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COVID-19 - Just get the vaccine as soon as possible!

2021-05-11T10:57:10-04:00

Well. For once this will be an article far away from the kind of stuff I use to post on this blog. This is a post about COVID-19 and its vaccines. But it's perhaps the most important thing I will have ever written.

Since the start of the week, various events have cruelly reminded us of how dangerous COVID is.
Particularly the situation in India, where infections are increasing at an absolutely terrifying rate, is very worrying. India this week set a world record for new daily COVID cases with more than 400,000 daily infections in recent days (and this is probably underestimated) and more than 2,000 daily deaths.

It is time for everyone to realize that our only way out of this long-term humanitarian disaster is clearly through herd immunity.
We have finally had an incredible chance for a few months: in Europe and the US we have wide access to many vaccines. The speed of vaccination has increased. And that is great.

The reason that prompts me to write today is that the #AntiVax are now emerging as the main pitfall on the way out of this disaster and that we - scientists or simply educated people - have the responsibility to react. All over Western countries, the same signs are being seen: some vaccination centers have already gone from insufficient supply a few weeks ago to insufficient demand today. And that is a disaster.

For example, in the US, according to the CDC, the average daily immunization has dropped by 20% since the beginning of April. A lot of centers find themselves with excess doses and possible appointments remaining, for example in South Carolina (see US media). Another example, without the county of Palm Beach, where a large number of vaccination centers have opened in recent weeks, the health department announces that it has 10,000 possible appointments on the various sites that remain vacant.
In Europe, the situation is unfortunately no better. In France, for instance, several vaccination centers claim that people are not registering for the vaccine as quickly as they had expected and that others are not showing up. The bottom line is that multiple doses are not given at the end of the day and some must be thrown away. This is madness.

A worrying and growing number of people are reluctant to get the free COVID vaccine.
However, these vaccines could save not only your life, but also the life of the people around you.

The bottom line is that for the Coronavirus, the herd immunity threshold would be between 70 and 90% of the population. It is this threshold that we have to reach as quickly as possible. This must be our most sacred goal.

In the US, for example, a survey found that if 60% of American adults have either received a first dose of the vaccine or wish to be vaccinated, 18% respond "maybe" and 22% categorically refuse.
Let us imagine that in the long term the undecided ones convince themselves to get vaccinated, that only places us at 78%. And unfortunately, this poll does not take into account children who are not currently eligibale to bgetting vaccinated and who represent about 22% of the population. From this perspective, achieving herd immunity today seems illusory.

We must therefore ensure that the vaccine is given to as many adults as possible as quickly as possible. And that means we really all need to get vaccinated.

I can understand that young, athletic and healthy people do not see the benefits of vaccination. We might not get seriously ill from COVID or even get sick at all, right?
But it could always be inadvertently passed on to someone who could then die.
And only vaccinating people at risk is not satisfactory since the circulation of the virus would not be stopped. And this is the real problem: the more the virus circulates, the more likely it is that we will see mutations appear that make it more dangerous, and perhaps even strains capable of fully resisting current vaccines, thus bringing us back to The starting point.

The point is, the current hesitation over vaccination is terribly problematic.

So in the rest of this article, I would like to review and discuss most of the "arguments" of the #Antivax groups.

VACCINES DO NOT WORK. THEY DO NOT PREVENT YOU FROM GETTING SICK OR INFECTING OTHERS

We hear that often and I kind of understand it. Especially when you have to receive two injections, you really want the thing to be foolproof (nothing is foolproof).

The argument most often made by conspirators is the fact that public health departments in Western countries recommend that vaccinated people (even force them) to continue to wear masks when in contact with vulnerable people.
However, this is in no way an element able to determine the uselessness of vaccines.

Clinical trials have shown that vaccines are amazingly successful in preventing people from contracting a severe form of the disease.
As to whether they protect you from the spread of the virus, the tests were not designed to assess that aspect. But the evidence so far indicates that they have significantly reduced transmission. The best proof of this is Israel, which with 80% of its population vaccinated has virtually eliminated the circulation of the virus.

The reason masks and distancing are still recommended is because public health organizations are as cautious as possible and apply the precautionary principle. In my opinion, that makes sense during a global pandemic, right?

What is crisp in all of this. is the fact that the #AntiVax groups were impatiently awaiting an event like this. They have a unique window of opportunity to propagate vaccine doubt and they have profited greatly.
And what's really scary is that they don't even really need to convince people that they're right. They just need to convince people that no one else is about the situation and the vaccines to get people to buy into myths, with lots of conspiracy videos spreading untruths and studies and claims taken ont of context.
So in the US, for example, only 4% of the population believes that the COVID vaccine is more dangerous than the disease. But 25% say they don't know. And this is a tragedy because if the #AntiVax groups manage to spread enough disinformation to convince people to "not be vaccinated for lack of information", then they ruin any chance of getting out of this crisis for everyone.

To be clear, I'm sure most of the hesitant aren't fanatics or conspirators, most are just people trying to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. We all know a bunch of people like that. But by swallowing the myths of the conspirators, they are complicit in the current situation.

BILL GATES USES THE VACCINE TO PUT A MICROCHIP IN EACH OF US

This myth fascinates me specifically because it touches a topic with which I am more than very familiar.
And the answer is really very simple. The technology for this simply does not exist, neither today nor in the near future.

Make no mistake, we have the technology today to miniaturize some very limited feature devices at this scale.
But miniaturizing a worthwhile chip (with remote connection capabilities, a reliable power supply, and useful analytical capabilities or the ability to influence the human body) is simply not possible today. It's science fiction. Believe me, it's definitely my job.

And also - and I don't stress how essential this is - monitoring you, stalking you in any way possible, and observing you all day long is precisely what your phone does with all your consent possible. Why would anyone bother to design a chip for this when everyone is buying these smartphones with such excellent analytics and tracking capabilities so greedily?

So to put it once and for all: there is no microchip in the COVID vaccine.
This rumor is based on the fact that the Gates Foundation funded research years ago that has often been taken out of context. In this study, researchers looked at creating an invisible ink that could potentially be injected with a vaccine so populations like refugee children could keep immunization records without paperwork. Over the time, the original context has been skewed by conspirators and made to become a microchip story that Bill Gates wants to inject into vaccines. Which, if you think about it for a second, doesn't make any sense.

Again, Bill Gates, just like facebook, google etc. already has all the means possible to track you with your smartphone.

VACCINES ARE TESTED ON US, THE POPULATION

Many people think that pharmaceutical companies use the general population as guinea pigs. And that hardly encourages, eh? No one wants to be used as a guinea pig.

It's worth understanding exactly how the vaccine got to the market so quickly. The very first thing to understand is that researchers have been working on vaccines against other coronaviruses for years. So when COVID-19 emerged, they got a big head start. "Operation Warp Speed", as it was called, was not about rushing scientific research. It was simply a matter of drastically reducing the bureaucracy that might otherwise have slowed it down.

The vaccine researchers have explained in detail (and in full BTW if you get the information in the right places, not on youtube) that they were able to develop vaccines in 12 months because they were able to compress the vaccine. calendar. While the various steps necessary for putting a vaccine into circulation are normally done in a linear fashion - from A, then B, then C and so on up to Z - they were able, this time around, to start steps in parallel - by doing the F and the E for example at the same time as the A and the B.
They took steps that usually happen sequentially and saved time by performing them simultaneously.

It is this aspect above all, but also the massive investments of the private sector and Western states in research which have made it possible to be so rapid, to the benefit of the population, in no way to their detriment.

mRNA-BASED VACCINES MAY DAMAGE DNA AND CAUSE MUTATIONS

Many have heard or read online that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were the first to be allowed to use messenger RNA, which is true, but it has given rise to speculation about what messenger RNA is capable of.
The most common fear is that anyone who takes these vaccines will invariably have neurological problems within a year, and most of them will die within 10 years.
Huh ... okay. I think it is important to clarify certain things.

First, other than a few conspiratorial videos that claim to have evidence that people have never seen, there is absolutely no credible evidence or study to support any of this.
As for the claim that mRNA vaccines can modify DNA, it is very important to know that messenger RNA from vaccines does not enter the genome. It's impossible. It does its job far away from the nucleus of the cell (where DNA is located).
Fear of what the vaccine contains or what it might do, however, seems to be common. For example, some evangelicals in the US fear that it contains cells from aborted fetuses, which is not the case either.
For most of the people who left #AntiVax insinuate doubt in their mind, they actually fear that the vaccine (still based on DNA modifications) could alter how their body works.
We have heard some individuals on facebook claim that these vaccines cause infertility; these rumors were fueled by a blog post, which falsely claimed that Pfizer's vaccine can cause the female body to attack a protein that plays a crucial role in the development of the placenta. It is a myth. This is absolutely wrong. Whatever these famous experts say, there is absolutely no evidence to support this claim.
There is, however, already quite satisfactory evidence that Pfizer's vaccine does not cause infertility, since during trials carried out in 2020, several women became pregnant ... and the only one to have suffered a miscarriage received the placebo. So this is simply completely wrong.

If you know a biologist or doctor among your friends, ask them to explain to you what messenger RNA is and how polymerase enzymes translate DNA into RNA and how the latter is used by ribosomes to synthesize the proteins that drive our body. It is really quite fascinating.
The bottom line is: Messenger RNA is not designed to enter a cell nucleus, let alone alter its DNA. It just doesn't work that way.

THE RISKS OF VACCINES ARE GREATER THAN THE RISKS OF COVID

This is a perception fueled by the constant circulation of misleading headlines about people falling ill or dying after receiving their dose of vaccine.

For example, you may have seen this story which was widely shared about 23 people in Norway who died within a week of taking the first dose of the vaccine, which sounds scary indeed. But that headline obscures an absolutely essential piece of context: At that time, in Norway, the vaccine was being given to the oldest or sickest people, and a certain percentage of them would statistically die that week. anyway, vaccine or not vaccine. 400 people die every week in nursing homes in Norway.
You see what I mean ?
If someone who has just received their first dose dies of a car crash on their way out of the vaccination center, we should be able to exclude the vaccine as the cause of the death, nope ?

When the WHO looked at these incidents, it found no unexpected or untoward increases in the number of deaths, which makes sense. Correlation is not causation. The vaccine protects against COVID, not the concept of mortality, fuck it.
It's strange to have to clarify this: but you have to know that you are all going to die one day, all of you, vaccine or not vaccine.

This also applies to the stories that are popping up in the US that are linked to the frightening exaggeration of data from VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) - the system for collecting vaccine-related adverse events. VAERS a database that collects all medical events following vaccination for any US citizen. The problem with VAERS is that reports can be entered by anyone and are not verified. The goal is to collect everything and since the users of the system are doctors or medical researchers, the system relies on their skills to separate the wheat from the chaff themselves.
So any layman must treat the resulting data with extreme caution, which journalists obviously do not do.
A self-styled doctor once claimed that the flu shot turned him into the Hulk. And this report was obviously accepted and entered into the database. Again the goal is to collect everything.
See where this takes us, eh?

The reason the US CDC collects this data is that if a pattern emerges, action can be taken. This is exactly what happened with Johnson and Johnson's vaccine. The CDC has found a potential pattern of rare blood clots and, with due caution, halted the large-scale deployment of this vaccine pending further testing and protocols.
Skeptics pointed to this fact as proof they were right that vaccines were dangerous. But in reality, this obviously proves the opposite: the risk to public safety of vaccines is analyzed and rigorously monitored, and in any case not buried in secret and requiring conspirators with an IQ 2 to be revealed to the public.

Obviously I am not claiming that there are no side effects to vaccines, of course not. But serious side effects like anaphylaxis are incredibly rare: 4.7 cases per million for Pfizer, 2.5 cases per million for Moderna. Also, it is essential to understand that these side effects mainly occur in people with a history of severe allergies.
The point is, the vast majority of people can expect the most common cold or flu symptoms within the first few days after their injection, or maybe just arm pain, or even nothing at all most of the time. time.

But most importantly, the bottom line, the key thing to remember is that no vaccine side effect is worse than the alternative COVID, a disease that has killed more than 3 million people worldwide, while one again to this day, there is no conclusive evidence that the vaccine killed anyone (and not that no one who received the vaccine died of course).

IN CONCLUSION

It is of course more than natural to have questions. But there are reassuring answers. You just have to look for them in the right places, so not on youtube or facebook.

The goal for everyone must be to achieve herd immunity, as quickly as possible. This is the only way out of this human, social and economic crisis in the long term.
And to get there, we must at all costs convince all those who can be to take these vaccines.

Talk to your loved ones and bring these arguments to those who hesitate, in the most benevolent way possible.
We need to get out of this crisis, and vaccines are the only solution.

Nokia n900 vs. Apple iPhone 3GS vs. HTC (OOpps.. Google) Nexus One

2010-01-24T15:37:40-05:00

I'm looking for a new phone. The 3 models I found appealing are the ones mentioned in the title of this post. I'm posting here the criterions I ran through when looking at these phones and the reasons that make me choose one or the other.

As an introduction, I have to say that I'm a software engineer and linux addicted. I'm using linux at home (unfortunately not always at the office) since almost 10 years now and besides a few journeys in the BSD world I don't have such a deep knowledge of any other Operating System. I'm stating this as an introduction so that the reader understands that my critera might not necessarily be his.

The first aspect we will be looking at is the hardware :

n900	iPhone 3GS	Nexus One
3.5' screen in 800 x 480	3.5' screen in 480 x 320	3.7' screen in 800 x 480
32 GB internal memory (extensible with mSD-Card)	32 GB internal memory (no extension possible)	512 MB internal memory (extensible with mSD-Card)
ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz (TI OMAP 3430) proc.	ARM Cortex-A8 600 MHz (TI OMAP 3430) proc.	Qualcomm Snapdragon 1Ghz proc
dedicated graphic chipset PowerVR SGX (OpenGL ES 2.0)	dedicated graphic chipset PowerVR SGX (OpenGL ES 2.0)	dedicated graphic chipset integrated in the Qualcomm SD
front camera	No front camera	front camera
hardware keyboard The device is quite fat though	Thin device	Thin device

For me the n900 is a winner here: the screen might be a bit smaller that the Nexus One's screen but the resolution is the same, the internal memory is the same than the iPhone 3GS but it can be extended (at least to 48 Gb with a 16 Gb micro-SD card) and as the iphone it has a dedicated graphic chipset supporting OpenGL ES 2.0 (with open specifications).

In addition, although the Snapdragon runs az 1Ghz, trust me guys, these Qualcomm processors are really crappy. In terms of pure processing, the high frequency is interesting but the integrated graphical chipset is ridiculous. I don't know if any of you remembers the 7201 on the Diamond or the Rapahel, even with better drivers it was just impossible to get decent performance for most games or high quality videos.
I don't know for you but I'm pretty sure I wont have any other Qualcomm based device in a short future. I still wonder why HTC keeps using those procs...

Now let's have a quick glance on the system software stack :

n900	iPhone 3GS	Nexus One
Maemo	iPhone OS	Android
Linux / X.org / Hildon (GTK-based) with Qt compatibility	MacOSx ... Well, sort of	Linux / Dalvik VM (java like))

Regarding the iPhone, I can't help but admire in a very general manner Apple's engineer's work on Nextstep ... OOpps I mean MacOSX. It's a unbelievable system with a revolutionnary (but not new) kernel architecture. It's very usable and it looks damn' good, alright.
But it's a commercial and closed system in which most layers are grey-zones and an extended set of system APIs and features are poorly documented or hidden. Without any document nor the source code how does one uses the system or changes it the way he wants ?
Besided it's unclear what exactly of MacOSX is in the iPhone and there are odds limitations like the lack of a proper multitasking support which seems unclear to me.

Now about Android : OK it's Open-Source, looks good and the big picture of it seems not bad at all.... but personnaly I'm no big fan. The problem for me comes from this Dalvik machine. It's roughly a VM running an extended subset of the Java spec. The linux kernel is used for nothing more than low-level interactions with the hardware and provides the ground abstraction from which the virtual machine is build up. Google's engineers applied a few changes on the kernel to make it fit as directly as possible the VM needs and I don't like that. This seems to me quite a hack and I would have preferred a good old standard linux/GNU standard libs deployment. In addition the display layer is not X compatible.
So how do you port usual *nix applications on it ?
You dont.

Well so much google once again. And I'm way not a google fan besides the search engine and gmail.

Let's look at the n900 now. the maemo 5.0 system is Open-Source (98%) and built using good old debian tools (deb, apt, etc.). It is mostly maintained by an open communitiy growing constantantly (with every problem that implies). It is fully based on Linux, the GNU standard libs, BusyBox, X.org, GTK etc. The Hildon GUI is strongly based on gnome.
In addition there are QT compatibility libraries for hildon. You can also progam it in python which is extensively used by the maemo community.
A few components mostly related to drivers and telephony features are nokia proprietary but 98% of the software stack is Open-Source.
The n900 is available since a few weeks only (not even worldwide publicly launched before end of January) and you can already find hundreds of nifty applications on maemo's extra (and -testing, -devel) repositories. Features as MMS not officially supported by the original nokia applications set are now fully supported using open-source and free third parties apps.

Well, let's face it. I'm choosing the n900 as a phone for the same reason that makes me choose Linux for my home and work computers. That does not mean the n900 is reserved to computer professionals or geeks, I really don't think so. I won't try to convince you here but I might tell you in a future post about my wife and children all using exclusively linux notebooks everyday for everything they need a computer for, even gaming (wine rules).

Other concerns :

To be honest, the n900 is not necessarily an iPhone killer either. There are hundreds of thousand of applications available for the iPhone, most likely several thousands already available for Android. There are far from that many available for the n900.
Don't get me started about the hundreds of thousands of applications available for the iPhoine. I would be really glad to know how many are useful. But anyway, let's be honest, there will never be that many apps available for the n900.

Still, I have a smartphone now for quite a while and the applications which are mandatory for me are : a very good media player (or several good media players), A GRRS/UMTS connection monitor, a good web browser with download manager, a good mail software, a ssh client, a vnc client, a good ftp/scp/sftp client, a console, a good GPS software and lots of other little things.

And I have all of these on the n900 and in the best possible way : *nix standard, free and open-source.