week 22 and week 23

Trump's new doctor on the coronavirus response team, Dr. Scott Atlas, a radiologist (he reads x-rays) who has no experience in public health or infectious diseases or epidemiology but he is a regular contributor to Fox news and he is happy to promote Trump's view of the pandemic.

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From Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter on August 17^th (paraphrased) - we lost 1500 people to covid-19 today and an average of 1,000 a day for the previous 17 days. A report in the NYT noted that there were more than 200,000 more deaths in the U.S. since March than in a normal year, suggesting that the death count from the pandemic is currently about 60,000 lower than is accurate.

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While previously there has been little evidence that antibodies from the coronavirus would protect people from re-infection, a fishing vessel with 122 crew members recently returned from 18 days at sea after one of the crew became ill enough to need hospitalization and over 100 other crew members were infected. The three crew members who had antibodies as the ship left port were not among the infected indicating cautiously that coronavirus antibodies do indeed protect someone from infection. And while this is a very small 'study' that has yet to be peer reviewed, this is important information for vaccine development. 

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Two vaccine candidates, the one from German company Pfizer and the other from the biotech Moderna, are entering late stage testing and plan to recruit 60,000 people to test them. Both these contenders, as well as others in the something like 160 different vaccines under development, use specially engineered RNA genetic material to instruct muscle cells in the body to produce a distinctive 'spike' protein found on the surface of the coronavirus. This genetically engineered technique has been in development for a couple of decades and has yet to produce a single vaccine of any kind that has been approved and released for use. The problem with this approach, imo, is that it permanently changes your genetic code and offspring can inherit the changed RNA. This technology is so new that they really have no idea what long term effect the changes in your genetic code will cause or cause to later generations. This NYT site lists the vaccines underdevelopment and groups them by type. 

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Trump and his good buddies HUD Secretary Ben Carson and the My Pillow guy are promoting a new snake oil cure for the coronavirus...oleandrin, a botanical derivative from the poisonous nerium oleander plant. Oleandrin, known by scientists as cardiac glycoside, is the chemical that causes oleanders to be toxic. The company that manufactures it says it has properties similar to digoxin and can treat cancer and though lab studies show that it has some anti-cancer activity in cancer cell lines, there have been no clinical trials in humans showing its effectiveness. They also claim that it can be used to treat heart failure, Hep C, AIDS, and COVID-19 but there is NO scientific evidence to support those claims.

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Trump, without providing any evidence as usual, is now accusing the 'deep state' at the FDA of deliberately delaying coronavirus vaccine trials in an effort prevent a vaccine from being available until after the election.

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Days after the FDA put a hold on the emergency authorization for blood plasma treatment for the virus after top health officials warned that evidence of effectiveness of the treatment was too weak Trump, desperate for a cure or a vaccine before the national election, has pressured the FDA into reinstating the emergency authorization. 

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In another attack on the FDA, Trump's White House, tired of complaints that there isn't enough testing, has taken away the FDA's authority to regulate COVID-19 tests. What this means is that there will be no quality control, no agency demanding proof that the tests work and are reliable. What this means is that any 'approved' lab can manufacture and sell tests without any studies or documentation that they are accurate. Plenty of profit for the labs though.

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It turns out that wearing masks not only protects other people, they protect you as well. Researchers and scientists have found that wearing masks limits the amount of virus that gets in your body resulting in milder symptoms and allowing the body's immune system to cope instead of be overwhelmed. 

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After cutting the CDC out of the coronavirus case and death count information and having hospitals send their data directly to the HHS for political reasons, a move that drew criticism from public health officials, the Trump administration is reversing this policy and returning the responsibility for data collection to the CDC and they now claim it was only an 'interim' change while the CDC worked on building a 'revolutionary' new data system. 

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Current US statistics as of today 8/24/20, 14:25 GMT: cases – 5,876,637, deaths – 180,621. That's an average of about 12,000 deaths a week for the last two weeks. My state, Texas, is, today, #2 after California for the number of coronavirus cases and my county has now jumped up to 1,112 cases and 39 deaths with about half the cases still active.