Travel during the continuing PANDEMIC

[Guest1]

QUARANTINE RULES?
An explainer on a confusing topic
Calgary Sun27 Jun 2021BRIAN LILLEY blilley@postmedia.com @brianlilley
THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES
To quarantine, or not to quarantine.

It's not a rhetorical question anymore. The rules in Canada are changing and whether you have to quarantine at home, in a hotel or at all can be confusing.

Are you double vaxxed? Do you have the right vaccine? The rules can be confusing. I mean, we've been told for months that anyone entering Canada by air had to stay at some pretty crappy hotels chosen for us by the government.

Brown bags with brown bananas and stale sandwiches were the order of the day at those places.

Then we found out more than 88,000 people were exempted by the federal government from staying in those hotels.

Turns out that included Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who stayed at some fancy digs in Ottawa before being sprung to go home and hold news conferences on the front lawn.

So, what are the rules for quarantine and who do they apply to? That's what

I'll try to answer here:

When do the rules change for double-vaccinated Canadians?

You may have heard that if you're double vaccinated, then you won't need to stay at a hotel, or quarantine at all as of July 5, but if you're booking travel to return to Canada, don't do it until July 6.

While the government says the rules change on July 5, they don't take effect until 11:59 p.m. ET.

That leaves about two hours for flights to land in Calgary and three hours in Vancouver, but if you land in Toronto at 9 p.m. on July 5, then you could end up in a hotel and at home for two weeks.

What about the kids?

Travelling with kids, especially young ones? Be prepared to keep them at home for two weeks.

Vaccines are only approved for those 12 and older in Canada and to skip the quarantine you need to have both shots.

If you're travelling with a 9-year-old, they won't have had any vaccines and will need to quarantine at home for two weeks. Same with a 12-year-old with just one shot — they won't be considered fully vaccinated and will still need to quarantine.

That doesn't mean they must be locked in a room in the basement with meals pushed through a slot in the door, but they won't be able to leave the house for two weeks.

It's OK, I was vaccinated overseas!

Plenty of people have been vaccinated outside of Canada but the thing you need to make sure of is that you've had one of the vaccines approved in Canada.

To skip the quarantine rules, you need to have received two shots of Pfizer, Moderna, Astrazeneca or any combination of those three.

Anyone with a single shot of Johnson & Johnson is also considered fully vaccinated.

If you received the Sputnik vaccine from Russia or Sinovac from China, you aren't considered vaccinated by the Canadian government and will still need to quarantine when you arrive.

How do I prove that I was vaccinated outside of the country?

It's your responsibility to prove that you've been vaccinated when you enter Canada. That proof must be provided in English or French, or have a certified translation that you can present to customs officers.

You'll also be asked to upload that information to the Arrivecan app.

What do I need to do if I need to quarantine?

You need to be able to prove to border officials that you have a place to stay and access to the necessities of life when you enter Canada.

That also means being able to stay away from others who didn't travel.

When does my quarantine end?

It ends 14 days after you enter Canada, provided you've had two negative tests.

Can I have visitors while in quarantine?

The only visitors you should expect or accept are border officials or police who may show up to check that you're following the rules.

Can I hold a news conference on the front lawn during quarantine?

This is probably a bad idea but since the prime minister is doing it, it will be hard for officials to say no, but don't expect the media to show up.

[Guest1]

Coronavirus: What to know about relaxed travel measures for fully vaccinated Canadians | CTV News

[Guest1]

BRUSSELS -- European Union governments agreed on Wednesday to add Canada and 10 other countries to their list of states from which they will allow non-essential travel, EU diplomats said.

Ambassadors from the EU's 27 states approved the additions at a meeting on Wednesday, with the change to take effect in the coming days.

Ex-EU member Britain, where the highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus has caused a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases, is not on the list.

Coronavirus: EU to add Canada, 10 other states to safe travel list | CTV News

[AIP]

1 hour ago, Kargokings said:

BRUSSELS -- European Union governments agreed on Wednesday to add Canada and 10 other countries to their list of states from which they will allow non-essential travel, EU diplomats said.

Ambassadors from the EU's 27 states approved the additions at a meeting on Wednesday, with the change to take effect in the coming days.

Ex-EU member Britain, where the highly infectious Delta variant of the coronavirus has caused a sharp rise in COVID-19 cases, is not on the list.

Coronavirus: EU to add Canada, 10 other states to safe travel list | CTV News

Now we need Canada to reciprocate.

[UpperDeck]

May I be forgiven for asking; UK variant; South African variant; Brazilian variant.....all particularly aggressive and cause for concern. And then we had the Indian variant...much worse in terms of both transmissibility and tenacity. But not for too long. Enter the Greek means of anonymity and presto....offend no one...the Indian variant became the Delta variant.

Sheesh...not only do those Delhi habitues own all the Esso stations; variety stores; and, hotel/motels.....they control nomenclature!!

Speaking of....so Air Canada...at the request of the Liberal government motivated solely by a concern for the safety of Canadians asked Air Canada to suspend flights to and from Delhi. Air Canada complied.

Ahem! Recent AC red-eye flight from Mexico City to Toronto. A full load. Routing? Delhi to Paris to Mexico City to Toronto. 25% agricultural workers; a small percentage from Europe and most from.....Delhi! And...as a usual result....a LOT of wheelchairs required in YYZ.

So....what was accomplished by terminating the AC flights to Delhi? Great political PR ; more hoops for the highly motivated BUT no enhancement to the "safety of Canadians".

What a load of BS.

 

[FA@AC]

11 minutes ago, UpperDeck said:

So....what was accomplished by terminating the AC flights to Delhi? Great political PR ; more hoops for the highly motivated BUT no enhancement to the "safety of Canadians".

The aim of the policy was probably to deter people from travelling to India and I expect that it achieved that.  Whether it actually made sense is up for debate.  A more logical approach might have been to deny entry to Canada to those who had been in India over the 2 weeks or so prior to their arrival on our soil or to impose a 2-week hotel quarantine on them.  Given the horrific situation in India of a couple of months back, doing nothing to deter travel from there to here might have opened the floodgates to thousands and thousands of people bringing the Indian/Delta variant of Covid into the country before a critical mass of our population had been vaccinated.  We had a rough enough time of it here until recently with the number of cases we already had.

I note that you seem to have opposed nearly every restriction on travel and other activity that our governments have imposed.  Many of the restrictions have been poorly thought out and have been inconvenient.  On the other hand, we now have good vaccine coverage and things in Canada are opening up again.  Quarantine-free travel for the vaccinated (overdue) will soon be here, and our country's Covid death rate, while horrific, is low compared to that of the countries whose approaches (Brazil, USA, India) you would seem to favour.  We have also reached the situation we're now in without going as far as to impose the Australia-like restrictions that some others would favour.  I'd say that on balance the authorities here have done relatively well despite some blunders.

[Don Hudson]

The "Australian-like" restrictions remain necessary because the vaccination rate is second only to India, at ~4% of the population, with only their first jab, thanks to government incompetence. Their vision, & resolve to control the virus appeared to stop at lock-downs, when, in Canada and elsewhere, that was an early, interim, temporary approach to slowing rampant transmission of the virus that was successful, while further measures were imagined, created and implemented. UD might set aside politics and be happy with the remarkable Canadian rate of vaccination as one can see, especially in BC, though through a glass darkly, a border-opening on the horizon and an end to those inconvenient hotel stays.

Edited July 1, 2021 by Don Hudson

[Rich Pulman]

13 hours ago, UpperDeck said:

..... and most from.....Delhi! And...as a usual result....a LOT of wheelchairs required in YYZ.

I had to chuckle at this remark as I remembered the miracle I once witnessed in Amritsar back in 2008. I operated a LHR-ATQ flight and had a request for 50+ (!!!) wheelchairs on arrival, all carry-offs. There are no gates at ATQ, but we parked close enough to the terminal that passengers walked to/from the aircraft. After all able-body passengers deplaned, the first 10 WC passengers were taken off and wheeled into the terminal building to collect their luggage, clear customs, meet their families, and get taken out to the street. Meanwhile, when it was explained to the remaining WC passengers that there were only 10 wheelchairs avaible in the airport and that it could take hours to get them processed, they ALL got up and walked off the airplane, down the stairs, and into the terminal building. Amazing! 

[AIP]

15 hours ago, FA@AC said:

"some blunders"

You are way to kind.

The border being "closed" is an absolute sham.

Quite simply no other way to state it.

[FA@AC]

13 minutes ago, AIP said:

The border being "closed" is an absolute sham.

I'm not sure if you're referring to the US border or to our borders in general, but changes are likely coming soon on both fronts.  

[AIP]

2 minutes ago, FA@AC said:

I'm not sure if you're referring to the US border or to our borders in general, but changes are likely coming soon on both fronts.  

Was referring to the "border closure" as purported by the fed and the lapdog media in this country.

The border has never been closed, people can come and go, and have been doing so.

The hypocrisy is best exemplified by the Caribbean experiment in March, where canadian airlines were not flying to those places, but american carriers were.  People were flying to and from Buffalo and then crossing the land border.

Delhi as has been pointed out is another fine example.

The upcoming changes that you reference are long overdue, the EU has added Canada to the list of countries whose citizens can travel to Europe (vaxxed of course), Canada MUST reciprocate this move, and it should be now.

[Guest1]

Open borders can result in problems.

Covid: Europe risks new wave, WHO warns

Published

52 minutes ago

Catherine Smallwood said the virus was being spread where fans mixed outside the stadiums

Covid-19 infections have risen by 10% in a week in Europe after two months in decline and the risk of a new wave of cases is growing, says the World Health Organization.

Regional director Hans Kluge said the risk had been heightened by sluggish vaccine rollouts, new variants and increased social mixing.

There was also a danger that Euro 2020 could act as a "super-spreader".

Hundreds of fans returning from London and St Petersburg have tested positive.

WHO senior emergency officer Catherine Smallwood called on host cities to do more to monitor the movement of fans.

"What we need to look at is around the stadia," she said, highlighting travel before and after matches. "What's happening after the games? Are they going into crowded bars and pubs?"

 

• Football linked to 2,000 Scottish Covid cases

[mo32a]

Anyone who is fully  vaccinated should be able to cross the US/Canada border restriction free, now.

[Guest1]

20 minutes ago, mo32a said:

Anyone who is fully  vaccinated should be able to cross the US/Canada border restriction free, now.

The problem lies with the proof and so far Justin has been dragging his feet on getting / adopting an approved document and of course I guess the same can be held true for the US.

[Don Hudson]

AIP;

The Australian & New Zealand actions were far easier to enforce for the obvious reasons associated with each being an island. It is equally obvious that a continental border will be far more porous. Some provinces & states here and south attempted to become an "island".

The notion of staying-away from infection is one of the first rules of personal hygiene, here, multiplied by many millions. So the balance in our chosen economies is, What do we harm, what do we protect and what do we consider saveable or sacrosanct? Those decisions are becoming more clear by the day.

There is noise and signal everywhere; - we each determine which is which for us, and continuously sort, filter, validate, delete/keep curious, pursue according to our values and upbringing which gives us our unique world view.

The Economist is known as a worthwhile and trustworthy media outlet; it's journalists have written extensively on lockdowns. First, from the July 4th Economist a year ago, the following:

Quote

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/07/04/how-speedy-lockdowns-save-lives

Jul 4th 2020

"Early stay-at-home orders contained covid-19 the best

"It is too soon to predict how severe such outbreaks will be. Yet data from the first wave show how important it is for governments to respond quickly. Most East Asian countries with existing contact-tracing systems and experience of viral outbreaks contained covid-19 almost immediately. Western governments resorted to blanket lockdowns, which have crippling economic side-effects. Those that did so fastest contained the disease most effectively."

. . . .

"In an analysis covering 200 administrative units, such as American states and Italian regions, we found that stay-at-home orders substantially reduced the probability of the virus spreading to new areas. Imposing such a restriction on a region with fewer than 100 cases knocks 50% off its chance of reaching 25 deaths per 100,000 people in the next fortnight. Lockdowns are blunt tools, but they do save lives. ■

"Sources: Johns Hopkins University; WHO; EU; University of Oxford; Flaxman et al. (2020); national statistical and health agencies

"Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our coronavirus hub"

 

, and from the July 3, 2021 issue of The Economist:

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2021/07/01/how-to-assess-the-costs-and-benefits-of-lockdowns

How to assess the costs and benefits of lockdowns

The policy will stay in governments’ toolkits. A growing body of research will guide its use

---

Jun 29th 2021

“TO ME, I say the cost of a human life is priceless, period,” said Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York state. In the spring of 2020 politicians took actions that were unprecedented in their scale and scope as they tried to slow the spread of covid-19. The dire warnings of the deaths to come if nothing was done, and the sight of overflowing Italian hospitals, were unfamiliar and terrifying. Before the crisis the notion of halting people’s day-to-day activity seemed so economically and politically costly as to be implausible. But once China and Italy imposed lockdowns, they became unavoidable elsewhere.

Much of the public debate over covid-19 has echoed Mr Cuomo’s refusal to think through the uncomfortable calculus between saving lives and the economy. To oversimplify just a little, the two sides of the lockdown debate hold diametrically opposed and equally unconvincing positions. Both reject the idea of a trade-off between lives and livelihoods. Those who support lockdowns say that they have had few malign economic effects, because people were already so fearful that they avoided public spaces without needing to be told. They therefore credit the policy with saving lives but do not blame it for wrecking the economy. Those who hate lockdowns say the opposite: that they destroyed livelihoods but did little to prevent the virus spreading.

The reality lies between these two extremes. Lockdowns both damage the economy and save lives, and governments have had to strike a balance between the two. Were trillions of dollars of lost economic output an acceptable price to pay to have slowed transmission? Or, with around 10m people dead, should the authorities have clamped down even harder? With politicians considering whether and when to lift existing restrictions, or to impose new ones, the answers to these questions are still crucial for policy today. Alongside vaccines, lockdowns remain an important way of coping with new variants and localised outbreaks. In late June Sydney went into lockdown for two weeks; Indonesia, South Africa and parts of Russia have followed suit.

Countries have employed a number of measures to restrict social mixing over the past year, from stopping people visiting bars and restaurants to ordering mask-wearing. The extent to which these strictures have constrained life has varied widely across countries and over time (see chart 1). A growing body of economic research explores the trade-off between lives and livelihoods associated with such policies. Economists have also compared the costs of lockdowns with estimates of its benefits. But whether the costs are worth incurring is a matter for debate not just among wonks, but for society at large.

People who see no trade-off at all might start by pointing to a study of the Spanish flu outbreak in America in 1918-20 by Sergio Correia, Stephan Luck and Emil Verner, which suggested that cities that enacted social distancing earlier may have ended up with better economic outcomes, perhaps because business could resume with the pandemic under control. But other economists have criticised the paper’s methodology. Cities with economies that were doing better before the pandemic, they say, happened to implement restrictions earlier. So it is unsurprising that they also did better afterwards. (The authors of the original paper note that pre-existing trends are “a concern”, but that “our original conclusion that there is no obvious trade-off between ‘flattening the curve’ and economic activity is largely robust.”)

Another plank of the no-trade-off argument is the present-day experience of a handful of places. Countries such as Australia and New Zealand followed a strategy of eliminating the virus, by locking down when recorded infections rose even to low levels, and imposing tough border controls. “Covid-19 deaths per 1m population in OECD countries that opted for elimination...have been about 25 times lower than in other OECD countries that favoured mitigation”, while “GDP growth returned to pre-pandemic levels in early 2021 in the five countries that opted for elimination”, argues a recent paper in the Lancet. The lesson seems to be that elimination allows the economy to restart and people to move about without fear.

Counterfactual controversies
But correlations do not tell you much. Such countries’ success so far may say more about good fortune than it does about enlightened policy. What was available to islands such as Australia, Iceland and New Zealand was not possible for most countries, which have land borders (and once the virus was spreading widely, eradication was almost impossible). Japan and South Korea have seen very low deaths from covid-19 and are also cited by the Lancet paper as having pursued elimination. But whether they did so or not is questionable: neither country imposed harsh lockdowns. Perhaps instead their experience with the SARS epidemic in the early 2000s helped them escape relatively unscathed.

When you look at more comparable cases—countries that are close together, say, or different parts of the same country—the notion that there is no trade-off between lives and livelihoods becomes less credible. Research by Goldman Sachs, a bank, shows a remarkably consistent relationship between the severity of lockdowns and the hit to output: moving from France’s peak lockdown (strict) to Italy’s peak (extremely strict) is associated with a decline in GDP of about 3%. Countries in the euro area with more excess deaths as measured by The Economist are seeing a smaller hit to output: in Finland, which has had one of the smallest rises in excess deaths in the club, GDP per person will fall by 1% in 2019-21, according to the IMF; but in Lithuania, the worst-performing member in terms of excess deaths, GDP per person will rise by more than 2%.

The experience across American states also hints at the existence of a trade-off. South Dakota, which imposed neither a lockdown nor mask-wearing, has done poorly in terms of deaths but its economy, on most measures, is faring better today than it was before the pandemic. Migration patterns also tell you something. There have been plenty of stories in recent months about people moving to Florida (a low-restriction state) and few about people going to Vermont (the state with the fewest deaths from covid-19 per person, after Hawaii), points out Tyler Cowen of George Mason University. Americans, at least, do not always believe that efforts to control covid-19 make life more worth living.

What if all these economic costs are the result not of government restrictions, though, but of personal choice? This too is argued by those who reject the idea of a trade-off. If they are correct, then the notion that simply lifting restrictions can boost the economy becomes a fantasy. People will only go out and about when cases are low; if they start rising, then people will shut themselves away again.

A number of papers have bolstered this argument. The most influential, by Austan Goolsbee and Chad Syverson, two economists, analyses mobility along administrative boundaries in America, at a time when one government imposed restrictions but the other did not. It finds that people on either side of the border behaved similarly, suggesting that it was almost entirely personal choice, rather than government orders, which explains their decision to limit social contact: people may have taken fright when they heard of local deaths from the virus. Research by the IMF draws similar conclusions.

There are reasons to think these findings overstate the power of voluntary behaviour, however. Sweden, which had long resisted imposing lockdowns, eventually did so when cases rose—an admission that they do make a difference. More recent research from Laurence Boone of the OECD, a rich-country think-tank, and Colombe Ladreit of Bocconi University uses slightly different measures from the IMF and finds that government orders do rather a lot to explain behavioural change.

Moreover, the line between compulsion and voluntary actions is more blurred than most analysis assumes. People’s choices are influenced both by social pressure and by economics. Press conferences where public-health officials or prime ministers warn about the dangers of the virus do not count as “mandated” restrictions on movement; but by design they have a large effect on behaviour. And in the pandemic certain voluntary decisions had to be enabled by the government. Topped-up unemployment benefits and furlough schemes made it easier for people to choose not to go to work, for instance.

Put this all together and it seems clear that governments’ actions did indeed get people to stay at home, with costly consequences for the economy. But were the benefits worth the costs? Economic research on this question tries to resolve three uncertainties: over estimates of the costs of lockdowns; over their benefits; and, when weighing up the two, over how to put a price on life—doing what Mr Cuomo refused to do.

Vital statistics
Start with the costs. The huge collateral damage of lockdowns is becoming clear. Global unemployment has spiked. Hundreds of millions of children have missed school, often for months. Families have been kept apart. And much of the damage is still to come. A recent paper by Francesco Bianchi, Giada Bianchi and Dongho Song suggests that the rise in American unemployment in 2020 will lead to 800,000 additional deaths over the next 15 years, a not inconsiderable share of American deaths from covid-19 that have been plausibly averted by lockdowns. A new paper published by America’s National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) expects that in poor countries, where the population is relatively young, “a lockdown can potentially lead to 1.76 children’s lives lost due to the economic contraction per covid-19 fatality averted”, probably because wellbeing suffers as incomes decline.

Researchers are more divided over the second uncertainty, the benefit of lockdowns, or the extent to which they reduce the spread of covid-19. The fact that, time and again, the imposition of a lockdown in a country was followed a few weeks later by declining cases and deaths might appear to settle the debate. That said, a recent NBER paper failed to find that countries or American states that implemented shelter-in-place policies earlier had fewer excess deaths than places which were slower to implement such restrictions. Another paper published in PNAS, a scientific journal, by Christopher Berry of the University of Chicago and colleagues, cannot find “effects of [shelter-in-place] policies on disease spread or deaths”, but does “find small, delayed effects on unemployment”.

Is the price right?
Running through this all is the final uncertainty, over putting a price on life. That practice might seem cold-hearted but is necessary for lots of public policies. How much should governments pay to make sure that bridges don’t collapse? How should families be compensated for the wrongful death of a relative? There are different ways to calculate the value of a statistical life (VSL). Some estimates are derived from the extra compensation that people accept in order to take certain risks (say, the amount of extra pay for those doing dangerous jobs), others from surveys.

Cost-benefit analyses have become a cottage industry during the pandemic, and their conclusions vary wildly. One paper by a team at Yale University and Imperial College, London, finds that social distancing, by preventing some deaths, provides benefits to rich countries in the region of 20% of GDP—a huge figure that plausibly exceeds even the gloomiest estimates of the collateral damage of lockdowns. But research by David Miles, also of Imperial College, and colleagues finds that the costs of Britain’s lockdown between March and June 2020 were vastly greater than their estimates of the benefits in terms of lives saved.

An important reason for the big differences in cost-benefit calculations is disagreement over the VSL. Many rely on a blanket estimate that applies to all ages equally, which American regulatory agencies deem is about $11m. At the other extreme Mr Miles follows convention in Britain, which says that the value of one quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) is equal to £30,000 (which seems close to a VSL of around £300,000, or $417,000, given how many years of life the typical person dying of covid-19 loses). The lower the monetary value you place on lives, the less good lockdowns do by saving them.

The appropriate way to value a change in the risk of death or life expectancy is subject to debate. Mr Miles’s number does, however, look low. In Britain the government’s “end-of-life” guidance allows treatments that are expected to increase life expectancy by one QALY to cost up to £50,000, points out Adrian Kent of Cambridge University in a recent paper, and allows a threshold of up to £300,000 per QALY for treating rare diseases. But it may be equally problematic to use the average figure of $11m in the case of the covid-19 pandemic, which disproportionately affects the elderly. The death of a frail 92-year-old is probably not as tragic as the death of a healthy 23-year-old. Because older people have fewer expected years left than the average person, researchers may choose to use lower estimates of VSL.

The best attempt at weighing up these competing valuations is a recent paper by Lisa Robinson of Harvard University and colleagues, which assesses what happens to the results of three influential cost-benefit studies of lockdowns when estimates of the VSL are altered (see chart 2). Adjusting for age can sharply reduce the net benefits of lockdowns, and can even lead to a result where “the policy no longer appears cost-beneficial”. Given that these models do not take into account the harder-to-measure costs of lockdowns—how to price the damage caused by someone not being able to attend a family Christmas, say, or a friend’s funeral?—the question of whether they were worth it starts to look like more of a toss-up.

But things only become still more complicated once you open the door to adjustments. Research on risk perception finds that uncertainty and dread over an especially bad outcome, especially one that involves more suffering before death, mean that people may be willing to pay far more to avoid dying from it. People appear to value not dying from cancer far more than not dying in a road accident, for instance. Many went to extraordinary lengths to avoid contracting covid-19, suggesting that they place enormous value on not dying from that disease. Some evidence suggests that the VSL might need to be increased by a factor of two or more, writes James Hammitt, also of Harvard, in a recent paper. That adjustment could make lockdowns look very worthwhile.

The malleability of cost-benefit analysis itself hints at the true answer of whether or not lockdowns were worth it. The benefit of a saved life is not a given but emerges from changing social norms and perceptions. What may have seemed worthwhile at the height of the pandemic may look different with the benefit of hindsight. Judgments over whether or not lockdowns made sense will be shaped by how society and politics evolve over the coming years—whether there is a backlash against the people who imposed lockdowns, whether they are feted, or whether the world moves on.

Dig deeper

All our stories relating to the pandemic and the vaccines can be found on our coronavirus hub. You can also listen to The Jab, our podcast on the race between injections and infections, and find trackers showing the global roll-out of vaccines, excess deaths by country and the virus’s spread across Europe and America.

 

[UpperDeck]

23 hours ago, FA@AC said:

The

I note that you seem to have opposed nearly every restriction on travel and other activity that our governments have imposed.  Many of the restrictions have been poorly thought out and have been inconvenient.  On the other hand, we now have good vaccine coverage and things in Canada are opening up again.  Quarantine-free travel for the vaccinated (overdue) will soon be here, and our country's Covid death rate, while horrific, is low compared to that of the countries whose approaches (Brazil, USA, India) you would seem to favour.  We have also reached the situation we're now in without going as far as to impose the Australia-like restrictions that some others would favour.  I'd say that on balance the authorities here have done relatively well despite some blunders.

If it appears so; ir is so. Seriously, I have opposed most of the travel restrictions imposed. Some have suggested that my motivation was simply personal. Those comments were both unfair and inaccurate. Certainly I have been affected by those restrictions but so also have been  thousands of other Canadians. My objection to those restrictions was that they were crafted and imposed based upon public perception of achievement rather than by reality-based metrics. 

I do not agree with those who now suggest Canada has done well in containing the virus. Canada did NOT do well. It is now July and people continue to mass for a first shot jostling over whether it will be Pfizer or not.

Since October, I have freely ( relatively) travelled back and forth to the US for non-essential purposes. I spent many weeks in quarantine but apart from answering phone calls requiring that I confirm my fulfillment of quarantine obligations, my life was unaltered as I remained within the confines of my property.

You might say that the hurdles inhibited travel and therefore reduced the "risk". I respond by observing that I mitigated risk to others by complying with the quarantine rules. Therein lies the rub. In truth, the government anticipated that travellers would NOT comply; hence the restrictions. One knows that driving after consuming alcohol ( in excess) is both dangerous and unlawful and yet we still do not confiscate vehicles operated by the impaired.

Travellers were inhibited but....home builders ( for example) and their trades continued without restriction...and few involved wore masks. Agricultural workers ( a known source of transmission) continued to move freely as did union members with travel permits. Community spread....community...was the primary source of transmission and continues to a diminishing degree as that "community" is vaccinated.

For me...it will be a long time...perhaps too long...before international travel becomes palatable ( and feasible). Athens flight tonight out of YYZ....a FULL load (400+) with some 90 pax connecting from LAX.

THAT'S "travelling during the pandemic"!

[Guest1]

[AIP]

19 hours ago, Don Hudson said:

AIP;

The Australian & New Zealand actions were far easier to enforce for the obvious reasons associated with each being an island. It is equally obvious that a continental border will be far more porous. Some provinces & states here and south attempted to become an "island".

The notion of staying-away from infection is one of the first rules of personal hygiene, here, multiplied by many millions. So the balance in our chosen economies is, What do we harm, what do we protect and what do we consider saveable or sacrosanct? Those decisions are becoming more clear by the day.

There is noise and signal everywhere; - we each determine which is which for us, and continuously sort, filter, validate, delete/keep curious, pursue according to our values and upbringing which gives us our unique world view.

The Economist is known as a worthwhile and trustworthy media outlet; it's journalists have written extensively on lockdowns. First, from the July 4th Economist a year ago, the following:

 

 

 

 

Good Morning Don;

Thanks for pointing out the articles, The economist is one of the few media outlets I put any trust or faith in these days, always try to find time to read (My July 3 version hasn't arrived yet).

In my mind, much of the valuation has been based on COVID effects alone.  There is alot more to it than that.

In no particular order, unemployment, personal economic impact, housing, alcohol, drug, and spousal abuse, mental health (which is a very broad topic as it reaches so many), and so on.

How many have had their lives cut short, or deemed not worth living as they endure weeks and months in endless isolation ?? Very hard to quantify the benefits of social interaction, way beyond me anyway.

What is the impact on our youth ?? Very difficult to assess and easily dismissed, we won't know the answers to some of these questions for a long time.

The lockdown was rightly used to protect the most vulnerable, but now that most of that segment of the population have been vaxxed, it is time to move along.  Those that choose not to be vaxxed, will more than likely make up most of the covid statistics moving forward.

Cheers From YYC

 

 

[Don Hudson]

All good questions, AIP.

The "collateral" effects are endless in character and, practically-speaking, duration. It is hard to "triage harm", but from a societal level, the effects upon those attending school, (K - 12), may be the greatest & longest lasting simply because the long-established link between childrens' ages/grades and their "readiness" for knowledge at specific periods of life at those levels was severely broken for the entire school year. That may be a loss that is irrecoverable and can only be restarted by hard work, strong direction and compassion for circumstance.

It's the, "if you're going through hell, keep going", mantra I suppose. Nor does that diminish millions of others' individual experience of dark times in summoning the energy & will to actually keep going, especially in times of the death of family or friends.

In the middle of the last century, it was the church basements where small groups gathered, and "the water cooler" in the office that provided the "glue" of social interaction at the individual level. Our greatest "pots of glue"; the fabric of our world - weddings and funerals followed by educational institutes, have been completely disrupted. At the end of the 20th and certainly in present times, the reality of the atomization of society and the character of social media seems incapable of locating that same glue. There is just nothing like close social contact, no substitute for the touch of loved ones.

I hope, being older now, I am just unaware of a fresh pot-o'-glue being brewed and spread by those say, under 40, and that what they are building repairs & rejuvenates our deep-seated needs for close-knit social interaction and support.

That can only occur with vaccinated people.

Vaccinated people are becoming "post-pandemic normal", with the freedom of gathering, travelling, shopping, relaxing with friends, mask-free, distanced-free, while those not vaccinated will always be at an unknown-but-not-zero risk of being infected within a society that, (except Australia it appears), is moving beyond and away from the concept of the "protective lockdown" for the very reasons you discuss.

The greatest risk for unvaccinated people is the Delta Variant, which almost certaintly will not be the last variant. When the virus infects non-vaccinated hosts, it can continue to replicate and therefore mutate. Thus far, the authorized vaccines protect against the Delta Variant.

"Opening up" our social life and the economy can only occur with increasing levels of vaccinated people to reduce replication of the virus, and it is demonstrably working - as of today, BC is opening up, maskless, with no need for self-distancing.

Edited July 2, 2021 by Don Hudson

[Specs]

13 hours ago, Don Hudson said:

I hope, being older now, I am just unaware of a fresh pot-o'-glue being brewed and spread by those say, under 40, and that what they are building repairs & rejuvenates our deep-seated needs for close-knit social interaction and support.

Tinder, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit......

(we're doomed)

[Don Hudson]

Hi Specs - re "we're doomed"...hopefully C3PO's predictions are temporary and we'll muddle through.

The Economist published this article this morning:

The last half of this article, (after "acey deucy"), is very technical and way beyond me but I'll leave it for others to read or skip.

Coats of many colours The unvaccinated are at risk as evolution accelerates the covid-19 pandemic
Research is unravelling the virus’s deep secrets
Jul 3rd 2021

FOR MUCH of 2020 the covid-19 virus was, in genetic terms, a little dull. Early in the pandemic a version of SARS-CoV-2 that was slightly different from the one originally sequenced in Wuhan, and spread a bit better, came to dominate the picture outside China. But after that it was just a case of a letter or two of genetic code changing here and there. Sometimes such mutations proved useful for working out where infections were coming from. But none of them seemed biologically relevant. By September Salim Abdool Karim, a South African epidemiologist, was beginning to find his monthly updates on new mutations “quite boring”. He considered dispensing with them altogether.

He was soon glad that he hadn’t. In the last months of 2020 researchers around the world began to see variants of the virus with not just one or two mutations but ten or 20. What was more, some of these new variants turned out to have new properties—to spread faster, to shrug off antibodies, or to do both.

The first of them, now called Alpha, appeared in Britain in September. By November scientists sequencing virus samples were becoming alarmed at the rate of its spread. Each infection with the original virus, as sequenced in Wuhan in January 2020, had been estimated to lead to roughly 2.5 subsequent infections in the absence of countermeasures like masks, social distancing and lockdowns. Under the same conditions the “reproductive number” for Alpha was reckoned to be almost twice as large: four or five.

By November Dr Karim was sitting in his office gobsmacked by evidence of a variant similarly studded with mutations, now called Beta, in South Africa. The Gamma variant, formally identified only in 2021, was beginning to make itself felt in Brazil and would go on to ravage South America. Delta, a key factor in the catastrophic Indian epidemic a few months later, raised the transmissibility bar yet further. British scientists estimate that in unvaccinated populations not taking precautions its reproductive number may be as high as eight.

In mid-June, only two months after it first appeared there, Delta had almost fully displaced Alpha in England (see chart 1). It now threatens the rest of the world (see map).

All the variants are more transmissible to some extent. Laboratory tests on human airway cells in Petri dishes have shown that Delta replicates more avidly in them than do earlier variants. That would seem to suggest that a smaller initial dose is needed for an infection to take hold. It also means that the amount of virus lurking in people’s airways is probably higher.

Swabs taken from people’s nostrils and throats during testing back this notion up. The amount of virus found in samples from people infected with Delta is higher than for other variants. That probably means that people are exhaling more virus than those infected by an older variant and thus that every encounter between an infected and uninfected person poses a greater risk of transmission.

Vaccination slows this spread down, but it does not stop it. The current vaccines do not stop all infections by any version of the virus. Nor do they stop infected people from passing the virus on, though they do make it significantly more difficult. People vaccinated with Pfizer or AstraZeneca jabs who are subsequently infected with Alpha are about half as likely to pass it on as the unvaccinated are.

British studies have found Delta to be around 60% more transmissible than Alpha. They put roughly three-quarters of that effect down to the fact that it is easier to catch if you are not vaccinated and about a quarter to the increased ease with which Delta infects people who have been vaccinated. Around half of the adults infected in a recent Delta outbreak in Israel were fully vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine.

Happily, studies of vaccines made by Western companies show them to reduce deaths and severe cases of the disease in people infected with every sort of SARS-CoV-2. This protection means none of the new variants is anything like as potent a public-health threat to a largely vaccinated population as the original version was to an unvaccinated one. Delta’s increased transmissibility, along with relaxed restrictions on travel and socialising, has seen the number of infections and cases in Britain beginning to climb again. But thanks to widespread vaccination, deaths have barely moved. Deaths are, by their nature, a lagging indicator of infection; but widespread vaccination of the most vulnerable is working as hoped.

The dangers posed to the unvaccinated and partially vaccinated mean that there is still a public-health case for keeping infections from spreading. Here, unfortunately, the degree to which variants can evade vaccine-produced immunity makes things a lot harder than once they seemed. “If there is a certain degree of immune escape, even if you were to vaccinate 100% of the population, it’s going to keep coming at you for some period of time,” says Adam Kucharski of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

In a population where 60% are immune, either through vaccination or from a past bout of covid-19, the introduction of a variant with a reproductive number of eight would cause a sharp surge in infections unless lockdowns and similar interventions were established right away (see chart 2). For unvaccinated populations the situation is much worse. If no precautions are taken, a reproductive number of eight produces a far more dramatic crisis in an unvaccinated population than one of two or three does. And last year provided ample evidence of how bad things get even with a lower R. Other things being equal, a highly transmissible virus means more deaths and a more acute stress on the health-care system.

Spikes for speedy spread
Other things may not be equal; the danger posed to the unvaccinated by a new variant may not be exactly the same as that posed by older versions. In Britain those infected with the Alpha variant saw a higher level of severe disease than those infected with the original version, but no corresponding increase in deaths.

Whether Delta does the same is unclear. Comparisons with other variants in countries that can measure such things well are made hard to assess by the large numbers of vaccinated people in those populations. The picture emerging from a British symptom-tracking app called Zoe suggests that Delta is presenting with symptoms closer to those for the common cold than those seen with other variants. They rarely have shortness of breath, the hallmark symptom of covid-19 with the variants that dominated the first year of the pandemic. Oddly, vaccinated people who then get infected tend to sneeze more—which is good for the virus not just because sneezes spread diseases but also because it allows covid-19 to be mistaken for hayfever.

So far, though, differences in the severity of disease caused by the different variants have been eclipsed by the simple, deadly fact of their high-speed spread. There is ample room for that to continue. Less than 1% of people in low-income countries have had even one dose of vaccine. In sub-Saharan Africa Delta is fuelling outbreaks that are crushing hospitals and killing health-care workers.

Rich countries, including Australia, Japan and South Korea, where the first wave was largely avoided and vaccination has not been a high priority now look highly vulnerable. By the end of June the risk of Delta had seen almost half of Australia put under lockdown orders. Delta is the dominant strain in Russia, where a vaccination rate of 12% and misinformation-driven vaccine scepticism seem set to make its spread easy.

The variants make vaccination programmes more urgent than ever. But though they may march on through the alphabet for some time to come, there is some reason to hope that they will not get all that much worse as they do so. They may be running out of evolutionary room to manoeuvre.

For a clearer understanding of what is going on, focus on the spike protein that adorns the outer envelope of SARS-CoV-2 particles. You can think of it, as you can of any protein, as being like a paper chain in which every link can have one of 20 colours. The gene for spike specifies the sequence in which those colours appear in the protein’s 1,273-link long chain. Mutations in the gene can change the colour of one specific link, add a few new links, or cut some links out. In the Alpha variant six of those links have different colours from those in the Wuhan sequence, and in a couple of places a link or two are missing altogether. The Delta spike has five distinctive mutations.

In reality the links in the chain are 20 different types of amino acid. Each type has subtly different chemical and physical properties. At the time that the chain is created the laws of physics require it to fold up into something more compact. The specific shape into which it folds is determined by its unique sequence of amino acids, as laid out in the gene. And that shape underlies all the protein’s future capabilities. Shape is almost everything in the world of proteins. It is through their shapes that proteins recognise each other. It is through changes of shape that they act.

Each of the now-familiar protuberances on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 particles is composed of three copies of the spike protein slotted together into a “trimer” shaped a bit like a golf tee (see chart 3). In the cup of these tees are the virus’s receptor-binding domains (RBDs). Each of the trimer’s constituent proteins can be open or closed at any given time. When they are open ACE2, a protein found on the surface of some human cells, fits quite nicely into the RBD’s carefully contrived nobbliness.

Acey deucey
The ACE2 receptor is the virus’s main target; it normally attacks only those cells that display it. The act of glomming on to an ACE2 molecule changes the spike protein’s shape, revealing a “cleavage site” which is suited to attack by another protein on the cell’s surface. As a result the spike gets cut in two—which sounds bad for the virus, but is in fact the necessary next step in infection. It is only after the spike is sliced asunder that the membranes of the virus and the cell can merge.

Tyler Starr, a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, describes the RBD as a “big, squishy interface” that mutations can reshape quite easily. In 2020 he, Jesse Bloom and their colleagues sought to examine this mutability by making versions of the SARS-CoV-2 RBD in which individual amino acids in the protein paper-chain were replaced by alternatives with different properties. These mutant proteins were then tested to see how well they stuck to ACE2; those that did best, the researchers reasoned, might be mutations that evolution would favour. They were right. In the original Wuhan genome the 501st position in the spike chain is occupied by an amino acid called asparagine. When the scientists in Seattle put an amino acid called tyrosine there instead, the RBD bound to ACE2 more tightly; it turns out that the change twists a key part of the RBD round by about 20 degrees, making the fit a bit more snug. Mutations which cause just that substitution, known as N501Y (or sometimes “Nelly”) subsequently turned up in the Alpha, Beta and Gamma variants. Another change they spotted, now called E484K (or “Eek”), was found in both Beta and Gamma.

Changes to the RBD can also reduce its susceptibility to antibodies. Antibodies also work by recognising shapes, and though they recognise various other bits of the spike protein, notably another region in the trimer’s head called the N-terminal domain (NTD), the most effective of them are specific to particular aspects of the RBD. Some changes to the RBD, such as N501Y, do not make it less recognisable to antibodies. Others, such as E484K, do. Being a lot less susceptible to some antibodies seems to help E484K’s possessors to infect people who have been vaccinated.

The RBD is not the only part of the spike protein where mutations matter. In a preprint published on June 22nd Ravindra Gupta, a molecular virologist at Cambridge University, and his colleagues put forward an argument as to why Delta is both more infectious and better at evading immunity than other variants. It is based on a substitution at site 681, which is at the point where, after the RBD meets ACE2, the protein is cleft in two.

Not ai, therefore em
Dr Gupta says P681R, helped by two shape-modifying mutations elsewhere, makes it easier for the protein to be cut up and thus get into cells. Its presence also means that, once a cell starts
producing particles, their spike proteins can get on to the cell’s surface pre-cut. That can lead to virus particles which are shorn of the RBDs which antibodies recognise and ready to fuse with any nearby cell. It can also encourage infected cells to clump together with others. Dr Gupta’s lab has found evidence of these cell clumps in a living model of the human respiratory system.

A full validation of this work will require a detailed picture of the Delta variant’s structure—something which is not yet available. In theory, it should be possible to predict the shape of a protein using nothing but the sequence of amino acids described by its gene and the laws of physics. Doing so from first principles, though, is impossible. DeepMind, an AI company which is part of Google, has shown that machine learning can help a lot. But as yet its capabilities are best demonstrated on small single proteins. This approach is not much good if the protein is large, anchored in a membrane, and naturally found in a dimer or trimer, as spike is. DeepMind has not made any predictions of spike’s structure public.
The best tool for seeing spike’s structure in detail is cryo-electron microscopy. Copies of the protein in question are flash frozen using liquid nitrogen (hence cryo); once they are immobilised beams of electrons are bounced off them and used to build up pictures (hence microscopy). Bing Chen, who has run a series of cryo-EM experiments on the spike protein at Harvard, is at pains to stress the time, effort and computer power required to turn thousands of pictures of the protein taken from every conceivable angle into a three-dimensional image which comes close to resolving the positions of every single atom. But there is no better way to appreciate the changes in the fine details of the protein’s structure brought about by the variants’ different mutations.

On June 24th Dr Chen’s group published long-awaited structures for the Alpha and Beta spike variants. They show the way in which the protein’s complex folding allows mutations that are at some distance from each other in paper-chain terms to have effects on the overall shape that it would be near impossible to predict from the sequence alone. A pair of mutations found called A570D and S982A, for example, act to slightly loosen up the protein’s structure in Alpha. That makes the RBD open up more. The group is now working on a structure for Delta which might confirm Dr Gupta’s insights.

Studies of this sort help reveal how the mutations in the variant spikes work together. But how did these variants come to have so many mutations in the first place? Mutations are normally expected to crop up one at a time; but the named variants each emerged with a whole set of them. That is what has given them sudden and surprising effects.

One way in which they could have emerged fully formed is by evolving in people with compromised immune systems who had very long drawn out SARS-CoV-2 infections. In such cases the virus would be able to continue replicating itself in their bodies again and again, accumulating a number of mutations as it did so. The time required for such a process would help explain why the variants only started to appear towards the end of last year. Studies of five such people have shown that they developed a number of the mutations now seen in variants.

Not all the mutations in the variants are in the spike gene, and some of those affecting other proteins will doubtless also prove to have importance. One of Alpha’s mutations appears to give it an advantage when dealing with a non-antibody-using arm of the immune system. Non-spike mutations probably explain why Delta’s symptoms appear different. But spike still dominates the discussion. Its structure is crucial to the vaccines. And it also seems unusually mutable.

Dr Starr thinks this mutability may be a consequence of the virus’s origin in bats. He points out that most viruses have binding domains that cannot tolerate much mutation, and so they evolve ways of hiding them away from pesky antibodies. The SARS-CoV-2 RBDs are too large for such protection. That would seem like a problem for the virus. But it may be a price worth paying if a larger, more open RBD is easier for evolution to reshape.

The reason that Dr Starr thinks evolvability might be a benefit worth paying for is that, in bats, ACE2 is much more diverse than it is in humans. That means viruses which use the receptors as a target need to be able to adapt the mechanisms by which they do so. The tolerance for mutations that has made new variants of RBD possible in humans may be the “by-product of this arms race...between virus and bats”.

Avoiding Omega
If mutation is comparatively easy, though, it also has its limits. In their experiments last year Dr Starr and his colleagues identified changes to the RBD that seemed advantageous but which do not turn up in the real world—presumably because real spike proteins cannot contort themselves enough to accommodate them.

Seeing similar mutations crop up in different variants also suggests that evolution is sampling a somewhat limited number of possibilities. “The fact is that you’re starting to see recurring mutations,” says Dr Chen. “That would be an indication that there are probably not that many places that the virus can mutate.” Strains with radically different ways of becoming more transmissible or evasive may be beyond evolution’s reach.

Another cause for optimism is that spike is not the only part of the process that is complex and mutable. The immune system is, too. The initial infection is the first stage of a protracted struggle in which the immune system has various strategies at its disposal. A study by Jackson Turner of the Washington University School of Medicine and his colleagues which was published in Nature on June 28th showed that the immune response produced by infection with SARS-CoV-2 is long lasting, robust and multifaceted. Among other things, some of the B-cells which produce antibodies produce more effective ones later in the course of infection than earlier on. This may be part of the reason why they provide better protection against severe disease than they do against infection.

It is quite possible, though, that not all vaccines will do so equally well. Hundreds of millions of doses of two vaccines made by Chinese companies, Sinopharm and Sinovac, have been sold to low and middle-income countries; they look like being a large part of the world’s vaccine supply for the rest of the year. But there are some doubts about their efficacy, especially against new variants. The original clinical trial of the Sinovac vaccine found a lower efficacy than in any other covid-19 vaccine trial, just 51%. Studies of the vaccine’s use in Uruguay and Indonesia have been a great deal more encouraging. But there is rising concern in Bahrain, Chile, the Seychelles, Turkey and the UAE, all of which have relied on Chinese jabs. The UAE and Bahrain are worried enough to have started offering a third shot of Pfizer’s vaccine to people who have already been given two shots of Sinopharm’s.

Third shots are being looked at by some other governments, too, including Britain’s. The fact that current vaccines protect people against severe disease and death even when infected by the new variants makes the idea that variant-specific vaccines analogous to seasonal flu jabs will be necessary look less likely. The easier alternative of offering people who have been vaccinated twice a third shot, though, perhaps using one of the other vaccines, has advocates.
But there is as yet no evidence that it is necessary. And third shots pale as a priority compared with first and second shots for those who have had neither, and now need them more than ever. ■

Clarification (July 2nd 2021): This story originally said DeepMind had not attempted to predict the spike structure; in fact it has, but it has not shared the predictions.

Dig deeper
All our stories relating to the pandemic and the vaccines can be found on our coronavirus hub. You can also find trackers showing the global roll-out of vaccines, excess deaths by country and the virus’s spread across Europe and America.

This article appeared in the Briefing section of the print edition under the headline "Coats of many colours"
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[Guest1]

Sabrina Maddeaux: Trudeau's border closure is a sham designed to only allow the rich to travel. Time to put an end to it

In what would be an epic troll if it didn’t adversely affect so many people’s lives and livelihoods, Trudeau suggested he may actually require 80 per cent of Canadians to get two doses before further relaxing border controls

Sabrina Maddeaux: Trudeau's border closure is a sham designed to only allow the rich to travel. Time to put an end to it | National Post

[Guest1]

UK Scraps Quarantine For Vaccinated Travelers From Amber CountriesCanada is on that list.

Quote

 

Changes to international travel rules for amber list countries

From 4am, Monday 19 July, the government will no longer recommend against travel to amber list countries. People covered by the amber list rules, who have been fully vaccinated with an NHS vaccine, will not need to quarantine on arrival in England or take a COVID-19 test on day 8. For further information:

• read the announcement about the rule changes
• sign up for an email alert to tell you when this page is updated

Until 19 July you must follow the following rules, even if you have been vaccinated.

 

 

 

[Don Hudson]

I think the anti-vax "prion" argument needs at least one response:

No, COVID mRNA Vaccine Won't Cause Alzheimer's or Prion Disease - American Council on Science and Health

(https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/american-council-on-science-and-health/)

By Alex Berezow, PhD — February 19, 202

The coronavirus pandemic has spawned an equally concerning mis- and disinformation pandemic. The latest myth is that mRNA vaccines may trigger prion diseases like Alzheimer's.

Credit: Public Domain/Wikipedia

Like the universe, the internet appears to be governed by a set of (admittedly tongue-in-cheek) "laws." The most famous is Godwin's Law, which posits that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1."

There are plenty of others. The coronavirus pandemic has put on grand display a lesser-known but far more important "law" known as Brandolini's Law, which claims that the "amount of energy needed to refute bullsh** is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

This, of course, is absolutely true. The reason is that people who spread lies are, by definition, not constrained by the truth. Making stuff up takes little effort while doing the diligent research necessary to arrive at the truth takes tremendous effort. That's why, as the adage goes, a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its shoes on.

The COVID pandemic has made this painfully clear. Among the most pernicious myths is one that claims the mRNA vaccines made by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are a form of genetic engineering, a lie that is being perpetuated by none other than fraud doctor Andrew Wakefield.

Now, a new myth has reared its ugly head. A paper written by a well-known anti-vaxxer named J. Bart Classen and published in a scientific journal -- if we can even call it that (because it's not indexed in PubMed) -- claims that the mRNA vaccines that target coronavirus could cause prion diseases like Alzheimer's. It's total garbage.

A Primer on Prions

In order for proteins to work, they must be folded properly. An unfolded protein is useless. By analogy, think of origami. An unfolded protein is like a piece of paper, and a folded protein is like an origami crane. A misfolded protein is also no good; it would be like breaking the crane's neck or wing. Again, useless.

Sometimes, misfolded proteins are dangerous. A particularly dangerous one is known as a prion. When it misfolds, it causes other properly folded proteins to misfold. Imagine if the origami crane with a broken wing caused all of its origami crane friends to develop broken wings. That's what prions do. The most famous prion disease is Mad Cow Disease, the infectious form of a rare neurodegenerative condition called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Increasingly, evidence indicates that other neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's are caused by misfolded proteins that trigger misfolding in other proteins. In the case of Alzheimer's, the proteins are called beta-amyloid and tau.

No, COVID mRNA Vaccine Won't Cause Alzheimer's

So, what does this have to do with COVID mRNA vaccines? Absolutely nothing. But that didn't prevent Classen from speculating that these mRNA vaccines might trigger the misfolding of two other proteins (called TDP-43 and FUS) that are also associated with Alzheimer's (as well as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis).

His evidence is non-existent. In the methods section of the paper, Classen writes, "The vaccine RNA was analyzed for the presence of sequences that can activate TDP-43 and FUS." How was it analyzed? What software was used? Did he examine any controls, like cellular mRNA sequences? He doesn't say. He simply tells us that the COVID vaccines contain various RNA sequences that may trigger TDP-43 and FUS's misfolding.

That's it. It's entirely speculative. There's no actual evidence.

Yet, from that, he concludes that the vaccine may be worse than the disease. For good measure, he mentions that the coronavirus and the mRNA vaccines both might be bioweapons released by the U.S. government. Hopefully, he notified Fox Mulder.

One would think that this conspiracy is too kooky to go viral (no pun intended). But we've already seen people burning 5G towers because they think they spread the coronavirus. So, it's better to debunk it now before the Andrew Wakefields of the world get ahold of it.

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/american-council-on-science-and-health/

Edited July 8, 2021 by Don Hudson

[Guest1]

Unvaccinated tourists won't be welcome in Canada for 'quite a while,' PM Trudeau says

Rachel AielloOttawa News Bureau Online Producer

@rachaiello  Contact  Link to the story with the video.

 Unvaccinated tourists won't be welcome in Canada for 'quite a while,' PM Trudeau says | CTV News

Published Thursday, July 8, 2021 3:19PM EDTLast Updated Thursday, July 8, 2021