Hey dj and anyone else with knowledge:
Health officials are encouraging people to get flu shots this year, but what if you get a flu shot that isn't the correct strain for the one you get? That's the big question every year, but this year its has higher (or at least different) importance. I'm not being anit-vax here, but they are requesting that people gamble a crap shoot in the middle of a crap shoot (the worst crap shoot in my life).
Thoughts?
I probably can't get a flu shot where I'm at now, but it doesn't worry me much, because whatever I'm doing to avoid C19 will obviously work just as well with flu. I suppose you can argue that the odds of getting one or the other are higher than just getting one, but unless you're engaging in fairly risky behavior, I'd think the odds of getting either one would be pretty low.
I saw a clip of Fauci's interchange with Rand Paul. This is the best I've seen Fauci, He sounded just as he ought to sound--as a scientist rebutting someone's claims to his conclusions. He was very civil, but very firm and forceful in his reply, just out and out told Paul where he thought he was wrong. I wish Fauci would be more outspoken in this way, but i think the reason he isn't is because he's afraid of disagreeing with Trump, unless it's something too much to ignore, and even then, he sugarcoats it, using words like aspirational, rather than wishful thinking. Paul and other Senators are no threat to Fauci's job, so he can come down on them forcefully without worrying.
A couple of links:
1) a really long article projecting how the pandemic may play out over the next year:
With health authorities saying it may not be until at least the end of 2021 before there’s a degree of post-Covid normalcy in our lives. we imagine the next 15 months and what life will be like.
www.statnews.com
2) a report of a new bat virus with high homology to SARS-CoV-2. What makes this study especially interesting is that they found four amino acids inserted into a critical region of the spike protein. SARS-CoV-2 features a similar insertion (though with different aa), and this new study shows that this kind of insertion can happen naturally. This paper has been out for several months, but I hadn't seen it.
The unprecedented pandemic of pneumonia caused by a novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, in China and beyond has had major public health impacts on a global…
www.sciencedirect.com