(2023-02-16) Zvi M Covid021623 It All Seems Rather Quaint

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 2/16/23: It All Seems Rather Quaint. Executive Summary: Situation continues to slowly improve. Eric Topol even more wrong than usual. All the news is now about AI and Bing instead. It’s going great.

The Numbers

Eric Topol and The Obvious Nonsense Paxlovid Study

In a better world, no one would ever listen to a single word Eric Topol had to say

And then there was the time he was instrumental in sabotaging approval of the Covid vaccines so that it would happen after the November election. Oh. That.

I continue to believe Paxlovid is great and we should be using it more often. This study did not update my belief on that front. It did update me on what we should expect from ‘peer review.’ I mean, wow.

I was going to say let’s read the paper, but after looking at the sources above it does not seem necessary to belabor the point.

In Other Covid News

Other Medical and Research News

On the MrBeast curing blindness front: TechCrunch, a rather large publication, jumped on the ‘making blind people able to see is bad, actually’ bandwagon, displaying standard levels of rigor. I continue to mention it because it seems important to recognize the phenomenon for what it is, and this is an unusually clean and safe-to-discuss example of a common practice. (ableism)

Also, the intervention? It’s a ten minute surgery that cures some forms of blindness

Is it the best use of funds in its broader cause area, or can we do better? That depends on how much you believe in the effectiveness of scaling alternative interventions.

Another point on Americans getting larger. (obesity)

None of this has to be a mystery or be complicated. You do not need to buy the full calories in, calories out calculation to say that caloric intake going up is the story here. You can then say that there is a different story about why we all eat so much that is more complicated. The core story could still be summarized as ‘bigger portions of more calorically dense food, everywhere, as the default.’