Pandemic Report
The small FLiRT spring/summer surge contimues; probably the biggest reminder we are not behind the pandemic yet is a delay in the Menendez trial caused by a defendant getting infected, even an animal shelter temporarily closing.
Key news items of interest include but are not restricted to:
- Key vaccine items of note:
- The FDA decided to replace the variant target for the monovalent fall booster from the advisors' and WHO recommendation of JN.1 to more recent FLiRT variant KP.2. More recent variants have novel means to evade immunity defenses. The basic concern was a possible delay in availability of protein-based vaccines like Novavax vs. mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer.
- The federal government is providing nearly $500M in funding for novel vaccines, including oral and intranasal candidates
- Anti-vaxxers wrongly inferred vaccines were linked to excessive deaths during the pandemic in a recent study
- The LA city council canceled its city employee vaccine mandate
- The US military conducted a dubious anti-vaxxer campaign targeting China's Sinovac in the Philippines
- Antenatal COVID-19 vaccination was shown to be safe for pregnant women and their babies
- Recent studies suggest lomg COVID may be fueled by rogue antibodies
- The government contimues to target COVID relief fraud, including
- A California restaurant owner improperly securing business relief loans
- A NJ businessman got COVID relief loans for businesses closed before the pandemic
- A Florida hip hop artist fraudulently obtained a PPP loan
- A NY report criticized former governor Cuomo not for his role in nursing home COVID deaths but for his top-down management style in government policy
- Dr. Fauci rebealed he turned down multi-million dollar job offers in the private sector to stay for a fraction of the money to stay in public service
- "According to the National Academies’ definition, long COVID is a medical condition that persists for at least three months after an infection with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Long COVID can affect any organ or system in the body. People may have any of more than 200 symptoms, which may include difficulty breathing, brain fog, blood clots, dizziness, extreme fatigue after exercising, loss of taste or smell, fast heart rate, diarrhea, constipation, diabetes and autoimmune diseases such as lupus (SN: 2/2/22; SN: 8/21/23; SN: 1/4/22). Those symptoms can appear alone or in multiple combinations, can be continuous, get progressively worse or have bouts in which the patient gets better and then worse again."
Other Notes
This happens every once in a while. The news section above takes a long time to select and summarize, and the above is a second effort after somehow I had somehow selected everything in my post and lost it to a few keystrokes--and there was no way to retrieve what I accidentally somehow typoed away without a usable backup.
It looks like the bogus blog statistics hacker is back after a few weeks of normal traffic. Over the last few days I noticed a couple of improbable 100+ pageviews from a more normal 40-60 and then over 300 on Saturday. I can't learn anything from garbage stats.
On the Twitter /X front, like in the case of Blogger since 2010, I could get a "free" page of stats--until this past week, when lauching the analytics page I got a pitch to upgrade my account to a paid subscription {premium) account. Now, granted, you can get simpler individual tweet stats for free, but it's more of a piecemeal approach, defying aggregate analysis. Things I long got for free, like my most popular tweets over the past month; I can't easily detect changes in tweet readership.It's one thing if they charged for improved analytics, but I resent paying for something I used to get for free
I recently wrote about how certain Blogger features were no longer usable in some browsers all of a sudden. That problem now seems resolved, but earlier this week, my installed copy of Google Chrome in Windows 10 stopped working, It was almost as if my security software was killing any launched window/tab. Even uninstall/reinstall was failing. (I also have a portable copy of Chrome which did work.) Long story short, I was finally able to reinstall after renaming the Chrome folder in AppData. However, the Chrome sync feature didn't seem to propagate bookmars, extensions, etc.. I could migrate some old Chrome folder content to restore expected browser functionality
WWE's Clash at the Castle PLE aired Saturday afternoon. I would be lying if I didn't halfway expect for CM Punk to screw Drew McIntyre from regaining his World Championship from Damian Priest,in front of Drew's homeland fans but it still pisses me off. WWE also seems to be hinting of Cody Rhodes next challenger as Solo Sikoa, not Roman Reigns' demanding his rematch. Among other things, Sikoa has jobbed so many times over the last few months, he's not even a credible contender
