> At the beginning of the pandemic, people theorized that public health will influence future media for a generation, much like WW2 did. For decades, we got war TV shows, war movies, war comics, etc. Hogan's Heroes ran into the '70s, Sgt. Rock was published until the late '80s, and so on. And I think we're about to see the same with media based on public health efforts.

but we actually won that war, which precipitated a rise to global hegemon status. covid has been a pathetic, fumbling showing, one that clearly reflects institutional decay and foreshadows future decline -- the reverse of the first situation

WW2 had the Red Scare, Japanese interment camps, and shocking amounts of human experimentation. I would like to hear about the fear mongering and downright lies that were going on during WW2 from someone who was there. I’d bet there was lots of misinformation going around, social media has made those types of things flourish.

If you look back at history through rose-tinted glasses everything will appear better than it was.

Especially once it stops being about race when we say we need to investigate how humans used the Scienctific process took "a solution in search of a problem" and collected samples laboratories, like searching for a needle in a haystack in Wuhan to purposefully replicate and infect chimeric rat/humans with bat viruses. Whether maliciously or not that is the likely prevailing Truth on why we now have a 5th corona virus we need to guide toward an endemic state.

I'm obviously not happy with the state of the world as a computer scientists.

Do you have sources for those claims? As computer scientist I’m certain you should understand the importance of reproducible data and analysis.

That's an opinion piece by a journalist with a BA in Natural Sciences from 1964, not a virologist or otherwise an expert on any of the topics. His claims have not held up well and the biggest scientist he interviewed (David Baltimore) has backed away from that[1]. As they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof and he had very little other than speculation.

I mention all of that because even that wobbly claim was still couched in terms like “did” or “could” while the comment I replied to described it as “likely prevailing truth”. We have no evidence and limited data supporting that hypothesis and a number of people pushing it for political reasons, which is rarely helpful to the scientific process.

1. https://nautil.us/issue/102/hidden-truths/when-a-good-scient...

until it stops being true that the lead scientist at the wiv pioneered work in & published papers about inserting FCSes -- which other than covid do not exist in coronaviruses -- into bat coronaviruses for gain of function research, you will be facing a very uphill battle. there are so many damning claims in that piece that would be convincing on their own that i suspect you haven't even read it.

If you read it more carefully, notice how those claims are much stronger than the supporting evidence. Note how often he says something is possible and then treats it as the most probable explanation without doing the real work of establishing it as such - this is one of the things all of the actual scientists who critiqued this op-ed focused on.

> covid has been a pathetic, fumbling showing, one that clearly reflects institutional decay and foreshadows future decline -- the reverse of the first situation

Against a totally novel virus, we developed and widely deployed vaccines with efficacies beyond anyone’s wildest dreams using totally novel technology in the span of a year. Not sure that quite meets my definition of “pathetic.”

Not a totally novel virus. The reason why vaccines were developed within days of isolating the virus is because SARS-COV-2 is not that different from SARS-COV-1 and all the vaccine research efforts carried over.

What was pathetic was the federal coordination - hesitation on travel restrictions, CDC response, recommendations against PPE… Lessons that could have been learned even from the 1918 pandemic were painfully ignored.

What makes you think the war wasn't won /despite/ pathetic and fumbling actions by leaders and governments? Ha, my country sent a small contingent (25k) to fight against the Axis in Italy. There were new uniforms made for this expeditionary force. Turns out they chose uniforms that closely matched that of the german uniforms (!).

From a book on this subject: "Another problem in the country's preparation was the production of uniforms similar to those of the German Army. 'They even threw rocks at us in Naples thinking we were the invaders'.”

I don’t think anyone “runs” the federal government. I think offices and processes exist, and I think there’s a semi-hereditary politburo occupying said offices, but I don’t think anyone has much authority.

To be fair this war isn’t over yet and WW2 wasn’t exactly a walk in the park for any allied power.

What makes you think the war wasn't won despite pathetic and fumbling actions by leaders and governments? WW2 wasn't a showcase of efficiency and practicality. Ha, my country sent a small contingent (25k) to fight against the Axis in Italy. There were new uniforms made for this expeditionary force. Turns out they chose uniforms that closely matched that of the german uniforms (!). From a book on this subject: "Another problem in the country's preparation was the production of uniforms similar to those of the German Army. 'They even threw rocks at us in Naples thinking we were the invaders'.”

I thought the rollout of the vaccines in the time it took, with the effectiveness it had, just went to show how the knowledge and technology of vaccines makes it one of the greatest human achievements, ever.

The us actually handled the 1918 pandemic even worse than this one.

Public authorities largely claimed it wasn't happening and wasn't a big deal as hospitals overflowed and we dug mass graves.

They even cancelled public gatherings but pretended it was unrelated to a health crisis. Health responses in the us were completely scattershot, and no one trusted information coming out from the government.

Compared to that this response was actually far better and more organized.

Oh, pandemics can certainly have long-lasting social and cultural effects. I ran into something quite interesting just the other day while playing with Google's Ngram on a whim. This is the occurrence of the word "contamination" in contemporary English texts in the last century: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=contamination&... (Care to guess what happened in the early 1980s?)

I'm actually a little worried about this. Of course, I'm happy it'll boost interest in vaccine development. But the terror and fear in reaction to AIDS led to a general biosecurity obsession that became biosecurity paranoia and then hysteria and then a renewal of persecution of homosexual men for a couple decades. Who says we'll be immune to the worse effects of fear, paranoia and panic this time around?

Why would it though?

mRNA vaccines just get your body to produce a particular protein you want to induce an immune response to, instead of injecting the protein directly.

Is it really the slow uptake of mRNA techniques that's prevented an HIV vaccine? Or is it HIV's capacity for rapidly mutating into large numbers of disparate strains inside one person, let alone in the entire community?

I mean, look at the delta variant of Covid, the mRNA vaccines reduce the severity of infection, but do not prevent infection or spreading thereof.

mRNA vaccines will enable rapid iteration, which is good. But they're not a wonder drug at all.

> I mean, look at the delta variant of Covid, the mRNA vaccines reduce the severity of infection, but do not prevent infection or spreading thereof.

I keep seeing that surface here. It is at odds with what I'm reading that says it /is/ effective at preventing infection[1] though not perfectly so. Are we looking at different metrics, or is my own ignorance of the field preventing me from fully understanding what I"m reading?

[1] most recently - https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7034e5.htm?s_cid=mm...

The anti-vaxxine crowd has never had any problem with cherry picking the statistics that they can twist to show their view. I've been watching them do it for at least 10 years (and evidence they have been doing it longer), but only now is the rest of the public seeing it. I have just enough statistics to see what they are doing, but it is complex enough that most people don't understand it.

It is a function of time. During the trials, it was a 95% reduction, Israel last reported a 39% reduction.

But that doesn't equate to saying that it is ineffective at preventing infection. I think we'd need follow-up studies showing a trend towards zero, but that doesn't seem to exist yet.

So expect the next version of Spiderman to be based on a mRNA spider.

> For example, it wouldn't surprise me if, the next time Marvel decides to make a new adaptation of Spider-Man, the spider will have been treated with mRNA instead of radiation (the original story) or gene therapy ('90s cartoon, '00s movies, maybe others).

mRNA vaccine tech being discussed here is not gene therapy. It cannot (appreciably) alter host DNA the way radiation or gene therapy can. It simply causes the host cells to manufacture desired proteins for a limited amount of time.

correct, but parent didn't claim it was?