aroch
For someone who “knows genomes”, this is a brain dead take on microarrays. Lots of the content on arrays _is_ directly tied to a phenotype because there’s limited space so we directly test variants that are known to cause problems!
Is he really claiming that BRCA1/2 variants don’t increase risk of breast cancer in a meaningful way? Or that there aren’t tons of people who are XXY who don’t know even though it’s the hidden cause of many infertility problems?
This is just such a bad take it is hard to take anything said here seriously
Frequently available for $50 and supports live headphone pass through if that’s your jam.
On the products page it says they provide FASTQs, aligned BAM and VCF. Which is exactly what one would expect. They're almost certainly just running the DRAGEN pipeline (or something similar) and giving you the output it creates.
I see elsewhere you're claiming that long Covid isn't a thing. It is, full stop. Unless you're suggesting that living with lung and heart damage caused by Covid isn't a complication of Covid?
1. They still get sick, even if asymptomatic, and can bring it home to the house where older people live 2. I don't know if there are published case report / data yet, but anecdotally the new strains are much more likely to cause complications and require hospitalizations for younger children. 3. Even asymptomatic infectious seem to cause "long covid" (Something like a third of long covid cases were asymptomatic). Potentially life-long alterations to lung or heart function doesn't sound like fun
First: The rate of thrombosis in AZ recipients is the less than it is in the general population -- Gen pop, ~.1% [1], AZ ~ 0.001% [2]. There is no evidence that the vaccine causes substantially higher risk. Also, the populations being prioritized for vaccination are a higher risk population for DVT to begin with.[1]
AZ, along with effectively every pharma company out there of note, takes the reporting of adverse drug responses (ADRs) very, very seriously. Both FDA and EMA require ALL companies that produce a labeled product (aka a drug you can "buy" and isn't only available in a trial setting) to investigate and report on every instance of a reported potential ADR. Companies want to investigate because they want to be able to keep selling their drugs. Regulators want to investigate because they want to limit ADRs as much as possible.
From the therapeutic point of view, it is bad if the treatment causes ADRs but also some may be unavoidable because of how the treatment works -- think chemo and cancer. The safety window for a drug is determined by balancing the therapeutic gain of treatment (usually, shorter time to recovery, increased QOL, or, in the case of cancers, increased life span/PFS) with the number and severity of known adverse effects. You might hear about cancer patients "cycling" their treatments, this is to allow time for the body to recover from known/expected ADRs.
Any way, this was a long winded way of saying every entity involved -- drug manufacturer, regulators, doctors, patients -- wants reports of ADRs investigated.
[1] https://www.ajmc.com/view/overview-of-venous-thromboembolism "The overall incidence of VTE is 1 to 2 per 1000 person-years in the general population, which rises to 8 per 1000 person-years in people older than 85 years"
[2] https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazene... 30/5,000,000
Thanks to them we now have a nearly completed genome, only missing the deconvoluted rDNA array segments (~12mb or so, we know the sequences since they’re basically identical but no one has accurately placed the individual array variants yet).
Funnily, there are people out there who want to teach army/marine grunts on the front line to run minIONs. Most of the work is on making the sample prep automated and idiot proof.
On the bacterial side, it is fantastic for quickly sequcinging and closing genomes. Personally, I think the killer use case is field portable and real time sequencing of pathogens. I've worked with groups (.gov and private, defense and health related) that want to put minION + flongles to use in applications like early detection for bio terrorism and pathogen surveillance.
The US Navy is much bigger and has global operations. They're just as guilty of being careless but they also have proven war fighting capabilities. No one is asking the British to sail by as a show of power and solidarity.
That being said, the US could stand to spend less on military funding.
While you're not wrong that we might be under-estimating risk, I'll note that we do take into consideration seroprevalence in our calculations (so called, ascertainment bias). We provide estimates for two cases; 5x and 10x under-counting bias.
And you are right, that risk is additive (to a degree) if you go do multiple parties. And people are terrible at doing this sort of calculation. Our messaging, in our manuscript/press/social media has always been to limit gatherings of any size, and mask and gather outside as much as possible