Is that okay because it's sort of a joke or all in good fun or a possibly effective way to stimulate a competition to get your group to win? But it reinforces superstition and channels people into fantasy, and it might cause some people to become more resistant to getting the vaccination. It's easy to imagine a Scorpio identifying with a rebel image and leaning into it.Now that Mercury is not in retrograde, we're just going to leave this here...
— Salt Lake Health (@SaltLakeHealth) October 19, 2021
(and yes, this is based on data) pic.twitter.com/fOxBHaDPvY
The two most-vaccinated signs, Leo, a fire sign with 70 percent fully vaccinated, and Aquarius, an air sign with 67 percent, are “super people-oriented,” said [astrologer Narayana Montúfar]... “King of the jungle” Leos, for instance, like to be the center of attention, “admired and surrounded by their people,” while Aquarius is the sign that “relates most to community and social work,” Montúfar said. Aquarians, she added, are also “techie” and generally tend to embrace innovation....
Similarly, one might expect to find wellness-minded Virgos, 50 percent, and privacy-seeking Scorpios, 46 percent, at the bottom of the list, Montúfar said. Virgos, she said, are often very concerned about health and may be hesitant to receive a coronavirus vaccine because they’re trapped in “analysis paralysis.” Meanwhile, Scorpios probably “don’t even want to disclose information” about their vaccination status, she said.....
On social media, users celebrated or commiserated with others who share the same signs as them, with many calling out Scorpios.....
I haven't meticulously studied every word of this article, but I don't think it ever plainly states that astrology is not science.
The commenters over there either play along or actually buy into astrology: "Sagittarius here, irked that fellow Sagittarians aren't shooting for a higher ranking," "For Scorpios, it is all about control," "I’m a Gemini, I’ve had two shots, but do I actually need four?," "Showed this story to my young-adult Leo and said, 'Look, you're sign ranks number one as most vaxxed for covid.' Without pause, she said, 'Of course we're number one, we're always number one. In everything.' Spoken like a true Leo," etc. etc. etc.
I'd like to think people are too smart to actually believe astrology, but my faith in human intelligence was wrecked one day long ago when I'd rejected a man who revealed that he believed in astrology, and I told my little anecdote to one and then, later, to another law professor friend. Each of them said — independently — "I believe in astrology."
ADDED: What is the status of astrology within Mormon beliefs? Wikipedia says:
In 1852, Brigham Young gave his approval to a convert to study and begin practicing astrology, only to change his recommendation a year later, calling it "a dangerous thing to meddle with".... By 1861, Young himself seems to have changed his mind about the utility of astrology, telling an individual who wanted to start an astrology school that, "it would not do to favor Astrology."
In 1868, the Salt Lake School of the Prophets decided that "Astrology was in opposition to the work of God. Hence saints should not be engaged in it," which was followed up with an article in the Deseret News decrying it. From that time on astrology has been considered an unacceptable practice.
Posts
79 comments:
I’m a Feces* and I don’t see any representation.
* h/t Jack Lambert
The blog post makes some fair points. But at least the astrology angle is less harmful to public health than a single prime time evening of the Fox News Channel, right? Or listening to a couple of hours' worth of Dan Bongino or Joe Rogan or Mark Levin, correct?
Libra is 54%? LIBRA ISN'T PERFECTLY BALANCED 50:50?!
Speaking as a Libra, this outrages me, although I can also calmly understand why it is so.
Your last comment about your loss of faith in human intelligence gave me my laugh of the day. Nothing much more needs to be commented on.
Ass-trology(religion for teh gay) is so stupid.
playing connect the dots with stars to create fictitious creatures with the power to dictate your personality and your day. LOL.
Has it ever been true that science gradually squeezes out non-science, and people become more enlightened? The Long Island medium is playing the talking to the dead racket--as Penn Gillette says, possibly the oldest and most lucrative carnival trick, truly shameful. I'm afraid someone close to me has expressed great interest in actually talking to a dead person. Climate science has a component of "God is going to punish us." As usual, there is not all that much evidence that the unjust suffer, and the just are rewarded, in this life. That's why the belief that it will all be corrected in an afterlife remains powerful.
Sheldon says it best
I don't know about you all, but I'm an Ophiuchus
Prior to 2020 if you told any epidemiologist that “within 20 months of the next pandemic, even if it is a novel virus, between 46% and 60% of adult Americans will be vaccinated for it” they would not have believed you. They would have said such an outcome would be an extraordinary public health success. Now you have to find a library that’s open (not here in California!) and dig out an old infectious disease textbook to learn we’ve reached herd immunity.
Like P. T. Barnum said, there's one born every minute.
Another way of saying that is that you probably won't go broke overestimating the stupidity of the general public.
Sad.
As a reminder, Katherine Graham was an enthusiastic proponent of Astrology, I am sure the WaPo has not been fully cleansed of that impact.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. The “science” behind the masking and vaxing seems about as credible as astrology.
And surely its readers know astrology isn't science and they can dabble in astrology then get back to following real science.
But that won't prevent others from using, "As appeared in The Washington Post" to polish what ever tarnished junk they're trying to sell. All such "reporting" should include a "humor" or "We just made this up for fun" label. Or better yet, just publish a serious take-down article including strong statements that it is all dangerous BS.
Next week we'll take on religion :)
(The little smiley-face is to tell readers that sentence isn't serious. But Althouse readers knew that already. Didn't they?)
Douglas Adams, _Mostly Harmless_
"_I_ know astrology isn't a science," said Gail. "Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis or - what's that strange thing you British play?"
"Er, cricket? Self-loathing?"
"Parliamentary democracy. The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the differnce it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just got to do with people thinking about people."
I've known two people that claim the ability to determine a person's sign just by knowing them. One was highly embarrassed by it, but we were good enough work friends that she confided in me. She then told me the sign of everyone in our office. I don't know what to make of that as she could have figured this out in other ways, but I wish there could be a scientific study to see if this is possible.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
So, the last few days I felt super edgy and and finally looked up if we have a full moon and if mercury was in retrograde. And both were. So, I’m not sure how that works but there’s some sort of science.
Robertson Davies had some interesting things to say about astrology in "What's Bred in the Bone"
As an amateur astronomer, I am supposed to sneer at astrology, and as a Catholic, to condemn it, but I cannot bring myself to do so. Astrology seems a sort of way of using the skies as a mirror to look inside ourselves, a catalyst for self-examination, recognition and awareness.
That is, a person might ascribe their tendency towards jealousy and secretiveness to being a Scorpio. Or to Jupiter being retrograde. Or to being a Sagittarius, whose sign, due to axial procession, is really Scorpio. It doesn't matter to what they attribute that trait; it matters that they recognize it in themselves.
And, as a friend once observed, if you follow the advice given in your daily horoscope, you will be, on average, better off than if you didn't.
Or, as the Bard wrote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
“I'd like to think people are too smart to actually believe astrology, but my faith in human intelligence was wrecked one day long ago when I'd rejected a man who revealed that he believed in astrology, and I told my little anecdote to one and then, later, to another law professor friend. Each of them said — independently — "I believe in astrology." “
Love on the [law prof] Spectrum
I must have missed the memo. I'm a Scorpio and got vaccinated early.
From Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, "Look Who's Irrational Now," WSJ 9/19/2008:
"'What Americans Really Believe,' a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians."
...
"Surprisingly, while increased church attendance and membership in a conservative denomination has a powerful negative effect on paranormal beliefs, higher education doesn't. Two years ago two professors published another study in Skeptical Inquirer showing that, while less than one-quarter of college freshmen surveyed expressed a general belief in such superstitions as ghosts, psychic healing, haunted houses, demonic possession, clairvoyance and witches, the figure jumped to 31% of college seniors and 34% of graduate students."
Astrology does seem publicly fashionable lately. Secularism becomes paganism. People gotta put our crazy somewhere.
"On social media, users celebrated or commiserated with others who share the same signs as them, with many calling out Scorpios....."
We Scorpions think the rest of you can sod off.
Astrology loons can't even get the name right; it's Scorpius, not Scorpio. Try saying 'Scorpio' at a Star Party and see what happens.
Can’t imagine hippies, smoking dope while it was still illegal and doing LSD and hanging out in their VW busses at Woodstock singing “Age of Aquarius” would be wearing a mask or socially distancing. And they’d never let “the man” tell them to take a “shot” (especially one that only sort of immunizes them).
Who said “nothing’s funny anymore”?
I love this so much….comedy of the absurd.
Barbara B, double vaxxed Scorpio
Well, astrology does seem to sort of work out, in an uncanny kind of way. Or so I hear.
Not that I believe in that shit.
TelfordWork:
“you want to know
whether i believe in ghosts
of course i do not believe in them
if you had known
as many of them as i have
you would not
believe in them either”
― Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel
Leos rock!
I'd like to think people are too smart to actually believe astrology,
Now you know how I feel when people say that Roe V Wade was a good decision......
I am about as hard-science educated/credentialed as you can be (I know, on the internet no one knows you're a dog, but, if you're inclined, you can take my word for it) and there's a sense in which I might be inclined to say "I believe in astrology". But beyond that, I've always thought it's not unreasonable for there to be a correlation between personality and Sun sign. Surely it's possible that there's some developmental fallout from learning to walk when it's summer vs learning to walk when you can't go outside, for instance. Of course, personalities should be shifted 6 months if you grew up in the Southern Hemisphere.
I've heard, although I haven't really looked into it, that "studies" have failed to find such correlations, but, in light of the replication crisis, I don't find that very convincing without researching it in far more depth than I'm inclined to.
Astrology is a disguised form of narcissism. Everybody can flatter or console themselves with this curve-fitting nonsense. Great fun and a useful distraction for journalists too lazy to work up a real column.
Ah, I see that TestTube has nicely summarized my views already.
I thought Mercury came out of retrograde three or four days ago.
“What we’re really doing is finding new and different ways to keep our community talking about vaccination when there is significant message fatigue around the topic,” the Salt Lake County Health Department said.
But it reinforces superstition and channels people into fantasy, and it might cause some people to become more resistant to getting the vaccination. It's easy to imagine a Scorpio identifying with a rebel image and leaning into it.
That's Prog think.
The implication is people need to be protected from jokes or from certain kinds of ideas because it might cause some people to do X or because it's easy to imagine some people might do Y. It also implies that people can be controlled and need to be controlled in this way.
Is that any more sensible than believing in astrology? I'd say it's a much more harmful delusion.
“ Now you have to find a library that’s open (not here in California!) and dig out an old infectious disease textbook to learn we’ve reached herd immunity.”
Except, of course, we haven’t.
The theory , it seems, is that we’ll be home safe if we get to herd immunity level. Then two things intervened. First was the assumption that we could get to herd immunity with vaccinations. Except that regardless how the FDA redefines the term, these experimental gene therapies are not real vaccines, and they don’t really contribute all that much to herd immunity. Word games don’t really fight pandemics. This first became obvious last summer when the P Town deep kissing of mostly vaccinated strangers turned into a superspreader event. For a “vaccine” to seriously contribute to herd immunity, it needs to be sterilizing. These novel gene therapies are not close to sterilizing. They are, instead quite “leaky”, with breakthrough cases appearing to be the norm, instead of the exception.
Then came the highly infectious Delta variant, that effectively pushed out the other variants over the month of July this year, when it went from roughly 20% to 80% over that month. Yesterday, I noticed that it was now running at 99% in this country. The infectivity of the ancestral strain of the virus causing COVID-19 had an infectivity (R0) of roughly 2.9, which translates into a Herd Immunity Threshold (HIT) of 65%. But Delta has an R0 of roughly 5.1, which translates into an HIT of roughly 80%.
Compounding this problem, very possibly, is that the experimental gene therapies very recently classified as “vaccines” by the FDA target two of the unique proteins in the virus’s spike. It turns out that the Delta variant has 17 unique amino acid changes, 10 of which in its spike protein. This may be why it appears that these vaccines are not as effective against Delta, as they were, when created, to target parts of the spike od the ancestral strain. (Note though that the P Town superspreader event was mostly pre-Delta, and many of the vaccinated caught the virus anyway).
What that means is that chasing herd immunity with these novel gene therapy “vaccines” is nonsensical. They are too leaky to effectively add to the community immunity, and the HIT for the Delta variant at over 80% puts the target almost out of reach, even if a real, non-leaky, sterilizing, vaccine were available. There isn’t one yet.
---Try saying 'Scorpio' at a Star Party and see what happens.
The men correct you (with a touch of disgust). The women mob you.
Here's the strange caption to that chart.
"Number[**] of SLCo residents vaccinated by date of birth, from USIIS; "US Population by Zodiac Sign" from University of Texas-Austin, applied to Salt Lake County 2020 population estimates from ESRI."
** Chart shows percent, not number.
Virgos, she said, are often very concerned about health and may be hesitant to receive a coronavirus vaccine because they’re trapped in “analysis paralysis.”
Suppose Virgos were on top of the list.
Virgos, she said, are often very concerned about health and could be expected to get the coronavirus vaccine.
The reasoning lets us interpret whichever way is favorable.
Confirmation bias is something I can believe in.
'What Americans Really Believe,' a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the paranormal and in pseudoscience than evangelical Christians."
how's the saying go?
If you Won't believe in GOD....You'll believe in, ANYTHING
There are/were some correlations with birth months and success. One explanation is that better off folks plan their pregnancies for spring and summer, while the rest just happen :)
There are/were some correlations with birth months and success. One explanation is that better off folks plan their pregnancies for birth in spring and summer, while the rest just happen :)
"As an amateur astronomer, I am supposed to sneer at astrology, … but I cannot bring myself to do so.
Or, as the Bard wrote: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy"
Sigh. How can someone observe and still believe that clap trap? I wouldn't have thought it possible.
I think you are wrong, Ann. Lots of well educated, or at least well credentialed, people truly believe that astrology really is "science"
That is they believe astrology is in the same class as chemistry, physics, astronomy and all the other physical sciences.
And even more believe that it is science in the broader sense that we call things like teaching "science"
John "The Scientist" Henry
If you joke about astrology on your blog, or I joke about droning someone in the comments, I have no problem. Neither of us will be taken seriously.
But when the president "jokes" about droning the Jonas Brothers AND has the capability of doing it, or when a scientific agency like a health department "jokes" about astrology, they give it am imprimature of truth.
That is wrong and should not happen. They have a responsibility to speak responsibly.
John Henry
Leave out the astrology. Are those numbers a statistically significant variation by birth date or more likely just chance? I'd need the raw numbers to know; it depends on the sample size in each group. The technique is called ANOVA (ANalysis Of VAriance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_variance
Before you become TOO, TOO hubristic, read the chapter, "I am a Capricorn" from Kary Mullis book, "Dancing Naked in the Mind Fields."
Nobel-Prize winning scientist. Kary Mullis is legendary for his invention of PCR, which redefined the world of DNA, genetics, and forensic science.
Eccentric, to be sure, but a genius of the first order, who took a "cruelly neutral"
view of the world, and a courageous stance.
Fun read!!
In the late 60s, knowing a little about 'signs' - and I mean a thimbleful - was an effective way to, um, meet hippie chicks.
One might expect to find the wellness-minded people to be among the lowest vaccinated? Does anyone proof-read this crap?
You open your paper and read that someone who claims to possess an understanding of a vast and complicated system beyond your own understanding has ostensibly performed some sort of analysis and thereby made some important determinations affecting your life. You come away with a reassuring feeling that you now have some critical information, a measure of fore-knowledge, a measure of control, an idea of what is the right thing to do.
Am I talking about astrology or "believe the science" news articles?
Now factor in that un-named and un-accountable persons somewhere have decided that, based on their self-perceived moral and intellectual superiority, they must control what you see and hear for your own good and the greater good. How do they determine what you need to see and hear today? For all you know, they are using astrology. Most likely they're acting in their own self-interest.
I have said, for many years, "Us Scorpios don't believe in astrology" Who knew that was a thing.
Bob Boyd at 11:09 AM wins the internet for this week.
I think it not necessarily implausible that the time of year you are born affects your fundamental nature in some subtle ways. Do you not think that it might matter what season it is when you are exactly 100, 500, 1000, 2000, 5000 days old?
I am going to call bullshit on that Utah, tweet, though- I think they made it up all the data in it.
Kary Mullis is legendary for his invention of PCR
Also for claiming that women are most beautiful at age 28, IIRC.
Bruce Hayden said...
“ Now you have to find a library that’s open (not here in California!) and dig out an old infectious disease textbook to learn we’ve reached herd immunity.”
Except, of course, we haven’t.
-------------
thanks for the explanation.
you call it ancestral as in
The infectivity of the ancestral strain of the virus causing COVID-19 had an infectivity (R0) of roughly 2.9
is it truly ancestral : natural occurring?
or did they not spike the spike on the virus to increase infectivity?
In the corporate world astrology has been supplanted by Meyers-Briggs categories. As an INTP I ought to know.
Do Mormons have a religious exemption? Because assuming a large enough population so that births are roughly equally spread across zodiac signs (and Salt Lake County is where a large city is located) then the overall vaccination rate is just over 56%. That seems low.
When I was a kid in the 1960s I loved Stranger in a Strange Land, by Heinlein.
I readily swallowed all the magical abilities afforded by learning the Martian language. I believed the character of Jubal Harshaw was totally realistic. The scenes in the afterlife did not trouble me.
The only idea that tripped me up for a moment was that absurd notion that the wife of the highest political officer on the globe would believe in astrology, and that one could successfully use her belief to influence the actions of that top politician.
How naive I was.
Interestingly, the Birth chart, including a reading of the personal planets, is foundational in Meiers-Briggs and E-Harmony businesses. That is a lot of money being spent based on a failed superstition.
Those of us following along with Baylor U's "100 Days of Dante" are in Canto 20 which depicts what (Dante believes) happens to those who use astrology to defraud others. Coincidence?
No screwier than "liberal" economics.
Astrology is bunk, and if you think so you will naturally assume that any difference in vaccination rates between zodiac signs is due to random chance. If you are a believer in Astrology, you are invested in it and you will tend to see any such difference as significant, since that will help you to justify your investment in your own mind – emotion over reason.
Suppose someone were to do a study of the population by the last digit of each person’s address, and let’s assume that, say, when the last digit of your address is a 2 you have a 70% chance of being vaccinated, and a 49% chance if your last digit was a 6. Almost everyone would think of such numbers as random, because almost no one has an emotional investment in the last digit of their address, or some theory built around the subject.
But when surveys show X percent of college graduates are vaccinated, as compared to Y percent of high school graduates, or X percent of Democrats in contrast to Y percent of Republicans, or X percent of whites and Y percent of blacks, the great majority of people will assume these discrepancies have meaning, and will try to construct some social or political theory that explains them. Of course, pretty much everyone has an emotional stake in education, or the lack of it, politics, and race relations. What’s driving these – our – opinions when we do this, emotion or reason? How much or our reason is really jerrybuilt after the fact justification, like the astrologers?
There’s an episode of the Sopranos where Christopher complains his life has no narrative storyline, no “arc”. In response, Paulie says something like “What arc? Nobody has an arc. Your born, a bunch of random shit happens, and then you die”. Everything isn’t random, but we may be underestimating how much is, and I think we overestimate how much we really understand.
and yet case loads are spiking in heavily vaccinated countries like germany and the netherlands, even more so in latvia, so what's the point,
Those who don't believe in God have a tendency to believe anything. Society is regressing to paganism, led of course by progressives.
I was surprised when a friend of mine, probably with an IQ above 175 and The smartest and most rational guy I know, said something that seemed to evince a belief in astrology. He said his approach to astrology was less a belief and more of an approach: "Let's assume it's true and see where it leads us." I have found that a useful approach to a wide range of beliefs.
Ficta, thank you -- nice of you to say. I'm blushing.
Original Mike -- Are you sighing at my Catholicism, or my observation that following the advice of your newspaper daily horoscope will, on average, work out better than not, or my idea that people use astrology as a sort of catalyst for self-discovery?
I don't know what the overlap between astronomers (amateur or professional) and astrologers (that is, people who view astrology as a sort of science, rather than those who see it as a sort of poetry of the skies) is. Doesn't come up at star parties much. Although I've never seen anyone kick up a fuss about Scorpio/Scorpius either. Probably because we're too busy looking at all the delights that part of the sky brings us
Note to the rest: It's not too late, especially in the Southern US, to grab a pair of binoculars and a star chart and enjoy some of the wonders in Sagittarius, Scutum, and Aquila. Plus Andromeda is rising!
By happy coincidence (!), I was just listening a couple of days back to Georg Muffat's "Propitia Sydera" (= "Lucky Stars"), a concerto grosso in one of the volumes of Florilegium. Great piece, especially the long chaconne (it reappears, slightly modified, as Concerto V of Armonico Tributo).
Astrology is basically one of those self-rationalizing psychological sorting devices -- tell someone the characteristics of, say, a Libra (I am one), and you will start to see Libra-like things in the personality. I, for example, can't help balancing a person's negative and positive traits. My husband still snickers about the time he said something snarky about Caligula and my reply started with "Well, to be fair . . ." I'm a lousy partisan, because I see both sides of anyone. OK, maybe not the Taliban :-)
Enneagrams are similar, though there I think you yourself select the relevant points, rather than their being handed you by your birthdate.
Astrology is just silly. Myomancy is the way to go. Those mice and rats know something that they're not telling us, like when an earthquake is coming.
"I think you are wrong, Ann. Lots of well educated, or at least well credentialed, people truly believe that astrology really is "science""
What are you saying I'm wrong about?
@TestTube - I took the Catholicism out of your quote in order to make it clear I was sighing at the belief in astrology. It ranks right up there with flat-eartherism. That someone can spend any time observing and still put stock in astrology I find astounding. I have to conclude they don't spend any time actually thinking about what it is they are viewing in the eyepiece. As to the number of professional astronomers who put any stock in astrology; I'll eat my hat if the number doesn't approach zero. I know a few professional astronomers and a lot of professional physicists (I belong to the latter group). These people have a rational view of how the physical universe works (they have to; it's what we do) and the astrological "explanation" is ridiculous. It makes no sense. It's as simple as that.
As to amateurs, I don't know any astrology believers among my observing mates. Maybe there are some closet believers, but I think your comment that it "Doesn't come up at star parties much." is self explanatory. Bring it up next time and see what happens. I'd be interested in the result.
explainist said...
I have said, for many years, "Us Scorpios don't believe in astrology" 10/22/21, 11:13 AM
As a Pisces, I could feel strongly both ways.
Looks like we need to round up all the Scorpios and force them to take the shot. They are below 50% compliance.
My wife and I are both Aries (Aryans?) and got the WuFlu shots as soon as possible because we are proper and obedient citizens.
Mine was wrecked in very close to the same way when an intelligent friend explained to me that, based on astrology, she'd moved the date of a major medical procedure. She was also a lawyer! Maybe a lot of lawyers are into astrology.
The health czars and czarinas in Utah think that only dumb people are refusing the vax.
They also think that only dumb people pay any attention to astrology.
What better way to get the rubes to get the jab than to frame it as an astrological choice?
Let's see a breakdown of UT's public health service bureaucrat hacks with regard to their affinity for astrology or their reluctance to get the vax.
“is it truly ancestral : natural occurring?
“or did they not spike the spike on the virus to increase infectivity?”
What was being discussed was the original strain detected of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. As far as I know, there is little evidence that it was naturally occurring, which strongly suggests creation probably through gene editing at one of the virology labs in Wuhan - probably the BSL4 lab, but possibly from a BSL-2 lab (apparently equivalent to the precautions taken in a dental office). This ancestral version was the first COVID-19 virus decoded, in either late 2019 or really early in 2020, by the Chinese. So far, all of the COVID-19 viruses seen so far are apparently mutations of that one.
Not really surprisingly, the Delta variant, while being significantly more infectious than the original, appears slightly less deadly. Mutations that survive tend to be both more infectious and less deadly, and, indeed, it was very likely the much higher infectiousness (R0) that allowed Delta to push out all the other variants in this country. Put simply, Delta out breeds it’s competitors.
I have never heard a good explanation why Delta outbreeds the other variants. It has something to do with the virus’s spike, but the spike in the original was optimized to attach to human ACE2 receptors (and since there is no cross specs mutational debris for this, the better assumption is that this was part of the genetic manipulation utilized to create this virus). Almost any mutation to the spike is likely to reduce infectivity - which we didn’t see with Delta.
"Almost any mutation to the spike is likely to reduce infectivity - which we didn’t see with Delta."
While true, viruses replicate on truly astounding scale- in the multi-billions- and RNA viruses mutate very rapidly. Even if only one in a billion mutations increases infectivity, an RNA virus like COVID can easily meet that optimization hurdle in only a few weeks.
Astrology is nonsense, but people think it's fun to poke and bait the rationalistic and scientistic fundamentalists.
Sort of like Phoebe teasing Ross about not believing in evolution in that show ... the one about the six friends and their sofa ... you know the thing ...
Only 51%? PROUD TO BE A PISCES!
Astrology, btw, is by no means the silliest thing out there; there's homeopathy, for one. I remember a couple decades back sitting with my husband at Nakapan (a Berkeley Thai restaurant, long gone now) and listening agog to the conversation at the next table, which consisted entirely of participants in a homeopathy conference. Yowza!
Then there's chiropractic. Except that my "Follow the Science!" biochemist/patent attorney Dad is, or at least was, quite keen on chiropractic at one time. That his practitioner was young, cute, and female might have nothing at all to do with this.
I should add that people mock astrology in the context of Nancy Reagan, and for the most part NOWHERE ELSE. Though Hillary Clinton communing with the spirit of Eleanor Roosevelt is OK.
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