msavold
Jetboaters Admiral
- Messages
- 768
- Reaction score
- 1,399
- Points
- 252
- Location
- Columbia, MD
- Boat Make
- Yamaha
- Year
- 2012
- Boat Model
- SX
- Boat Length
- 24
A couple more thoughts, as if I didn't ramble on enough before.
The first problem here is, IMO, the 'emergency' nature of all this. We're in effect seeing the wizard behind the curtain - something that has never happened before. Usually the good folks like @swatski have done their work long before we even hear of a treatment or vaccine but here we see in real time the stuff that has gone on for all vaccines, often WAY before we even hear of them. And unfortunately, the cross checks in place to make sure we're mostly safe are interpreted as 'failures', often by shrill voices seeking to make a platform for themselves on the interwebs!
And then there's the matter of people pulling up IMO absurd comparisons to historic events and past failures as justification for their distrust of the product of all this research, starting from the oft repeated inference that mRNA is a 'new' thing. Meh, relatively new, but that doesn't de facto make it a BAD thing! (See my previous post!)
What has gone into this vaccine is stunning. We are SO far from the days of "hey, let's see what this fuzz on this piece of bread will do when I inject it into something!". As an example, I was blown away when I first heard of the computing power that has been applied to figuring this out. (COVID-19 HPC Consortium Pours 437 Petaflops Of Compute Power Toward Virus Research | Awaken). Yeah, I had to look it up too - a petaflop is one thousand trillion operations per second, So we're talking 437x10^15, or 437 with 15 zeroes after it, calculations per second. A few things have changed in science in the past few decades. Um, the space program's calculations were done with slide rules! PLEASE stop pointing at stuff from the 50s or earlier (love that x-ray shoe sizer! Someone brought one into Pawn Stars a while back!) as proof that if we/they screwed up once before then THIS will certainly be a screw up too! We've become collectively smarter than that - or so I thought.
The first problem here is, IMO, the 'emergency' nature of all this. We're in effect seeing the wizard behind the curtain - something that has never happened before. Usually the good folks like @swatski have done their work long before we even hear of a treatment or vaccine but here we see in real time the stuff that has gone on for all vaccines, often WAY before we even hear of them. And unfortunately, the cross checks in place to make sure we're mostly safe are interpreted as 'failures', often by shrill voices seeking to make a platform for themselves on the interwebs!
And then there's the matter of people pulling up IMO absurd comparisons to historic events and past failures as justification for their distrust of the product of all this research, starting from the oft repeated inference that mRNA is a 'new' thing. Meh, relatively new, but that doesn't de facto make it a BAD thing! (See my previous post!)
What has gone into this vaccine is stunning. We are SO far from the days of "hey, let's see what this fuzz on this piece of bread will do when I inject it into something!". As an example, I was blown away when I first heard of the computing power that has been applied to figuring this out. (COVID-19 HPC Consortium Pours 437 Petaflops Of Compute Power Toward Virus Research | Awaken). Yeah, I had to look it up too - a petaflop is one thousand trillion operations per second, So we're talking 437x10^15, or 437 with 15 zeroes after it, calculations per second. A few things have changed in science in the past few decades. Um, the space program's calculations were done with slide rules! PLEASE stop pointing at stuff from the 50s or earlier (love that x-ray shoe sizer! Someone brought one into Pawn Stars a while back!) as proof that if we/they screwed up once before then THIS will certainly be a screw up too! We've become collectively smarter than that - or so I thought.