Fauci, Paul, and Gain-of-Function

Senator Rand Paul and Dr. Anthony Fauci famously argued in a hearing in July about whether NIH funded forbidden (not to be funded) gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This has been bothering me for some time because it should be easy to find out who is lying, yet no one is making reliable conclusions. The problem is, nearly everyone is obfuscating in one way or another.

Here is what I have found:

• Paul tried multiple times to vaguely link the research to Covid, and then backtracked those links. This is a huge red herring.
• The Obama white house initiated a funding pause on "gain-of-function research projects that may be reasonably anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses such that the virus would have enhanced pathogenicity and/or transmissibility in mammals via the respiratory route."
• In the context of virology, 'gain-of-function' means modifying a virus to allow it to do something it could not do originally.
• The research in question modified a bat virus to see if it could infect human cells (enhanced transmissibility).
• Fauci says the research in question was not gain-of-function.
• The virus that was modified was not SARS, but rather SARS-like.

It is hard to interpret Fauci's statement in a way that would make it true, but it is possible:

• We have to interpret "gain-of-function" to mean research that is forbidden by the pause, rather than its usual definition.
• We have to interpret the pause to apply literally to SARS itself, and not SARS-like.

So why does Fauci not spell this out? Because he has calculated that obfuscation is preferable to hiding behind a meaningless technicality or admitting error.

Reinfections

Are vaccinations better than natural immunity? Common sense would say no, but headlines like "Unvaccinated People Are Twice As Likely To Face COVID-19 Reinfection" seem to indicate they are. Suspiciously, the articles don't actually draw that conclusion, but they don't discourage it either. That should trigger your spidey sense. 

The actual paper is here. People who contracted COVID in 2020 and did not vaccinate were compared to people who contracted COVID in 2020 and did vaccinate in 2021. The first group were over twice as likely to get reinfected. This should not be surprising. Both kinds of immunity wear off over time and the vaccine was more recent. For previously infected people, the vaccine is essentially a booster shot - unnecessary, because death and serious effects are extremely rare after either kind of immunity. Once you have had the disease or a vaccination, COVID is simply another common cold.

The media believes vaccination of previously infected people is a good thing, and they will embrace a paper that can mislead people into doing so, without regard to factual accuracy.

Worse than 1918?

Continuing their agenda of alarming the public, the New York Times has published a new article suggesting this pandemic is worse than the Flu pandemic of 1918. Specifically, they report the excess death rate for Covid in 2020 at 16% while the same figure for 1918 is reported as 11%. How is this possible when the earlier flu killed more Americans (675,000), and the current US population is 3 times what it was then? Short answer: it's not.

The excess is easy to calculate for 2020 from CDC data. US Covid deaths 2020: 350,616. Normal US mortality 2019: 2,800,000. Excess mortality 2020: 12.5%

For 2018, we can use data from the census bureau. There are some caveats. 

1. The data only covers the "registration area" meaning states that are reporting their data. This shouldn't be too bad because we are only calculating percentages.
2. Influenza and Pneumonia are reported separately to allow comparison with international data. The documents instructs that the categories should be lumped together.
3. The data does not distinguish 'Spanish' influenza/pneumonia (IP) from other influenza/pneumonia.

The most straightforward approach simply compares total mortality for 1918 to previous years. Normal mortality had been decreasing since 1880 and was hovering around 1.41% by 1917. Total mortality in 1918 was 1.80%, so excess mortality was 30.0%

An alternative is to tease out the 'Spanish' influenza/pneumonia from the previous year's influenza/pneumonia. The total IP mortality rate for 1918 was 0.583% and the total IP mortality rate for 2017 was 0.167%. The difference is 0.416%. This is 29.5% excess mortality.

Final score: Covid 12%, Spanish Flu 30%

Under siege from all sides

After the capitol riots, Trump was removed from social media by tech monopolies, effectively silencing the President of the United States. Then when supporters tried to set up their own sites, the sites themselves were removed by another tech monopoly. These tech monopolies have dramatically demonstrated they have more power than the leader of the free world.

Trump's words and actions are seditious, and words intended to promote insurrection are and should be illegal. But these tech monopolies go much further and suppress conservative views simply because they deem them to be false, by standards they themselves create.

Section 230 is part of a federal law which provides immunity for website publishers from third-party content. The law is broken. If a publisher gets to edit content (other than as required by law) then they are responsible for content.

It is not hard to imagine a future in which the laws governing tech monopolies are written by the monopolies themselves and any objections to this arrangement would be simply silenced.

On its face, the First Amendment only applies to the government, but it is the government's responsibility to protect the people from abusive monopolies. The constitution was designed to protect the people from tyranny. A rogue government is not the only possible threat to our liberty.

We are seeing a fight between those who would overthrow our democracy and those who would overthrow the First Amendment. The rest of us are caught in between. 

In other news, OpenAI has made its GPT-3 software available as web service to software companies without providing the source code. This software is capable of generating text on any subject virtually indistinguishable from that produced by humans. The company was founded on open principles, among which is the premise that closed source AI research is dangerous to humanity. But they found it impossible to financially support their work and in 2019 sold out to Microsoft and went closed source. Now the users of their software are carefully selected in order to prevent nefarious uses, among other criteria.

If this stuff doesn't scare you, you are not paying attention.