GWS Nick. Hope it gives you an easy ride.
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GWS Nick. Hope itās a mild one.
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Itās really mild. Barely know I have it tbh.
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Two lines for me this morning 
Bah
Bol Gareth
New research indicates that covid bears a number of indications that it was synthesizedā¦
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Thatās quite a significant finding.
Just been for my seasonal rooster booster at our local vax centre (which was repurposed from a beauty salon at the beginning of the pandemic).
What an operation - if it took 30 seconds per patient Iād be surprised.
Oh, and the guy before me was 3 days older than me - kind of tells you the demographic theyāre going for right now.
Had mine Sunday
Was only a handful there,which was a surprise as when I went for the other three jabs,there were hundreds in the queues.
Wonder what the take up has been compared to the others?
Big queue at our vax centre, but as I said, they were absolutely smashing through it.
Weāve got ours tomorrow.
Mine is at my GP Surgery this afternoon. Previously it has been at my preferred chemist.
My covid jabbers (mass vacc centre at Oxford Utd stadium) said two weeks ago that theyād been busy and take-up among the folks they were doing then (those with some sort of vulnerability) had been good. My flu jab was done in a supermarket pharmacy though and there was less chatting.
Looks like 8.8 million āautumn boosterā covid jabs in England by Oct 16th Statistics Ā» COVID-19 Vaccinations, so more than one in seven of us have had it. They were doing just shy of 2 million a week.
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Is this booster just for the over 50s?
If so,I guess 8mill brings it down to under 1 in 3 have had it
The over 50s and the vulnerables. Three in front of me in the queue was another type 1 diabetic I happen to know. Heās in his early 20ās.
Will wait for that to survive peer reviews.
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Unfortunately thereās a whole load of idiot factions jumping on both sides already, but I saw it when Francois Balloux retweeted it, and heās no fool.
Demonstrates the difficulty of non-specialists trying to judge the quality of specialist work. Itās hard enough when the work is in an uncontentious area. But when thereās big pressure to reach one conclusion or another then anyone who doesnāt work in the field stands next to no chance of being able to work out whether the data support an assertion. Any flaws may well be critical but not trivial to spot.
If true then the discovery that SARS-Cov-2 was synthesised would be big enough to get into Science or Nature, or at least one of the top rank molecular biology journals. These mags all subject big claims to very serious peer-review scrutiny. Bobās right to want to wait for that.
In the absence of that scrutiny and the skills needed to work through the claims, all we have is the established reputation of the claimants. I note that Washburne did his PhD at Princeton (very good school) and then a couple of post-doc placements at Duke (also good, at least in parts) and Montana State (I donāt know it, but certainly not Ivy League). Heās now self-employed through his own one-man company.
Andersen did his doctoral work at LMB Cambridge then post-docād at Harvard and MIT. These are all absolutely top-rank places. Heās been a faculty professor at Scripps La Jolla (also a world-class place) for a long time and runs his own lab there with 25 staff.
Between Washburne and Andersen, Andersenās by a long way the bigger player. His stellar position would be seriously damaged if he came out and trashed someone elseās hugely important claims, only for those claims subsequently to turn out to be correct. If heās not absolutely certain then heās not going to take that risk.
Iām not saying Washburneās wrong, but heās been challenged very hard. Heās got some convincing to do, and Iād bet a few quid that this will turn out to be cold fusion.
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