I'm really hoping that the CDC ACIP committee has the sense to recommend the vaccine every 6 months to anyone willing to take it. It's an open question whether that will be their decision on September 22nd. The meeting was originally announced to be taking place on September 12th but it appears this has been changed. I just submitted my written comment about their upcoming meeting to the federal register a few minutes ago shortly before the written comment period expired. Please give it a read.

Docket No. CDC–2023–0060

Vaccines have been the cornerstone of public health response since they were first developed. At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic, while the HHS declared PHE has been ended, nobody who is following the state of infections, disease, and long term effects of any infection believes that the pandemic is "over". One of the last effective things that people are encouraged to do by public health messaging and public officials to blunt the impact of the pandemic on their lives is to get vaccinated. It is rational for people to not want to get sick. People getting sick despite vaccination can and does happen in the absence of masking and ventilation improvements, but getting boosted regularly reduces this risk. The efficacy against any infection is of course not the only reason to encourage vaccination, but everyone in the US and around the world deserves the best protection against getting sick and vaccinations at this time, are most effective for a bit less than six months[1]. People want to avoid illness for all kinds of reasons: because it's unpleasant to be sick, because of the risk of death or hospitalization, because of the high[2] and increasing[3] with each infection risk of long term COVID complications - or even because they can lose income or their jobs if they do not show up to work.

Due to the clear loss of a majority of the protection against any infection (each infection carrying with it severe risks to long term quality of life directly and indirectly) at around six months, everyone deserves the right to a COVID vaccine every 6 months. If CDC does not recommend an every 6 month schedule, many or most people will have significant trouble getting one every six months whether logistically because their doctor won't prescribe it, or their pharmacist won't administer it, or their insurance will not pay for it. Recommending a vaccine every six months won't stop people who only want to get vaccinated once a year from only getting vaccinated once per year. There is no reason to move to a yearly-only schedule with the vaccines we have today that wane in this manner.

It would also also makes no sense to increase the risk of young people to become infected, which comes with a 12%-16% risk of Long COVID per infection[4] by making an arbitrary decision to remove access from those who are not either high risk or elderly. To add to this, every infection of a child - like every other infection - also comes with a risk of infecting others either at school, at home, or in the community.

In sum, everyone must be eligible and recommended a COVID-19 vaccine dose every 6 months as a bare minimum of public health response in the continuing pandemic. Even if COVID-19 were to become endemic instead of a continual series of epidemic outbreaks overlapping each other as we see today in the continuing pandemic, this would mean that the risk of infection with COVID-19 with its severe impacts on quality of, or continuance of, human life, would be ever present and the availability of a vaccine every 6 months is essential. COVID-19 shows no signs of becoming seasonal in any sense similar to influenza at this point and we should not make policy as if it has done so.

Citations

1) Chemaitelly H, Tang P, Hasan MR, AlMukdad S, Yassine HM, Benslimane FM, Al Khatib HA, Coyle P, Ayoub HH, Al Kanaani Z, Al Kuwari E, Jeremijenko A, Kaleeckal AH, Latif AN, Shaik RM, Abdul Rahim HF, Nasrallah GK, Al Kuwari MG, Al Romaihi HE, Butt AA, Al-Thani MH, Al Khal A, Bertollini R, Abu-Raddad LJ. Waning of BNT162b2 Vaccine Protection against SARS-CoV-2 Infection in Qatar. N Engl J Med. 2021 Dec 9;385(24):e83. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2114114. Epub 2021 Oct 6. PMID: 34614327; PMCID: PMC8522799. - figure 2 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34614327/#&gid=article-figures&pid=figure-2-uid-1)
2) Ford ND, Slaughter D, Edwards D, et al. Long COVID and Significant Activity Limitation Among Adults, by Age — United States, June 1–13, 2022, to June 7–19, 2023. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2023;72:866–870. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7232a3
3) Bowe, B., Xie, Y. & Al-Aly, Z. Acute and postacute sequelae associated with SARS-CoV-2 reinfection. Nat Med 28, 2398–2405 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-022-02051-3
4) Long COVID in Children and Young after Infection or Reinfection with the Omicron Variant: A Prospective Observational Study
Pinto Pereira, Snehal M.Buszewicz, Marta et al. The Journal of Pediatrics, Volume 259, 113463

Yesterday, Donald Trump incited insurrection against our constitutional republic. He must be impeached again. I don't know if the Senate will actually remove him but that doesn't matter for what you need to do right NOW. The actions we take in response to this sedition and insurrection will determine whether this type of violent overthrow of our constitution will be considered normal, or remain an aberration.

If we do not stand up, for the record, for our own consciences and our future right now, we lose. The lesson these extremists - nay, domestic terrorists will take away if we do nothing is that they can get away with this - and it will surely happen again.

Next time it may succeed.

Do not be complacent and say he's gone in 13 days who cares. Speak up right now. It takes five minutes. Say it while it's fresh in your mind how egregious these crimes by our sitting president are. You won't regret it.

So, Britain is either leaving the EU or renegotiating membership in it from a very bad position. Already markets are hurting badly and millions of people's futures are rapidly collapsing. Tons of people that voted for "Leave" have now been saying things along the lines of "I didn't think we'd actually do it" and "I was voting in protest, I didn't think my vote counted much".

This is a disaster. I am very sad for those few brits I know, seriously, I am.

Here in the U.S. we have got to make a choice this year between two um, options. Those options being:

• Hillary
• Trump, who said just a few months ago: NATO is ‘Obsolete,’ UN is ‘Political Game’.

I personally don't think that NATO and the UN are "obsolete" or "a game". With resources dwindling worldwide, and climate change (not just on our doorstep but inside the front room tracking mud on the rugs and carving its name into the doorjams with a bowie knife), we need unity in the world MORE than we ever have.

Remember, protest votes and "votes that don't count" can count. Be very careful what you do.

If you're tuned into Wisconsin politics and on the Internet lately, you've probably seen the mesmerizing webcam installed at the Government Accountability Board. They're counting the Walker recall signatures in a secret location.

I've been running some video analysis software I wrote at Pumping Station: One for awhile, so when I heard about this from Tony, I just had to analyze the stream for activity data.

It's only been running for a little while tonight, so there's no interesting results yet, but I can't wait to see that change tomorrow when the GAB employees filter in.

It's time to count the counters.

I'm tired of digging through the busy GitHub web interface, looking for issues on my projects to solve. If I don't really know which of my projects to work on or what to do, I'd like to see a few random issues I haven't solved yet. My subconscious really already knows what I'm ready to fix, or what I've got thoughts on. It just needs some prodding.

So, show me a few things I've been meaning to do. I don't care which one, I'm feeling lucky.

If this intrigues you, check it out on GitHub.

On Thursday I gave a talk about the motivation, internals, code, and architechture of my video-stream analysis software lidless at ChiPy. It's about 40 minutes with a few slow bits but if you haven't heard me go on at length about this project yet, here's your chance!



As far as I know, the only public installation of lidless is Spacemon, my installation of it at Pumping Station: One.

Ksssssssshhhhh splutter scrub scrub scrub WAIT, THAT'S GENIUS! I'll remember that for sure. Nope, you won't.

We've all had ideas that come out of a clear sky in the shower, but really it's ideas that come out of a clear head free of distractions. However, they often go away like tumbleweeds before we really get to act on them.



It's easy to never lose an idea again.

I haven't yet moved over the project pages on my site to reflect it, but I do all my coding on github now (yeah yeah, slow on the uptake, I know). Today I imported a project from CVS (not mine, I just couldn't deal with Sourceforge or CVS) and another from a poorly laid out SVN repository (mine). Here are the incantations.

CVS

Oh, that's not nice. Get rid of that right now.

SVN

For SVN, you'll need a .authors file, which will look like this:

Skip the -T / bit if you have a nice trunk/ branches/ tags/ layout set up. If you don't because you're bad, leave it.

Tonight, we all found out that Osama bin Laden was killed by the CIA. Very little detail provided, and the announcement President Obama made was delayed for some reason. Nothing much was lost there, as the entire Internet was already alight with the news and speculation about the details. This person to person propagation of the news when it was breaking reminded me of no historical event so much as the violent events of 9/11/2001.

Neither event in a purely rational world would have had much impact. More innocent people die in car crashes in the US in a month than died on 9/11. Many jihadis die at the hands of the US who aren't Osama. However, it's the mindset of the populace that changes. In 2001, Americans felt vulnerable. We felt hurt. We felt like our place in the world wasn't what we thought it had been. We were shocked. Many of us were scared, at least for a while.

We immediately overreacted and allowed ourselves to be led into 2 wars, one of which merely using our fear as a way to cloud our reason. It's easy to let the fight-or-flight reflex take over in exigent circumstances, and that's what happened. In a way, the US created the monster that was Osama bin Laden; both literally in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and figuratively as a symbol of Islamic Extremism. When you put a man at the #1 position on the Billboard Chats of Violence for 9.5 years, it lends a certain impact to his message, even in opposition.

A quote has been making the rounds over the last few hours on the subject of Osama's death. I find it quite apt.

Most of us have got past 9/11, eliminated fear already. I hope Osama's death will inspire the rest to put aside the manacles of fear that they've allowed themselves to be restrained with; and that more citizens of the world let fear go now than take up the flag of revenge. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. Well, if we can get past the past.

I've written a new project today, for publishing files quickly & easily to the Kindle. It's specifically for publishing Markdown formatted text files. More details on the markdown-kindle page.