Prophet Zacharia

Have you looked at your 401(k) lately? Retirement looked a whole lot closer two months ago.

I updated it before I went to Japan two years ago. So no, @donkpow isn’t in it.

Work.

I dunno. I can't stand watching MSNBC either really. Both are slanted terrible No, I’m not a fan of news channels as entertainment, as the 24 hour channels are. Too much encroachment of opinion on news.

They have refrigerator trucks at the morgues in NYC.

Not sure why Hannity wasn’t fired for saying much of the same things.

Best: we’d get Christmas presents at random times of the year because my grandmother would misplace them and not find them all at once, or at all at Christmas time. Worst: She’d never serve dinner before about 9 pm because her time management skills were so poor, what had planned to be a 7 pm meal never was. A lot of hungry evenings and late nights.

It was said not infrequently in February. I believe Trish Regan list her job on Fox for saying it and other fake claims.

Is it because of this look?

Yes: the lady’s version. No: the men’s.

I bought more D cell batteries for a POS plastic radio shack flashlight as a kid than I care to admit.

Lighten up, Francis.

Getting death threats? I get that it sucks having to stay home, but it’s not really his fault.

It’s using virus proteins, not live-attenuated or killed virus, and similar to effective vaccines to other corona viruses. “We had previous experience on SARS-CoV in 2003 and MERS-CoV in 2014. These two viruses, which are closely related to SARS-CoV-2, teach us that a particular protein, called a spike protein, is important for inducing immunity against the virus. We knew exactly where to fight this new virus,” said co-senior author Andrea Gambotto, associate professor of surgery at the Pitt School of Medicine. “That’s why it’s important to fund vaccine research. You never know where the next pandemic will come from.” “Our ability to rapidly develop this vaccine was a result of scientists with expertise in diverse areas of research working together with a common goal,” said co-senior author Louis Falo, professor and chair of dermatology at Pitt’s School of Medicine and UPMC. Compared to the experimental mRNA vaccine candidate that just entered clinical trials, the vaccine described in this paper—which the authors are calling PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh CoronaVirus Vaccine—follows a more established approach, using lab-made pieces of viral protein to build immunity. It’s the same way the current flu shots work. The researchers also used a novel approach to deliver the drug, called a microneedle array, to increase potency. This array is a fingertip-sized patch of 400 tiny needles that delivers the spike protein pieces into the skin, where the immune reaction is strongest. The patch goes on like a Band-Aid and then the needles—which are made entirely of sugar and the protein pieces—simply dissolve into the skin. “We developed this to build on the original scratch method used to deliver the smallpox vaccine to the skin, but as a high-tech version that is more efficient and reproducible patient to patient,” Falo said. “And it’s actually pretty painless—it feels kind of like Velcro.” The system is also highly scalable. The protein pieces are manufactured by a “cell factory”—layers upon layers of cultured cells engineered to express the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein—that can be stacked further to multiply yield. Purifying the protein can also be done at industrial scale. Mass-producing the microneedle array involves spinning down the protein-sugar mixture into a mold using a centrifuge. Once manufactured, the vaccine can sit at room temperature until it’s needed, eliminating the need for refrigeration during transport or storage. “For most vaccines, you don’t need to address scalability to begin with,” Gambotto said. “But when you try to develop a vaccine quickly against a pandemic that’s the first requirement.” When tested in mice, PittCoVacc generated a surge of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 within two weeks of the microneedle prick. Those animals haven’t been tracked long term yet, but the researchers point out that mice who got their MERS-CoV vaccine produced a sufficient level of antibodies to neutralize the virus for at least a year, and so far the antibody levels of the SARS-CoV-2 vaccinated animals seem to be following the same trend. Importantly, the SARS-CoV-2 microneedle vaccine maintains its potency even after being thoroughly sterilized with gamma radiation—a key step toward making a product that’s suitable for use in humans. The authors are now in the process of applying for an investigational new drug (IND) approval from the Food and Drug Administration in anticipation of starting a phase I human clinical trial in the next few months. “Testing in patients would typically require at least a year and probably longer,” Falo said. “This particular situation is different from anything we’ve ever seen, so we don’t know how long the clinical development process will take. Recently announced revisions to the normal processes suggest we may be able to advance this faster.” Additional authors on the study are Eun Kim, Geza Erdos, Shaohua Huang, Thomas Kenniston, Stephen Balmert, Cara Donahue Carey, Michael Epperly, William Klimstra and Emrullah Korkmaz, all of Pitt; and Bart Haagmans, of Erasmus Medical Center.

University of Pittsburgh today announced a vaccine has been developed that effectively produces antibodies to the Covid-19 virus in mice studies. https://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/ebiom/PIIS2352-3964(20)30118-3.pdf

It must be the end of days when RG is the voice of reason! Yes, I am wearing a mask at work. I haven’t when I go grocery shopping, but I haven’t been in a store with more than about 10 people in it, so social distancing wasn’t an issue. I don’t wear gloves, but Purell often while shopping and immediately upon putting groceries in my car.

Not the best written article. I have to hope he had a word quota he had to meet.

There have been so many mixed messages given out by federal leadership that it’s no wonder people aren’t prepared for what it will take to clear this. Yes, “churches open for Easter” was walked back, but still now the message is that the next two weeks will be hard. Try “the next 6 weeks will be hard” and your starting to communicate the scope of what will be needed to fight this infection, nationally. Also, I was listening to a TV ad yesterday, the message is still wrong. Still too much minimizing the risk to younger people, stating the risk is mainly to the elderly. Sure, the risk of death is more for the elderly, but plenty of younger people are getting hospitalized, and some even dying. How about simply “this is a highly contagious virus that can lead to severe pneumonia and even death. Stay in your house.” People are smart enough to know that if they have preexisting medical conditions or are elderly they would be in a more vulnerable group.

I now see 213,000 for the day’s total, so I guess I underestimated.

I revised that when I realized the end of the month wasn’t last weekend but instead midweek this week. I re-predicted 200,000 cases by today. Fortunately, we didn’t hit that mark (yet).

Our streets aren’t very empty. Only essential traffic allowed, yet the roads aren’t as empty as a week ago.

Jane’s dad was the air traffic controller. But I always go back to the opening statement: “Chemistry is the science of change”. It’s a series about the change in personalities of the characters.

I joined Bicycling in 2004, although mostly lurked in the pro cycling section for a long time. I don’t know exactly when I entered LF. I joined here when it opened, but left when Bosox was permitted to stay. Came back when LF closed and I learned he was banned.