Peter Hotez on Vaccination.

Health expert Peter Hotez warns of a third COVID-19 wave, says a vaccine likely won't come for another year

By Shawn Mulcahy, The Texas Tribune Sept. 24, 2020

"Health expert Peter Hotez warns of a third COVID-19 wave, says a vaccine likely won't come for another year" was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.

Vaccine expert Dr. Peter Hotez warned Texas could face another potentially deadly spike in COVID-19 cases and said an immunization for the novel coronavirus likely won’t be widely available for another year during a conversation on Thursday at the 2020 Texas Tribune Festival.

Hotez, dean at the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, criticized the White House’s lack of a coordinated response to the coronavirus, pointing to a drastic surge in cases in Texas, Georgia and Florida this summer.

“If we had had that leadership that had put in place a national campaign strategy to prevent the resurgence of COVID-19, we never would’ve been there,” he said.

At its peak in July, Texas logged more than 10,000 new cases of COVID-19 per day. Hospitals neared capacity, and open beds in intensive care units were sparse.

Now, new hospitalizations have fallen and the state is reporting about 3,500 new cases per day. But Hotez predicts another surge in Texas and across the nation this fall as students return to schools and colleges, and states loosen restrictions on businesses.

“We could have a resurgence — a third peak — that’s potentially worse than the one we just went through,” he said.

Even as Texans face yet another wave of the coronavirus, Hotez said a vaccine likely will not be widely available until the third quarter of 2021. Three U.S. companies are currently in the third phase of clinical trials and are expected to have enough data to determine efficacy by the end of the year.

Hotez warned communication between drug companies and the public is vital to a successful rollout, particularly amid growing public distrust of a potential vaccine. President Donald Trump has said he expects a vaccine to be ready before Nov. 3 — a claim widely disputed by scientists. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll found that 6 in 10 Americans say they would not take a COVID-19 vaccine as soon as it is available.

“We’re going to need an unprecedented level of communication which we don’t have right now, unfortunately,” Hotez said.

He said he has a “high level of confidence” in the science of the vaccine, but worries public misconceptions could derail the process.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/24/peter-hotez-coronavirus/.

The Texas Tribune is proud to celebrate 10 years of exceptional journalism for an exceptional state. Explore the next 10 years with us.

Psychology of Climate Change Denial

I have been going through the "Denial101x - Making Sense of Climate Science Denial" MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).  It is available for free on the edx platform and you can also see a reference to it at https://skepticalscience.com/denial101x-videos-and-references.html. I just watched two extended video interviews that relate to the "psychology of denial".  I think you should take a look at them.  The first one is the interview with Stephan Lewandowsky who is at the University of Bristol in the UK.  His main point seems to be that for the most part the deniers have political issues related to accepting the evidence.  He says that over two thirds of the variance in acceptance can be accounted for by a person's worldview.  So the denial is not based on the science

• "When it comes to the drivers of belief or acceptance of scientific findings, in particular, climate change, then what we find is that one of the most important factors is a person’s worldview or you can call it a political ideology, their belief in things such as the free market. It turns out, in particular in the case of climate change, that people who are very enthusiastic about free markets and who think that government should not interfere with free markets, that they tend to reject the findings from climate change, climate science based on that ideology.  It’s a very strong effect. It’s a huge effect. In some of my data, it explains two-thirds of the variance. Now what that means is that if I know somebody’s belief about the free markets, I can reduce my uncertainty about what their climate change attitude is by two-thirds. There’s a huge correlation there between those two variables and that is one of the main drivers." 

Watch the entire video:

 

 The other interview is with Larry Hamilton from the University of New Hampshire:

Ex-Fox anchor explains how to start deprogramming your Fox-brainwashed friends and relatives, Part 1 on Front Page Live

Ex-Fox anchor explains how to start deprogramming your Fox-brainwashed friends and relatives, Part 1 on Front Page Live: Fox News' slanted coverage, climate change denial, and now the Australian fires have caused a huge split in the Murdoch family.

Failure

The recent UN meeting about climate change looks like a complete failure to me.

This is from a recent article in the Texarkana Gazette.

“Since leaders first started talking about tackling the problem of climate change, the world has spewed more heat-trapping gases, gotten hotter and suffered hundreds of extreme weather disasters. Fires have burned, ice has melted and seas have grown.

The first United Nations diplomatic conference to tackle - change was in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Here’s what’s happened to Earth since:

• The carbon dioxide level in the air has jumped from about 358 parts per million to nearly 412, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That’s a 15% rise in 27 years.
• Emissions of heat—trapping carbon dioxide from fossil fuel and industry jumped from 6.06 billion metric tons of carbon in 1992 to 9.87 billion metric tons in 2017, according to the Global Carbon Project. That’s a 63% increase in 25 years.
• The global average temperature rose a tad more than a degree Fahrenheit in 27 years, according to NOAA.
• Since Jan. 1, 1993, there have been 212 weather disasters that cost the United States at least $1 billion each,when adjusted for inflation. In total, they cost $1.45 trillion and killed more than 10,000 people. That’s an average of 7.8 such disasters per year since 1993, compared with 3.2 per year from 1980 to 1992, according to NOAA.
• The U.S. - Extremes Index has nearly doubled from 1992 to 2018, according to NOAA. The index takes into account far—from-normal temperatures, drought and overall dry spells, abnormal downpours.
• Nine of the 10 costliest hurricanes to hit the United States when adjusted for inflation have struck since late 1992. The other one, Andrew at No. 6, hit in August 1992, according to NOAA.
• The number of acres burned by wildfires in the United States has more than doubled from a five—year average of 3.3 million acres in 1992 to 7.6 million acres in 2018.
• The annual average extent of Arctic sea ice has shrunk from 4.7 million square miles in 1992 to 3.9 million square miles in 2019, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. That’s a 17% decrease.
• The Greenland ice sheet lost 5.2 trillion tons of ice from 1993 to 2018, according to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
• The Antarctic ice sheet lost 3 trillion tons of ice from 1992 to 2017, according to a study in the journal Nature.
• The global sea level has risen on average 2.9 millimeters a year since 1992. That’s a total of 78.3 millimeters,or 3.1 inches, according to NOAA.”

Sealioning

Sealioning is a common tactic among climate change deniers. According to the Urban Dictionary “A subtle form of trolling involving "bad-faith" questions. You disingenuously frame your conversation as a sincere request to be enlightened, placing the burden of educating you entirely on the other party. If your bait is successful, the other party may engage, painstakingly laying out their logic and evidence in the false hope of helping someone learn. In fact you are attempting to harass or waste the time of the other party, and have no intention of truly entertaining their point of view. Instead, you react to each piece of information by misinterpreting it or requesting further clarification, ad nauseum. The name "sea-lioning" comes from a Wondermark comic strip.”

Trends in the climate

From https://skepticalscience.com/global-cooling.htm

Notice all of the trends shown on the image.  These are all due to a warming climate.  Don't let thecontrarian convince you otherwise!

97%

97% is a number both praised and criticized concerning the climate change issue.  An article published by Naomi Oreskes in 2004 found that 97% of the papers published by actual climate scientists (those who do research on the phenomenon) agree that the climate is changing and that it is due to human activities.  Oreskes examined 928 papers published between 1993 and 2004l. A more recent study (Cook et al 2013) of over 12, 000 papers agrees with this figure.

There is a good discussion of this issue at https://skepticalscience.com/97-percent-consensus-robust.htm

As Pogo says, "We have met the enemy and he is us."