A Revolting Itch!

[Burnaby49]

No, I’m not about to over-share some disgusting personal hygiene issue. The discussion header is part of the title of Quatloos contributor Donald Netolitzky’s new paper;

"A Revolting Itch: Pseudolaw as a Social Adjuvant"

Getting a bit flamboyant aren’t we Donald? Even with my massive vocabulary I had to look “adjuvant” up;

In pharmacology, an adjuvant is a drug or other substance, or a combination of substances, that is used to increase the efficacy or potency of certain drugs. Specifically, the term can refer to:
• Adjuvant therapy in cancer management
• Analgesic adjuvant in pain management
• Immunologic adjuvant in vaccines

Just Donald making some use of his past life as a medical researcher. While it might be a fascinating article it’s behind a paywall too pricy for we impecunious pensioners to breach. USD $45 for 48 hours access is money better spent on absolute necessities such as more beer. That’s an entire night’s pub-crawl at such time as I’m allowed to engage in such reprehensible activities again.

Anyhow here’s the header and link;

Pseudolaw is a collection of legal-sounding but false rules that purport to be superior laws suppressed by conspiratorial actors. Pseudolaw replaces conventional law. Modern pseudolaw emerged around 2000 in right-wing and often racist US Sovereign Citizen communities, but has subsequently spread world-wide to groups with diverse political, racial, economic, and social objectives. Pseudolaw purports to shift authority away from state and institutional actors and to individuals, and is attractive to dissident groups who resist conventional authority. Pseudolaw is politically agnostic since pseudolaw does not change or create the ideologies and objectives of these dissident groups, but instead empowers them. Pseudolaw aggravates interactions between its host populations and conventional government, court, and law enforcement actors. As pseudolaw expanded outside of its Sovereign Citizen incubator, pseudolaw ceased to be sequestered knowledge taught by gurus and held by privileged groups. Pseudolaw has merged into the cultic milieu: a collection of rejected and marginal ideas, resources, and history. A broad range of conspiratorial and outsider communities and individuals mine the cultic milieu. In this context pseudolaw has become a separate legal system available to those who seek a different explanation for law, and the extraordinary privileges and immunities that pseudolaw falsely promises.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10 ... 21.1924691

But, speaking of Donald, I have to get to work on him, at least indirectly. His employer, Alberta’s court of Queen’s Bench, has been pumping out cases that I’ve been too lazy to write up. Instead of further educating myself by buying Donald’s article I just squandered $200 on this;

https://modelairplanemaker.com/2018/10/ ... ld-review/

I’ve been making model airplanes since I was about 7 or 8 and this is the finest quality model I’ve ever tackled and the Corsair is one of my favourite aircraft. A work of art but also a lot of work so Queen’s Bench has been pushed to the back of the line.

[Juisarian]

I had to look “adjuvant” up

Not a scholar of the anti-vaxx movement? It's one of their bugbears.

[Burnaby49]

Got my first shot at the first opportunity. Getting the second one next Sunday. When I was born children had to run the gauntlet of nasty childhood diseases you rarely see any more. Whooping cough (I had it), polio, scarlet fever, impetigo (has that one too), a whole menu of diseases that, while still floating around, are far less prevalent. I credit vaccines for that.

[eric]

When I was born children had to run the gauntlet of nasty childhood diseases you rarely see any more. Whooping cough (I had it), polio, scarlet fever, impetigo (has that one too), a whole menu of diseases that, while still floating around, are far less prevalent. I credit vaccines for that.

Not just vaccines - you better add in tb, impetigo, pellagra, scabies, and various rotaviruses (although there are vaccines for some of them) that are primarily what I call environmental diseases - poor sanitation, poor nutrition, too much alcohol, and not enough education. Welcome to being the white kid racial minority in some parts of Canada where we were fairly healthy and everyone else wasn't.

[DNetolitzky]

Hi folks,

If anyone would like a copy, send me a private message with an email address. I can't publish the paper openly, but the licensing arrangements allow me to share copies with fellow "academics".

Yup, anyone on Quatloos is definitely a "fellow academic". Just give me an email address.

Take care of yourselves.

Donald

[notorial dissent]

Whooping cough, diphtheria, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and polio, and TB let's not even go there, all were, and still are, given the chance child, and adult, killers. I really seriously don't think anyone misses polio, and yet if they were just coming out with the vaccine I can just hear the hysteria about it. I am hoping the prognosis on the longevity of the covid immunity is better than they are saying now, but at least they have something for it.

[noblepa]

Whooping cough, diphtheria, measles, mumps, chicken pox, and polio, and TB let's not even go there, all were, and still are, given the chance child, and adult, killers. I really seriously don't think anyone misses polio, and yet if they were just coming out with the vaccine I can just hear the hysteria about it. I am hoping the prognosis on the longevity of the covid immunity is better than they are saying now, but at least they have something for it.

To those who would argue that vaccines don't work, or that they are unnecessary, I would point out that there hasn't been a case of smallpox recorded anywhere in the world, since 1977. So, vaccines work!

I don't know if we are close to repeating this feat with any other diseases, but polio seems to be close. When I was a kid, in the 1950's and 60's, photos of wards full of kids in "iron lung" breathing machines, were not uncommon. I can't remember the last time I heard of a case of polio in the US or Europe.

[AnOwlCalledSage]

I can't remember the last time I heard of a case of polio in the US or Europe.

Stop using facts to prove a point. It is so last century.

[The Observer]

I don't know if we are close to repeating this feat with any other diseases, but polio seems to be close.

We are close, but two nations in SW Asia are resistant to polio vaccinations and as such, are still getting transmission of the virus in their populations.

[JamesVincent]

I can't remember the last time I heard of a case of polio in the US or Europe.

The CDC lists the last reported case that originated in the US was 1979.

[The Observer]

The CDC lists the last reported case that originated in the US was 1979.

That is true for cases that were transmitted as viruses in the wild. However, we had a case of polio that was imported into the country by an immigrant in 1993.

Another way of getting polio is as a result of being vaccinated with a polio vaccine based on a weakened virus. Since the US stopped using this type of vaccine, which is oral, we should not be getting the virus transmitted via vaccine. We had several cases in 2005 where children were exposed to someone who had received an oral vaccine outside the US. Fortunately, the children avoided the worst effects of polio. There was another case where an adult died in 2009 of polio symptoms after contracting the virus from a child who had received an oral vaccine in the years before 2000.

[Jeffrey]

The graph of COVID cases and deaths for Israel is extremely dramatic. Free fall since vaccination started. Down to a dozen cases a day now. I don’t think there’s been an equivalent case of a disease being extinguished so quickly. The US has the vaccine supply necessary to accomplish the same thing but it’s clearly not gonna happen. I checked out the numbers for Mississippi, they’ll reach 50% vaccination by July 2022.

[DNetolitzky]

Deploying an effective vaccine often results in crashes of disease incidence. This paper documents the effect of vaccination on US measles, rubella, and mumps incidence in the US:

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr6204a1.htm

I won't go further given the risk of crossing into Quatloos' political debate prohibition. I'll simply say as a microbiologist, and former vaccine development worker, that I am so very impressed at how, worldwide, highly effective tools have been developed and deployed in a timely manner against a novel virus. Best wishes and heartfelt thanks to all the researchers and workers who made that possible. You all deserve our most profound appreciation and acknowledgement.

And it's time to start planning for the next, worse, pandemic. It's coming.

Donald

[Jeffrey]

I still have to insist the scale seems unprecedented as far as I can tell. Compare it to the rollout of the chickenpox and measles vaccines. The crash in cases and deaths occurred over a period of years not months. We’re experiencing a scientific miracle right now.

[The Observer]

I think it is problematic to compare the measles vaccination program results to the COVID-19 program. The first obvious difference was that measles vaccinations were targeted at children (adults at that time were considered already immune since the statistice were that most adults had the disease by the age of 15). Furthermore, the earliest vaccines for measles were not entirely effective or long lasting, so the recipient needed another shot, otherwise they could catch the virus again. And the effort to eliminate the disease from the US population only started 15 years after the first vaccines were administered. Even so, there were sizeable reductions in the incidence and mortality rates. These went up as the effective vaccines became more widespread and available to countries around the world.

The COVID-19 vaccine has been pushed more aggressively than the measles vaccines were in a shorter time frame. So I don't think we can claim that this is a medical miracle so much as it is a logistic miracle.

[Jeffrey]

Keep an eye on Canada. They’re somehow outpacing everyone else on vaccines.

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

[Burnaby49]

Surprises me too. We did very poorly at the start, lagging behind most of the developed world. As I understand it we tried to shortcut on vaccines by getting them from China (no idea why) but China screwed us by cancelling the contract after all the approved vaccines had been reserved so we ended up in the back of the line. It was so slow that the government decided to forego giving second shots for at least four months in order to get everyone at least a first shot. I had my first shot (Pfizer) early April and expected second sometime in August. But we suddenly went into overdrive and the wait between shots is now the authorized two months and almost everyone who wants a first has had it. I'm going for my second shot as soon as I'm done this post, a little over two months from the first. Of course only having a population of 34,000,000 or so and an insignificant ant-vaccination movement helped and I believe we are getting a huge quantity of shots from the US because they have hit an anti-vaccination wall while still producing massive amounts of vaccine.

[eric]

Of course only having a population of 34,000,000 or so and an insignificant ant-vaccination movement helped and I believe we are getting a huge quantity of shots from the US because they have hit an anti-vaccination wall while still producing massive amounts of vaccine.

There are significant areas here in Alberta with almost no vaccine uptake. Rural areas like around me it's vaccine hesitancy combined with everyone is just too busy with seeding and spraying, hopefully it will pick up in a month or so. Northern Alberta is ridiculously low for vaccination rates - at the rate they're going they will never get more than about 15%. Up there it's religious combined with what I call the "end of the highway mentality". Settled by people who didn't get along with the rest of society and government rules and it's been like that ever since.

[Burnaby49]

Maybe I should amend that to insignificant numbers of anti-vaccers here in BC and most of the rest of Canada. Alberta is an outlier. For one thing it has the last significant remnants of the sovereign/freeman movement. Edmonton seems infested with them and they provide a base for vaccination skepticism. We still have a bit of sovereign activity here in BC largely centered around David Lindsay in Kelowna and a few others like Darren Clifford doing something, somewhere up north, but nothing of consequence.

Being a vaccine enthusiast I'm just back from my second shot. the process is really streamlined. I was about half an hour from getting out of our car to being back in and that included a mandatory 15 minute wait at the end.

[The Observer]

Yet a number of Canadians in Alberta took advantage of an offer from the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana to receive vaccinations after the tribe saw they had a surplus in vaccinations and offered them to First Nation members, and then to any Canadian that could get to the border.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/ ... Y2qtL1FqCI