I’ve been at home, rarely stepping out, other than to visit an empty university and a lab populated entirely and exclusively by spiders. And I like it that way! Alas, it all changes on Tuesday, when the students return and I have to mingle with them 5 days a week. I have my masks, and I’ve been thoroughly vaccinated, but I’m also aware that there are plague demons among us. People like Joseph Ladapo, surgeon general of Florida, and accomplice to the fast-fading fascist, Ron DeSantis.
It used to be fairly easy to dismiss Florida’s surgeon general, Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo, as a clownish anti-vaccine quack posing a danger mostly to residents of his home state.
That has become harder to do as time goes on, as Ladapo has moved from promoting useless treatments for COVID-19, such as the drugs hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, to waging an ever-expanding fact-free campaign against the leading COVID vaccines.
This month, Ladapo established a new low for himself. In a public advisory issued Wednesday by the Florida Department of Health, he declared the vaccines “not appropriate for use in human beings” and counseled doctors to steer patients to other treatments. He explicitly called for a “halt in the use of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.”
He’s basing this sweeping dismissal on ONE (1) swiftly debunked paper by an anti-vax crank.
It’s not just COVID, though. I’m concerned about that as I prepare to share an atmosphere with students again, but also because we’ve got idiots like Ladapo everywhere who are disrupting basic public health with their absurd ideas.
Then there’s the public health context: As COVID infections have been surging coast to coast, advisories from public health authorities to resume masking and take other protective measures, such as making sure you’re up to date on vaccinations, are almost invisible.
Even more worrisome, the incidence of other vaccine-preventable diseases may be rising. As many as nine cases of measles have been reported in Philadelphia, some associated with an infection started at a daycare center with a family that violated quarantine rules.
Among the victims, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, are “an infant who was too young to get vaccinated, an unvaccinated older child and the older child’s unvaccinated parent.”
Nine cases may not sound like a lot — 41 were reported nationwide in 2023 — but they could be a harbinger of worse to come, in clusters in which anti-vaccine propaganda has taken hold.
The “invisible” aspect of public health advisories is notable — my university used to have a big bold link on the main web page that pointed to the status of the pandemic on campus, with recommendations for protecting oneself. It’s gone. You have to dig to find any updates on COVID. I guess someone thinks COVID-19 is over.
And then, undermining public confidence in such basic principles of good preventive medicine, such as vaccines and hygiene, as Ladapo is doing, is going to do long-lasting harm. I don’t want to die of COVID, but I also don’t want to die of polio, or measles, or the bubonic plague, or some exotic new disease that springs up in the rotting flesh of some Republican ignoramus. Ladapo and all of these conservative know-nothings are making that more probable.
How do these morons get any power at all in government, I’d like to know.
PZ, just to try to save you from measles, did you get another measles shot since when you were a kid?
The CDC says that everyone who was born up through 1957 must get another shot, as those first vaccines weren’t lifelong lasting. I think that’s your year of birth?
Well, you probably may already have done this, but I thought I’d mention it, I know what it’s like to be around college-age germ-sinks.
Definitely, a lot of people dying right now from the Covid-19 virus. It’s 1,500 a week.
This is 10 times higher than flu deaths.
Happening right here, right now.
Very old woman in the hospital with Covid-19 virus, caught at her nursing home.
She isn’t responding well to treatment and will die soon.
There’s a new right wing stink tank…the Brownstone Institute:
“The world needs Brownstone Institute now to prevent the next “snap” lockdown and make the case for an open and free society.
The idea is to correct and compete with the mainstream media and take on the technocratic disease managers, or anyone else who believes rights and liberties can be violated, at the discretion of political leaders, to central plans.”
Your ability to infect others, is your right! (me)
https://brownstone.org
Vaccine? What vaccine?
PZ might well have done what we all did back then.
Get measles.
I never got the vaccine. It came out years after I got measles.
And chickenpox, Rubella, and mumps.
Yup, back in the day we all had a slew of now preventable diseases. Most of us came through mostly fine, but plenty also had lasting, occasionally fatal, effects. Those who now push for natural herd immunity seems to ignore these facts, or simply do not care.
And dying of SSPE is totally the coolest thing to do in 7 years! Everyone should do it, just to keep god-emperor Trump happy.
Then, we can move onward to full forced birth laws, to promptly machine gun the babies after the forced birth, in His unholy name.
While burning oil and gas as fast as possible, in order to make earth like the heaven known of as venus.
Maybe, if we ask really nicely, the god-Trump will have them reintroduce smallpox too, as a bonus.
Oh, Silly Sidney Powell has stated that the god-Trump will be reinstated as POTUS by this summer. Under the constitutional grounds of hand wave.
And the state of Texass still allows her to malpractice law.
Of course, I’m just being grumpy. Storm’s coming in, my back is sending hot rails of pain down from butt to ankle and my doctor’s practice still is refusing to give vaccinations, referring all to their pharmacy (mine doesn’t offer vaccines, so I have to limp 3 miles to one that does).
Maybe we can instead have a rabies party!
Oh, a bit of a joke, mixed with truth. Blame the spread of the genes associated with MS on Ukraine. Well, the regional people from there 5000 years ago. Apparently, the cattle breeding people from the region migrated westward through Europe back then, the genes that helped protect against livestock diseases also leaving one vulnerable to MS. So, we can blame Ukraine for MS and Russians existing. :P
Well, technically, Rus people originating from Vikings, not the MS gene, which was pre-existing by the time the Rus invasions began…
Well, back to figuring out what to make for dinner. Left over fish fillets, whole red snapper, thin sliced bone in pork chop and to decide upon veggies.
And I want to make a batch of potato-egg salad…
I know, I’ll have food! Side order of yummies.
Orac has a few choice words for/about Dr. La-la-land…
raven @4
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/measles-vaccine-adults-who-were-vaccinated-in-the-1960s-may-need-a-measles-booster/
PZ’s age and yeah I got measles, mumps, chickenpox and whooping cough which I almost died from. Had acquaintances with polio damage.
Well, it certainly is a good thing that Biden officially let the Covid state of emergency lapse. He needed to focus government attention on the state of emergency which he did renew, the one for 9/11. I mean, 1500 deaths a week may be scary, but it’s nothing to the omnipresent, imminent threat of Zombie Osama Bin Laden, who might at any moment rise from his grave and crash more planes into the World Trade Center, killing another totally unacceptable 3000 people. (That’s where the weekly threshold is, 3000. If weekly Covid deaths double, then maybe it will be worth talking about again.)
Stop expecting your government to protect you; obviously the only legitimate function of the US government is to protect Israel while they commit their genocide in Gaza — as you expire from preventable illness, you can take solace in the remembrance that even though Biden won’t lift a finger for you he’ll at least give billions of dollars to deliberately commit crimes against humanity. Such an improvement over Trump; well done Democrats.
Vicar (singular), hey, you’ve moved on from Hillary and from Obama.
(For you, not that shabby, only took you a few electoral cycles)
Maybe make “explain what vaccines do” a prerequisite for your course and give a mandatory to pass exam on it the first week.
Vicar @ 10, that’s bullshit! We all know that Biden most certainly will lift a finger.
Alas, we’re not incredibly fond of which finger is being lifted, but we veterans are used to that from Republicans indicating veterans are #1, while lifting that same third digit.
@7 that’ll be the first time Orac had a few words to say about anything ;)
@10. The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) :
Would you prefer Trump or any of the Repugs? Would (t)he(y) be any better in any respect here?
Aren’t they – Trump personally and most of the Repugs & reichwing – the virus and vaccine deniers throughout the whole covid pandemic? The ones who denied the scientific and observed reality, that recomended non-cures and attacked reasonable health measures with disinfo, lies and even violent attacks on the people trying to save other people?
Biden might be bad here. I actuallty agree lettingthe covid emergency lapse was wrong – but Trumpand those onthe other side are far worse. When your options are bad or worse, you pick bad and also work to try and find and create better ones. As I’ve said before, major political reforms incl abolition of the Electoral College, abolition of voter suppression laws and gerrymandering and also the introduction of some form of preferential or run-off voting system are very much needed over in the USA.
@11. John Morales : Please don’t get Vicar started.
@12. bcw bcw : An excellent idea . Should be mandatory for anyone considering entering politics too in my view.
StevoR:
Heh. Fat chance.
Vicar (definite article) can’t dispute me. Tried once or twice, back in the day, a decade ago or so.
Point being, far as he’s concerned, everything without fail is the fault of the Democrats, particularly of Hillary Clinton. And Obama.
And yes, he would prefer Trump. I quoted him making that claim, years ago now.
(To be fair, he does seem to know a bit about computing, so there’s that; shame he can’t stick to what he knows)
StevoR @15: Re The Vicar; you’re pissing in the wind, mate. He’s an accelerationist (i.e. he wants everything to go to shit ASAP so that things can somehow magically then get better), but he doesn’t have the guts to admit it. That’s why he hates the Democrats (above and beyond the hate they actually deserve); they’re delaying the nightmarish hellscape he devoutly wishes for.
[OK Rob, that was fucking spot-on]
StevoR, I know you like videos, so here:
“not appropriate for use in human beings”. Did he say this to placate ranchers and farmers who spend thousands injecting their herds? I had a similar discussion with an anti-vaccine local who at the end of his rant seemed to suggest that vaccines work on mammals but not humans.
I found this to pretty much quash concern:
https://www.factcheck.org/2024/01/faulty-science-underpins-florida-surgeon-generals-call-to-halt-mrna-covid-19-vaccination/
So the guidance Ladapo is relying upon for his scaremongering was toward DNA vaccines, not the mRNA vaccines.
And:
If you full-on want cray cray of Ladapo’s mental process here:
https://twitter.com/EricKleefeld/status/1742970911207133424
Also it’s quite possible university systems have required employees (eg- PZ) to get a measles update at some point. I was vaccinated as a tyke in late 60s, but had to get one in early 90s before entering university as a student.
I still managed to convince the pharmacy to give me a measles update again in 2019 and received the three shot polio series quite recently though I received OPV as a tyke. Fairly easy to do.
“How do these morons get any power at all in government, I’d like to know.” because…..FREEDUMB!
From the Orac link above https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2024/01/05/florida-surgeon-general-joseph-ladapo-parrots-antivax-disinformation/
I received Spikevax from Moderna every time, though I doubt there’s any there there for SV40 concerns. I did learn more about the manufacture of mRNA vaccines as a result of this BS put forward by Ladapo. I also knew not to be concerned about integration of the mRNA itself because lack of reverse transcriptase and integrase in the vaccines. I was not aware of the presence of residual DNA fragments, which I could understand laypeople like me having concerns about as presented by antivax scaremongers.
Yet I know the difference between these phantom integration events and the nifty DNA changes in B-cells that vaccination and/or COVID itself can set in motion. I am at a point now where I wonder about an offset between imprinting (so-called original sin) and affinity maturation (via hypermutation). We want the latter to prevail when we get updated Spike targets in vaccines. Our history with Spike antigen may impact how our individual immune systems react upon future exposure.
Here’s a cool video where a researcher discusses his work on how B-cells mature:
And another where Dr. Wilson demonstrates the stupidity of Joe Rogan on vaccination related to life expectancy drops:
As an aside rabies shots are far from the scary thing they once were. I kinda want to get mine so I can pursue my dream of wrestling raccoons.
On a more serious note, last I checked mpox vaccine isn’t available outside qualifying groups. I would totally get mine if I could.
I can’t see that the Pfizer/BioNtech Covid-19 vaccine even contains the SV40 promoter.
There is absolutely no reason why it should.
The SV40 promoter is mammalian eukaryotic specific. It doesn’t work in bacteria.
The entire mRNA vaccine is made in E. coli and in bioreactors in vitro.
The Pfizer vaccine is made by growing DNA plasmids in E. coli, harvesting them, and cutting them from circles to linear.
The DNA is then transcribed to mRNA and capped in vitro using enzymes.
An SV40 promoter isn’t used and would be useless.
Crossposted on the infinite thread.
-The tories in Britain also ignored professional advice and killed vast swathes of their own voters . But finally -despite pro-tory newspapers having a deathgrip on printed media and tories having unofficial control over BBC- the birds are coming home to roost. I hope the coming year will catch up with the regressives in your country, too.
I bring it up because if such a thoroughly conservative-dominated hellhole as Britain can change for the better, your country – and your state – can, too.
Of course a lot of people will still die needlessly from disease (and failing public services) before then. But the end will finally come. To quote Brecht, night has 12 hours, then comes the day.
“Tory Government Ended By Maths”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=sCWGfikGn_k
And
“Carnival Party” 🤤🦚🍹✨🎊
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=x_8v6ffvkXc
Trump – I will go along with any stupid idea that my party wants, as long as I get to pretend to be, and maybe when the next election happens again, try to actually become king.
Biden – I realize my party has no one that actually has ideas, who has a better chance of actually making it through a primary (see Berne Sanders for an example of this, or anyone else actually not a centrist), and am arrogant enough to a) not step aside and support someone else, who might undermine some of the stuff I already have in the pipeline, and b) think that all my ideas are super great, and maybe the anger and complaints from some of my own parties base can’t possibly be a sign that some of those ideas are a serious problem. Besides, we need to win (and I am arrogant enough to think I can, even with all the lies being told about me by the other side, on top of my own constituents annoyance at some of my choices), or – see the alternative.
That said, some of the anger is.. somewhat misplaced. For example – Israel. Hell yes, in a sane, fair, politically stable, world, in which we didn’t have half the freaking idiots in it thinking that we need to, “make sure Israel exists so the end of the world will happen”, or we at least didn’t have to freaking make some level of concessions to the madness that has always existed around them, Biden has failed. In the real world, he is playing a mad game of politics, in which you can’t support them 100% without being a lunatic, but you also can’t utterly abandon them to their own idiocy and side with their victims, lest you cut your own throat doing it. So.. you middle ground the crap out of things – do everything politically feasible to argue for a cease to the hostilities, and to funnel non-military aid to the victims, while also doing every damn thing possible to not step on the wrong toes, or at least not too hard, and lose everything in the process. You are damned no matter how you handle it, but you are double damned if you ignore the fact that, on this one single subject, are large percentage of the people that might be voting for you in the next election might actually vote for someone insane, out of spite, because they believe in 90% of everything that is liberal, but just happen to have bought into the idiocy that “Israel is important, and all Palestinians are dangerous!” And, yeah, sadly, those people exist, because this kind of stupid has bled, much like “the government is the problem” rhetoric, through generations, into every corner of the nation, and even people that utterly reject the Reagan era nonsense still catch themselves thinking this. And, even people that are 100% against what is happening in Israel are going to be prone to thinking, “But.. we need them, right?”, at least part of the time.
So much of the stupidity in US politics is this madness. We know damn well what is right, and what we need to do, but then there is the entire other half of the country, and some percentage of our own “half”, who if you tried to do it would immediately balk, try to derail it, undermine the process, and intentionally or not sabotage the goal, because you crossed some insane line and stepped on a social land mine, caused by decades long absorption of ideas that run utterly contrary to ACTUALLY doing what ever you are trying to accomplish. So.. Every flipping person that gets even close to the presidency, at least if they have any prior political experience, has spent their whole career dodging these land mines, then they become president, and they still have to dodge them, or the next election, for representatives, gets flooded with people who scream, “Ah ha! You stepped in it now, the people won’t allow that, look how we just took over majority of the Senate, or the Congress. Now we will stop you!”
So, you play the game. And, everyone that doesn’t want you to play the game is pissed you are playing it, and hate you, but.. if you don’t, you will be mobbed by all the idiots that get pissed because you didn’t play it.
Vicar’s biggest problem, to give the most egregious example of failing to understand this, is the belief that the solution is to elect someone that somehow magically falls “outside” this mobius strip of land mine dodging, but anyone “third party” is both a) already playing the same game, and b) has 100 times more land mines in their path. What is needed is a sea change in the people themselves. Something we kind of see going on, on the left, but which the right has also seen and has not just doubled, but quadrupled down on undermining, with lies, misinformation, propaganda, and more land mines. Its an act of desperation in many respects, because without all that crap, hammering people with an endless mass of lies, at least some percentage of which even people on the left sometimes look at and go, “Huh.. maybe…”, because they have no clue what the real source of al the crap is, but its an act of desperation that came within a hairs breadth of working on Jan 6. It failed, and keeps failing, despite all attempts to prop it up, because of gross incompetence – you might be able to con the people that are already 100% on board with the madness over and over again, because they seem to all be too bloody clueless to recognize that you have changed the lies 15 times, and keep changing it every time the last version didn’t work. But this is also why everyone else recognizes it as lies – they keep trying to change them to fit the changing tides, instead of sticking to one freaking set of clear lies.
I mean, seriously, how many different lies did Trump speak with regard to Covid – starting with how China was doing a great job, and it would never get here, to then claiming it was just a cold, to them claiming it was a Chinese virus made to kill us, to lies about how to cure it, and on and on. The only “lie” that didn’t change was that persisted was that it, “wasn’t a problem”. Even when he flipping did a 180 and suggested it was really a problem, and people should get vaccinated, the first true thing he said in the whole bullshit cycle, they just spewed back at him the other 40 lies he told them before and ignored his new advice. And they have done this with everything, including their attempts to exonerate him for Jan 6, his document thefts, etc. And, again, its hit the point where he can literally flat out admit his own guilt, on national TV, and somehow his followers eyes gloss over, the truth doesn’t compute, and all they hear is the 50 lies he told them before about how it didn’t do it.
But, the rest of us.. we see utter madness.
Thing is.. even among those that see the utter madness, there are some small number that will say, “Yep, guilty of 99.9% of everything, but.. he might have a small point about lie number 134 that he told about crime number 14.” Because, some of the bullshit still seeped through. And, its been only 4 years. What if this nonsense had been going on, like support of Israel, for 80+ years? How many otherwise sane people would instead be talking about how half his lies sort of make sense, and half his crimes might not be crimes, among his freaking detractors?
This is the madness I think Biden has to contend with when setting policy, and its made only worse by how much of his policy really is crap.
OK, I see where that SV40 promoter is probably used.
To drive an antibiotic resistance gene that works in eukaryotic cells.
This SV40 promoter-antibiotic resistance gene isn’t need at all for the production of vaccine mRNA. It’s just along for the ride.
Probably what Pfizer did was just use an off the shelf plasmid with an extra feature they didn’t need or want but didn’t bother to take out.
In any event, as already discussed, it doesn’t cause any problems.
The number of Covid-19 vaccine doses given worldwide was 12. 7 billion in October, 2022.
These vaccines are no longer experimental.
We have data bases of hundreds of millions and billions of doses given. Something like 5 1/2 billion people have been vaccinated. It’s now been 3 years.
If there were problems with the vaccines, we would know by now.
More specifically on the subject of vaccines though, when do we finally see these?:
https://asm.org/articles/2022/december/vaccines-delivered-via-dissolvable-skin-patches
Got to love how tech improves, but we can’t “quite” get there in terms of making it available. I understand the general reasons why – manufacturing and storage issues, due to what they are made of, but they also, supposedly, reduce, or erase two major issues with shots 1) reactions to the shot, which make some people feel sick after getting them, and 2) the actual shot. I literally didn’t even know these where a thing, at all, until like 2 months ago, when I stumbled across an article on the subject.
raven @27
The SV in SV40 promoter just means a simian virus was its original source, so that’s the superficially scary part. But it’s only a component of a larger virus and lacks the nasty bits. Maybe molecular biologists recognized it as a useful tool and co-opted it. It’s upstream of an antibiotic resistance marker that might indicate transfection of eukaryotic cells or transformation of bacteria with a gene of interest containing plasmid was successful. Somewhere in the process of COVID vaccine manufacture DNAases are used to chop up the plasmid DNA into meaningless pieces. Some acceptable level of DNA finds itself remaining in vaccines. The part that’s SV40 promoter may be rendered meaningless by the chopping up process? But being sourced from SV40 is not SV40 itself. It’s just a promoter.
This is at the limits of my meager knowledge of such things.
I think there’s both a Gish Gallop and moving of goalposts with antivax rhetoric. They throw everything at ignorant targets hoping something sticks. They also go from mRNA itself as a threat (gene therapy, integration etc) to a byproduct of manufacture (DNA fragments) instead.
Another thing the Florida Deportment of Hell added to the current “threat” was the lipid nanoparticles:
https://www.floridahealth.gov/newsroom/2024/01/20240103-halt-use-covid19-mrna-vaccines.pr.html
Scary! Not. The development and deployment of these vaccines was amazing. That a minority of the US population is getting boosters is sad and fearmongering is at least partly to blame.
Kagehi @28
I had read something recently where Topol is still cheerleading nasal delivery.
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-01-04/covid-2024-flu-virus-vaccine
I could see that in theory the nasal route may have the advantage of inducing mucosal immunity.
They are just throwing out scary words that they don’t even understand.
SV40 is a common, well known lab virus that is known to be oncogenic in some species. We use it for spare parts. The oncogene is the T antigen which isn’t part of more or less any of the constructs that use the SV40 promoter.
After the plasmid DNA is used as template to make the mRNA it has to be purified away.
They seem to use DNase 1 digestion followed by multiple chromatography steps and tangential flow filtration.
The vaccine mRNA is highly purified but there are low levels of short DNA strands left.
I was unable to find out anything about the Pfizer and Moderna details of just how they purify their mRNA. It is likely to be something of a trade secret.
Strange factoid.
DNA is everywhere.
Not surprising since it is a necessary component of all cellular and a lot of viral life.
We eat a lot of animal, plant, and bacterial DNA every day.
It’s on the order of grams per day per person.
As a caveat I am way outside my wheelhouse here, but I wondered how prevalent DNA vaccines are as they were the focus of the guidance Ladapo was misusing.
See: https://www.fda.gov/media/174875/download
Peter Marks, M.D., Ph.D. Director Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research wrote to Ladapo in a footnote:
I found in the Wikipedia entry (yeah I realize that):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_vaccine
…that apparently the only DNA vaccine being used in humans is ZyCoV-D in India:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZyCoV-D
Ignorant me was going to ask if smallpox vaccine would be considered a “DNA vaccine” considering it’s based on a DNA virus (vaccinia), but DNA vaccines are a more specific thing involving plasmids I guess. Caveat above…
Right now in the USA, no DNA vaccines are approved. It is zero.
DNA vaccines are an idea that came and went.
They work in animals but ended up failing to work in humans.
The reason for this is now known.
It is hard for some reason to get enough DNA into human cells by injections to make enough antigen for an immune response.
People are still working on that problem.
Inovio has been around for a long time and is still working on DNA vaccines.
They use an electroporation device to increase delivery.
That works but it really slows vaccination down. Each patient takes up a lot more time and materials.
That there are no DNA vaccines approved for humans in the USA might change in the next year.
Inovio plans to submit a Biological License Application this year for a DNA vaccine directed against HPVs-6 and 11, which cause Recurrent Respiratory Papillomatosis.
Inovio also had a Covid-19 virus vaccine in clinical trials.
They were so slow in testing that all the other vaccine makers ran circles around them and they finally gave up without completing much of anything.
If Ref to @3 stinkers and also PZ’s original point, perhaps PZ could replincate the situation at the famous Eton School in England which is operating remotely because flooding in the Thames has backed up all the sewers and toilets.
@18. John Morales : Cheers!
@19. dbinmn :
Oh fer fucks sake!
Did you tell him humans are mammals too? How did he react?
bcw bcw @ 36, we have a unique American system just for such instances. Sink or swim.
StevoR @ 37, such people then massively go off with, “Mammals are animals and people are not animals”, so I’m guessing in their minds that people are either minerals or vegetables. Minimal knowledge, even less logic in them.
Hence, why so many are MAGA types.