation worse, despite good intentions.
Im currently in grand teton national park and need to get a test before seeing my parents. This area that has 5+ million visitors a summer has about 3 covid tedting sites in an 2-3 hour drive. The main hospital needs a referal to give you s test. Any referals from out of the area will have their tests sent to another site, results are expected in 5-7 buisness days. When asked how much it would cost, they said they have no idea, they will bill the insurance. We have decided not to take this test and wait till we are in a major city and get the 15 minute test. Naturally, they have plenty of open appointments to administer the test. Our healthcare is completely broken. These national parks are intersections of people from all over the US and one of the most important places to have rapid testing and its just completely unavailable.
Imagine a virus so bad you got to get tested in order to know if you have it or not. You made the choice to go to the park nobody forced you to go there you're going to have to sacrifice some stuff if you want to be 100% safe but trust me buddy CDC websites says 003% that anything is going to happen
Thankfully, I'm a young and healthy adult and wish to do my part to continue living my life while doing due diligence to protect more susceptible people around me. And if you want to look at it in a fiscally conservative way, prevention of spread is cheaper than treating those it may have spread to.
> In reality, your doctor would simply stop testing for Coronavirus and instead refer you to a LabCorp collection center, where they could keep you waiting in line until they had enough testing capacity to take your sample and start the 24-hour clock. Everyone loses.
This kind of sounds like a semi-win. Eliminate the middle man between the patient and the lab. Provide visible backpressure by refusing to accept requests that can't be serviced in a timely fashion, allowing those requests that are serviced to be timely.
It doesn't help the problem of more demand for tests than supply of testing (or at least, not directly). But it's better to have all (or substantially all) results in 24 hours, than to have all results in a pipeline for a week.
Also, maybe start at 48 hours, if 24 hours is too restrictive.
Except now you have one appointment to order the test and one appointment to take the test and possibly another appointment to read the results. A 2x to 3x process drag during which the patient is not being productive at their day job.
His statements are also not uncontested and he gets his arguments from other doctors, hopefully. Most doctors still do the brain torture testing and the data might indicate it is the safer option. There are conflicting studies.
There are of course also conspiracies that your brain gets damaged from the test...
I've put it this way for a long time: "The US system combines everything that is bad about socialized medicine with everything that is bad about privatized medicine."
TL;DR: Billionaire who snored through fifty years of tax cuts for the rich that inevitably gutted basic healthcare in the US now appalled at the US governments inability to marshal even basic care for its citizens.
> without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die
In addition to the many articles that have been published, it has been possible since early March for people to extrapolate the graphs that were widely available. Those graphs, and their potential shortcomings, were widely discussed, and a "citizen scientist" could interpret them with reasonable confidence. My own analysis at the time was something like this:
If the graph keeps going like the way it looks, it will consume effectively the entire population by month X, with Y percent dying. While this was not a formal epidemiological model, it allowed two tentative conclusions:
1. If the curve (a straight line on a semi-log graph) shows signs of turning over, I will breathe a huge sigh of relief, the sooner the better.
2. The curve was a "sniff test" for whether more advanced predictions were believable, notably, any prediction that did not roughly follow this baseline needed a darn good explanation.
No credible forecast predicted 2 million deaths by now (I'm sure there were some stupid one that just projected a exponential growth curve forward or something but hopefully they had large disclaimers that they are only accurate very short term).
The CDC in February (back when they weren't compromised) did modelling that predicted between 200,000 and 1.7M deaths in total for the entire epidemic. This March piece from NYT has the details: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-est...
The imperial college COVID response team (one of the major forecasts) predicted 2.2 million deaths in the US without action.
> without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die
Comparing what has happened to doing absolutely nothing (effectively having no health system) is of limited use. How about a comparison to how things have gone in peer countries? Our death rate is 600 per million which is many times that of the likes of Canada, Germany, and Japan.
My take is that "the US" as a cohesive entity with a central government did next to nothing. The US has acted as an uncoordinated collection of state and local governments, private businesses, and some other institutions such as universities for both better and worse.
For example, the graphs for COVID cases in my county reflect the county government working with no coordination at the state or federal level, the predictable effect of having a large public university in town, and private companies that are managing the production and analysis of COVID tests with no public policy guidance.
Bill Gates DESTROYED Covid-19 pandemic with LOGIC AND FACTS
> “All you have to do is the four plus four, $8 billion total. And then people will see, even though the U.S. made some mistakes, at least our desire to cooperate, help others and use our R&D capacity, at least, you know, they’ll see it in a positive light.”
The bottom line is he's advocating for more funding to pay for vaccines in other countries. I think it's hard to argue that the U.S. response to coronavirus has been competent, but I don't think Bill Gates is a credible authority to making many of the health claims he's raising in this piece.
For example, he BLASTS how we've handled testing in the U.S. - fair point, but it's not clear that the alternatives he raises would be more effective. In fact, it seems like the most widely accepted tests we have are prone to false positives. This could in part be why our strategy has shifted to not test asymptomatic individuals. There's no point forcing someone into isolation over an inaccurate test that could have flagged a cold virus as Covid-19.
Bill Gates has advocated for some pretty creepy stuff ("Real ID" microchip implants, a complete ban on end-to-end cryptography). He can spend as much as he wants on PR, but I don't trust him in his role as a "vigilante health authority." He's a billionaire with pet projects and an ego.
> There's no point forcing someone into isolation over an inaccurate test that could have flagged a cold virus as Covid-19.
Yes there is.
I'm fine with the Bill Gates bashing, but this is like saying there's no reason to stop having unprotected sex after you've tested positive for HIV using a test with a 20% false positive rate. Stop doing things that would potentially spread the disease, then take a better test.
Is the goal of civilization that all people should be 100% protected against 100% of threats 100% of the time? I have a statistically higher chance of dying in a car accident in the 2.5 hour drive to visit my parents than I do of dying from Covid-19. The restrictions we're placing people under over this virus are disproportionate to the harm it's doing to our civilization.
If the goal is really to protect people, then we shouldn't stop at isolation. We should ban all of the things that could potentially harm people: alcohol, tobacco, fast food, sex (protected or otherwise - there is too much risk), and driving. We should remove all peoples' liberties to protect them from all threats.
That's a real stretch. If you're going to count chained infections then why stop at 5? You might as well go to infinity and claim that everyone in the world will be infected. Ridiculous.
I have a statistically higher chance of dying in a car accident in the 2.5 hour drive to visit my parents than I do of dying from Covid-19.
You didn't do one bit of math before writing that.
In 2.5 hours, about 10 people will die in car accidents in the US. (100 per day)
Versus about 100 people from Covid (1000 per day).
Only 8% of the US population does NOT have access to a car. Exclude the elderly and children.. but that's still not enough of a difference to explain an order of magnitude more deaths.
You draw a lot of conclusions from rhetoric instead of facts. That's exactly what got us into this mess.
Well except that recorded Covid-19 deaths are statistically inseparable from deaths due to comorbidities and the overwhelming majority of recorded deaths were over 55 years old and had two or more comorbidities. The number of recorded Covid-19 deaths with zero comorbidities is some infinitesimal fraction (< 10%) of the overall “death count.” So, yes, as a perfectly healthy mid-30s adult I have a higher chance of dying in a car accident.
If anything we’ve successfully argued why people with comorbid risk factors (old age, diabetes, asthma, obesity, etc.) should remain isolated, but even that is looking sketchy as the death rate continues to plummet.
the overwhelming majority of recorded deaths were over 55 years old and had two or more comorbidities. The number of recorded Covid-19 deaths with zero comorbidities is some infinitesimal fraction (< 10%) of the overall “death count.”
A comorbidity is something that contributed to death, not necessarily a pre-existing condition.
Please take another look at the CDC report you’re extrapolating your claim from. You’ll see comorbidities such as
* Influenza and pneumonia
* Adult respiratory distress syndrome
* Respiratory failure
* Respiratory arrest
* Cardiac arrest
As it stands you’re essentially saying that if you have no pre-existing conditions, then being shot is fairly risk free. After all, people who die from gunshot wounds have comorbidities like blood loss, cardiac arrest, brain damage, laceration of internal organs, and sepsis.
It's difficult to have a sensible, objective discussion about relative risks because the numbers vary tremendously for individuals. Here are the latest estimates of infection fatality rate by age.
Of those that died in all age groups, the majority had at least one serious pre-existing condition prior to infection. In general most healthy young people are at higher risk from vehicle accidents than COVID-19, but the risk calculus changes significantly for those who are older or in poor health.
> We should remove all peoples' liberties to protect them from all threats.
Well, that's a bit far. We just want to protect our human trafficking trade, our customers don't want to risk dying of COVID-19, nor do we want to expose our product to an outbreak, that'd just be bad business. The restrictions are necessary and the vaccine can't come fast enough, our COVID-19 free stock is dwindling fast and we will need more humans that are immune our our whole trade will collapse, and that will NOT be good for the global economy and the heads of state we've strategically positioned.
I don’t know when this interview was, but I’m surprised to see no mention of sputum testing as a replacement for Nasopharyngeal RT-PCR.
I don’t know the precise number, but probably at least a dozen of these spit tests have been developed at Universities and approved by the FDA for emergency use. Some even use the LAMP protocol as opposed to RT-PCR, which saves on time and reagents.
Another thing I always think of is how we didn’t adopt the contact tracing protocol that Google and Apple developed. Obviously it was a trust issue, and maybe some logistical shortcomings, but contact tracing as we’ve implemented it is largely ineffectual in reducing spread. The serial interval in young people is likely less than the time it takes to get back a test, and certainly shorter than the time it takes to get a test and complete a contact tracing interview.
The US response to Covid is obviously a polarizing issue, but we’re all wrong to assume that we couldn’t have done better.
We know mortality increases with unemployment, which increased due to lockdown by 5x. The richest people in the USA made over a half of trillion dollars during lockdown, on top of free money, trillions, that they just openly took.
I hope Mr. Gates reads this, because I just have one word to say to him. Bravo. I am glad you are the one doing this, because I would be so much worse. It's good I am kept away. We would not survive. I see our shared ills, cities burning and people dying as simple forceful motivation.
To everyone else, don't be shocked by the complete absence of morals among society. I read through most everything. This is no argument. It's just what works, to be the most frightening person among them, so everyone leaves you alone. What humans do to each other, nothing surprises me.
The people trying to take over with just who they are and what they say, what else do they have? Racial strife? Let me tell you how that one is going to work out. BLM yeah yeah yeah, sure. Whatever. Please meet the new member of the team, Joshua Blahyi.
I do not want leadership, or a celebrity, or even a president so much as I want a very mean man walking the streets with a gun.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadI don't know about you, but I like to keep my employees COVID19-free.
I don't understand why they make such a fuss about it! The employees are free to vaccinate and microchip their pets and their children, so why can't we vaccinate our employees? This is clearly a double standard.
For example, Gates insists that people should be able to get test results within 24 hours no matter what and that it is unbelievable and inexplicable that the US isn't encouraging people without symptoms to get tested. There's an inherent trade-off between those two things - push people without symptoms to get tested and it overloads the testing capacity, impeding access to testing and contact tracing for everyone - which can't easily be fixed by expanding testing. There's an extremely limited global supply of everything needed to carry out testing, the US already has pretty much the biggest testing program out there excluding a handful of really small countries, and the availability of further supplies is not being helped by the fact that Europe is having major outbreaks right now and is trying to expand testing there up to US levels. You wouldn't know this from the article, which just makes it sound like the big bad government is doing these things to make this worse because they're big and bad.
(There also seem to be some pretty fundamental limitations as to how useful testing potentially-exposed people without symptoms can even be in the first place. Test them too early and it'll likely give a false negative. Test them too late and you'll only find out they're positive after they've been contagious for some time, plus they may also test negative too. I've also seem it claimed that the optimal time to test people is about 3 days after the peak in infectiousness, which probably doesn't help - though without symptoms it's not like there's really any way to tell when the optimal time is anyway. This really fundamental reason why what he's calling for wouldn't work as described is just ignored, even though the CDC's literal stated reason for discouraging it is that it would lead to false negatives which would cause people to think they're in the clear and go out and spread the virus.)
Imagine a virus so unpredictable that you might take anywhere from 0 to 14 days to become infectious, and you could end up anyhwere from unknowingly and asymptomatically shedding the virus to dead from it. Imagine that.
You mean like HIV?
Journalism’s Gates keepers: https://www.cjr.org/criticism/gates-foundation-journalism-fu...
If you are wondering why someone like Michael Levitt [1] doesn't get wall to wall coverage by media (including outfits like RT) [as an 'expert voice on pandemic response'], the above article has a few clues.
[1]: He's just one example. There are many others.
https://twitter.com/mlevitt_np2013?lang=en
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Levitt
-- p.s. relevant pull quote asking the timely question --
During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac.
> In March, the Los Angeles Times reported that Levitt correctly forecasted in February that the COVID-19 pandemic in China would soon peak and that China would end up with around 80,000 cases and 3,250 deaths from COVID-19.[41] However, it has been noted that Levitt actually made a number of predictions, including incorrect forecasts, in February about China's COVID-19 trajectory[42], including one on February 7, 2020 claiming that "by 14-Feb. we will have reached 95% of the eventual death count of 928".[43] Levitt also has stated his belief that achieving natural herd immunity to the virus is possible[44] and has spoken against lockdown orders.[45]
> Levitt also wrongly predicted that Israel would suffer no more than 10 COVID-19 deaths[46]. On July 25, 2020, Levitt predicted that COVID-19 in the United States would be over "in 4 weeks with total reported deaths below 170,000".[47] However, this prediction about the reported death count also ended up being wrong as the number of reported deaths from COVID-19 in the United States exceeded 170,000 on August 16, 2020, only 3 weeks after Levitt's prediction.[48]
Sounds like he does get some coverage. As for why it’s not wall-to-wall? Maybe his predictions have been wrong too many times?
Track records don't seem to matter. The famous Imperial College model was by a worker with a rather alarming track record. How is the track record of Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, btw? Or the unqualified man currently serving as head of WHO? His C.V. is alarming enough.
So side arguments aside, the question remains as to why Bill Gates, are granted such a global megaphone. The article from Columbia Review of Journalism tells us why that may be the case.
I find it entirely irrational and unreasonable that decisions that will affect the entirety of humanity today, and will definitively alter the course of human development are to be made by individuals such as Bill Gates, and that other input by far more qualified individuals is entirely ignored, if not blackwashed.
It not unreasonable to seek a second opinion even for relatively minor health matters. And here we are talking about metaphorical open heart surgery on the very nature of society: how we are governed, how we interact, and how we make collective decisions.
There has never been a more timely moment to ASK QUESTIONS.
His idea that no one should be paid for a test result if it takes more than 24 hours to result is not bad, but the existing system is not set up for it. Decades of regulation of all aspects of the US medical system, from billing codes even to electronic health records, would prevent that kind of change from being adopted overnight. If we adopted this change, you'd very likely see almost no one running any COVID tests at all - the risk and infrastructure investment would be too high, for too little payout. (Recouping the cost of lab tests is generally hard as is, since the costs of running a medical lab are almost entirely fixed, both in terms of labor and capital. Routine maintenance must be performed, the lab must have a certain contingent on duty to handle stat tests, etc.)
I'm not sure the US system can be improved unless we have some practitioners who want to make a clean break from the existing regime, and they get some cover from the government to actually innovate. I'm not holding my breath.
What worries me is this may be decades away.
> What worries me is this may be decades away.
First the good news: That day is here!!
Now the bad news: that medication isn't working out great for them. Apparently some wingnut told people that drinking bleach was a potential cure for some ills. Didn't go great.
And thats the problem with what you wish for - a popular facebooker, youtuber, instagrammer, president tells people that they can design their own medication, people are going to do it.
There one example
It lead to actual problems of US American citizens ingesting/consuming bleach which forced government agencies to put out warnings: https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2020/08/24/some...
Never once does he mention the word 'bleach'. He uses the terms UV light and disinfectant. But I guess using disinfectant, to the average American reader, is synonymous with literally injecting bleach into your body or guzzling it down your throat...
Remember when NPR came out with this article entitled: "No, You Don't Need To Disinfect Your Groceries", and the media was outraged because millions of Americans were dumb enough to start soaking their food in bleach? Yeah, me neither.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/12/8322692...
Interestingly, looks like he was right about it anyway:
https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/using-uv-light-to...
Quackery is much easier than actual medicine. Quacks don't have to spend anything on R&D and quack medicines are a lot easier to manufacture (look up the synthesis pathways for popular pharmaceuticals!), and this means quacks can spend more on marketing and operate with much higher margins. This translates into a huge market advantage. Pretty soon you'll have nothing but quacks.
Medicine has a unique and extreme case of the "uninformed consumer problem." In medicine it's incredibly difficult even for professionals to tell whether something actually works, let alone individuals.
"Do your own research" doesn't work at all in medicine unless you have a billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket and can assemble your own research lab. Excluding emergency medicine and the most instantly and dramatically effective drugs, it's really hard as an individual consumer of health care to tell whether a treatment is working over the short term. Check out gwern.net and how much work he's put into trying to tell if various nootropics work and how much uncertainty remains.
The fact that individual discernment is so hard in medicine means defrauding people is incredibly easy. It's a market that is inherently vulnerable to massive fraud, and there is no easy way (that we know of) to fix this. Even with the FDA there is still a tremendous amount of quackery. Without the FDA and strict licensing and supervision there would be only quackery.
BTW news seems to suffer from a similar problem. Actual investigative journalism is expensive, hard, and sometimes dangerous. (Old PI joke: How do you know if a conspiracy theorist might be right? They are missing and presumed dead.) Fake news is cheap and easy, and since it's fake you can craft your stories for maximum click bait appeal without having to be limited by pesky "reality" and "honesty" constraints. The reader meanwhile has neither the time nor the ability nor the expertise to really fact check anything.
In general markets where the consumer is unable or unwilling to discern tend to be flooded with and overcome by fraud.
It's extreme but not unique. Do you know what's running in any of your devices? Almost not, I believe. Yesterday I had the pleasure of needing to copy some medical reports of mine on a multipurpose printer I own. I shortly gave it a pause being not sure whether the contents would be sent immediately to the mothership. I then realized that when the printer was set up initially that I set up the router to prevent calls to the outside for this machine. But: although I configured the router, I would need to go to great lengths to actually verify that the printer can't phone home.
And don't get me started about quality (as in endurance and serviceability). It's a nightmare as price is not a deciding factor in my experience. Neither is brand.
Is that web cam sending pics of you to China? Is your fridge listening to your private conversations? Is your printer sending confidential PII to a poorly secured server somewhere? Is your car tracking you and selling the info to insurance companies? Is your home security device allowing a stalker to watch your every move?
It's pretty hard to answer any of those questions unless you are a security researcher with deep understanding of network protocols and systems and a good deal of time on your hands.
Yes, many more quacks would advertise services.
> Quackery is much easier than actual medicine. Quacks don't have to spend anything on R&D and quack medicines are a lot easier to manufacture (look up the synthesis pathways for popular pharmaceuticals!), so they can spend more on marketing and operate with much higher margins.
Good point!
> Pretty soon there will be little legitimate medicine left in the market.
I'm not so sure. Even the canonical example of this phenomenon, Gresham's Law, requires legal tender laws or some similar mechanism which requires the acceptance of the "bad" money on par with "good" money. It's not clear that a requirement would happen in laissez-faire medicine.
> Medicine has a unique and extreme case of the "uninformed consumer problem." In medicine it's incredibly difficult even for professionals to tell whether something actually works, let alone individuals. > > "Do your own research" doesn't work at all in medicine unless you have a billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket and can assemble your own research lab. Excluding emergency medicine and the most instantly and dramatically effective drugs, it's really hard as an individual consumer of health care to tell whether a treatment is working over the short term. Check out gwern.net and how much work he's put into trying to tell if various nootropics work and how much uncertainty remains.
Agree. "Do your own research" in medicine doesn't work very well for a host of reasons. Chief among them: physicians don't understand the complexity of the body as a system. Microbiologists don't even understand the complexity of a single cell. We (humans) understand human life in certain aspects, and it's remarkable what competent physicians can do with the knowledge they do have. But if even they have no idea what is going on beyond essentially sophisticated educated guess-and-check, what hope does the layperson have?
> The fact that individual discernment is so hard in medicine means defrauding people is incredibly easy. It's a market that is inherently vulnerable to massive fraud, and there is no easy way (that we know of) to fix this. Even with the FDA there is still a tremendous amount of quackery. Without the FDA and strict licensing and supervision there would be only quackery.
I'm not sure the FDA is the only way. We could have stronger laws that punish fraud in civil court, or make practitioners liable financially (or in severe cases, criminally) for ineffective or harmful treatments. Things like the Internet make the information problems less daunting than in the bad old days of patent medicine salespeople roaming from town to town (though today we have unregulated MLMs).
I also think that the regulation to which I refer is much broader than simply FDA regulation. Billing, electronic records, purchasing, distribution of medical equipment, pharmaceutical distribution, laboratory testing and just about everything else in the US medical system are regulated beyond belief. Many of these regulations were introduced with the goal of "improving efficiency," and have instead resulted in protected, rent-seeking firms with zero gains in efficiency. They've resulted in the death of the private practice, and have siloed practitioners into Kafkaesque organizations, each of which is a single point of failure.
I'm skeptical that the FDA should do much beyond determining the safety of treatments, but there is a host of other regulatory nonsense in health care that could be innovated around, including many of the things GP was talking about.
Right now most of the necessary equipment is siloed in research institutions and hospitals.
It seems medical quackery gets a disproportionate platform, I think in an attempt to educate people about how dangerous it can be. But go look online or even in a brick and mortar store: there's plenty of stuff designed to take your money that won't improve your life.
This is especially true for providers who aren't running the tests in-house. If your doctor takes a test and sends it out to an external lab like LabCorp, who is responsible if the complete process takes more than 24 hours?
In reality, your doctor would simply stop testing for Coronavirus and instead refer you to a LabCorp collection center, where they could keep you waiting in line until they had enough testing capacity to take your sample and start the 24-hour clock. Everyone loses.
Not to mention all of effort required to retool billing and accounting systems to account for time-based costing. This alone would drive the cost of testing upward by huge amounts. Or more realistically, providers would simply not offer tests unless patients paid in cash to avoid this mess.
This is a great example of how regulation can end up making the situation worse, despite good intentions.
This kind of sounds like a semi-win. Eliminate the middle man between the patient and the lab. Provide visible backpressure by refusing to accept requests that can't be serviced in a timely fashion, allowing those requests that are serviced to be timely.
It doesn't help the problem of more demand for tests than supply of testing (or at least, not directly). But it's better to have all (or substantially all) results in 24 hours, than to have all results in a pipeline for a week.
Also, maybe start at 48 hours, if 24 hours is too restrictive.
There are of course also conspiracies that your brain gets damaged from the test...
We have had 200k, so a 90% reduction.
Hopefully there is a vaccine soon
citation needed.
Here are many models that we can backcheck: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/covid-forecasts/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-r...
If the graph keeps going like the way it looks, it will consume effectively the entire population by month X, with Y percent dying. While this was not a formal epidemiological model, it allowed two tentative conclusions:
1. If the curve (a straight line on a semi-log graph) shows signs of turning over, I will breathe a huge sigh of relief, the sooner the better.
2. The curve was a "sniff test" for whether more advanced predictions were believable, notably, any prediction that did not roughly follow this baseline needed a darn good explanation.
The CDC in February (back when they weren't compromised) did modelling that predicted between 200,000 and 1.7M deaths in total for the entire epidemic. This March piece from NYT has the details: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/us/coronavirus-deaths-est...
> without action by the government and individuals to slow the spread of coronavirus and suppress new cases, 2.2 million people in the United States could die
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-r...
30,000,000 to 40,000,000 have died from AIDS over the decades for some reference point.
For example, the graphs for COVID cases in my county reflect the county government working with no coordination at the state or federal level, the predictable effect of having a large public university in town, and private companies that are managing the production and analysis of COVID tests with no public policy guidance.
> “All you have to do is the four plus four, $8 billion total. And then people will see, even though the U.S. made some mistakes, at least our desire to cooperate, help others and use our R&D capacity, at least, you know, they’ll see it in a positive light.”
The bottom line is he's advocating for more funding to pay for vaccines in other countries. I think it's hard to argue that the U.S. response to coronavirus has been competent, but I don't think Bill Gates is a credible authority to making many of the health claims he's raising in this piece.
For example, he BLASTS how we've handled testing in the U.S. - fair point, but it's not clear that the alternatives he raises would be more effective. In fact, it seems like the most widely accepted tests we have are prone to false positives. This could in part be why our strategy has shifted to not test asymptomatic individuals. There's no point forcing someone into isolation over an inaccurate test that could have flagged a cold virus as Covid-19.
Bill Gates has advocated for some pretty creepy stuff ("Real ID" microchip implants, a complete ban on end-to-end cryptography). He can spend as much as he wants on PR, but I don't trust him in his role as a "vigilante health authority." He's a billionaire with pet projects and an ego.
Yes there is.
I'm fine with the Bill Gates bashing, but this is like saying there's no reason to stop having unprotected sex after you've tested positive for HIV using a test with a 20% false positive rate. Stop doing things that would potentially spread the disease, then take a better test.
If the goal is really to protect people, then we shouldn't stop at isolation. We should ban all of the things that could potentially harm people: alcohol, tobacco, fast food, sex (protected or otherwise - there is too much risk), and driving. We should remove all peoples' liberties to protect them from all threats.
That seems a reasonable thing to do, because unlike all your other hyperbolic examples it is potentially harmful to large numbers of other people.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
You didn't do one bit of math before writing that.
In 2.5 hours, about 10 people will die in car accidents in the US. (100 per day)
Versus about 100 people from Covid (1000 per day).
Only 8% of the US population does NOT have access to a car. Exclude the elderly and children.. but that's still not enough of a difference to explain an order of magnitude more deaths.
You draw a lot of conclusions from rhetoric instead of facts. That's exactly what got us into this mess.
If anything we’ve successfully argued why people with comorbid risk factors (old age, diabetes, asthma, obesity, etc.) should remain isolated, but even that is looking sketchy as the death rate continues to plummet.
A comorbidity is something that contributed to death, not necessarily a pre-existing condition.
Please take another look at the CDC report you’re extrapolating your claim from. You’ll see comorbidities such as
* Influenza and pneumonia
* Adult respiratory distress syndrome
* Respiratory failure
* Respiratory arrest
* Cardiac arrest
As it stands you’re essentially saying that if you have no pre-existing conditions, then being shot is fairly risk free. After all, people who die from gunshot wounds have comorbidities like blood loss, cardiac arrest, brain damage, laceration of internal organs, and sepsis.
0-19 years: 0.00003 20-49 years: 0.0002 50-69 years: 0.005 70+ years: 0.054
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scena...
Of those that died in all age groups, the majority had at least one serious pre-existing condition prior to infection. In general most healthy young people are at higher risk from vehicle accidents than COVID-19, but the risk calculus changes significantly for those who are older or in poor health.
Well, that's a bit far. We just want to protect our human trafficking trade, our customers don't want to risk dying of COVID-19, nor do we want to expose our product to an outbreak, that'd just be bad business. The restrictions are necessary and the vaccine can't come fast enough, our COVID-19 free stock is dwindling fast and we will need more humans that are immune our our whole trade will collapse, and that will NOT be good for the global economy and the heads of state we've strategically positioned.
Isn;t that the 'American Dream' role model?
your snark completely obliterates your argument. nobody will listen to you if you talk like that.
i'm telling you this as someone on your side.
I don’t know the precise number, but probably at least a dozen of these spit tests have been developed at Universities and approved by the FDA for emergency use. Some even use the LAMP protocol as opposed to RT-PCR, which saves on time and reagents.
Another thing I always think of is how we didn’t adopt the contact tracing protocol that Google and Apple developed. Obviously it was a trust issue, and maybe some logistical shortcomings, but contact tracing as we’ve implemented it is largely ineffectual in reducing spread. The serial interval in young people is likely less than the time it takes to get back a test, and certainly shorter than the time it takes to get a test and complete a contact tracing interview.
The US response to Covid is obviously a polarizing issue, but we’re all wrong to assume that we couldn’t have done better.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
We know mortality increases with unemployment, which increased due to lockdown by 5x. The richest people in the USA made over a half of trillion dollars during lockdown, on top of free money, trillions, that they just openly took.
I hope Mr. Gates reads this, because I just have one word to say to him. Bravo. I am glad you are the one doing this, because I would be so much worse. It's good I am kept away. We would not survive. I see our shared ills, cities burning and people dying as simple forceful motivation.
To everyone else, don't be shocked by the complete absence of morals among society. I read through most everything. This is no argument. It's just what works, to be the most frightening person among them, so everyone leaves you alone. What humans do to each other, nothing surprises me.
The people trying to take over with just who they are and what they say, what else do they have? Racial strife? Let me tell you how that one is going to work out. BLM yeah yeah yeah, sure. Whatever. Please meet the new member of the team, Joshua Blahyi.
I do not want leadership, or a celebrity, or even a president so much as I want a very mean man walking the streets with a gun.