california, brazil, south africa, the uk. tom and rp take a not so scenic tour of the covid variants - along with stats, projections and vaccine effectiveness - as the variants position themselves for domination.

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Show Summary Notes

Zero Days – Nutan Nuclear reactor – Iran + Strategic Talks

• Iran either badly wants nuclear weapons or wants to trade them off
• Can buy themselves a big seat at the table, take the sanctions off and let them sell their oil around the world
• OR they want to be a nuclear state – hegemonic toliterian
• Air Gap facility – no data wires leave that facility and go anywhere else, you can't hack it – it had to be human engineered, it was extraordinary
• April 11th – Israel said that they orchestrated the attack
• What does this attack tell you about America's cyber weaponry?
• • In a number of years we will have cyber weapon treaties

College Women's Softball – Hope Trabwine, North Texas

• 21 bats, 21 strikeouts – perfect game

Battle of the variants

• In California, CA variant blocking spread of UK variant.
• • https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-12/california-coronavirus-variant-preventing-spring-surge-herd-immunity

• In Israel, UK variant blocking spread of South African variant
• • https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-israel-study-idUSKBN2BX0JX

• Can you be infected with multiple variants?
• • Why is co-infection rare?
  • https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-what-happens-when-a-person-is-simultaneously-infected-with-two-variants-154748

***This disease mutates less than the flew, but with this many infections there comes a lot of variants

B117

• UK has excellent genomic surveillance
• Most prominent attack right now, worse virus for us a population
• 50% more transmissible - 7x-8x more lethal, on a populations basis

Think of california variant as a lighter UK variant

They compete with each other on inverse transmissibility

The race between variants and vaccines

2 big issues we have to think about in the US:

• Vaccines vs. variants
• Variants vs. variants

Vaccine Efficacy

• Soma variants are more concern than other, immune escape
• Israel's data – appears that the Pfizer vax does not appear to have the same efficacy against the South African variant as it does against the wild strain - more immune escape

• Brazilian variant, not enough evidence but some evidence appears that this variant also has some reduced efficacy, but we do just not have enough data yet

Minneapolis shooting

https://www.wsj.com/articles/minnesota-police-shoot-man-in-traffic-stop-incident-killing-him-11618202288

Yes or BS

J&J Pause

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson-johnson-vaccine-blood-clots-fda-cdc.html

Shut down Michigan

https://www.wsj.com/articles/minnesota-police-shoot-man-in-traffic-stop-incident-killing-him-11618202288

"Vaccine passports" are our ticket to freedom

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/07/opinion/the-argument-vaccine-passports.html

Bezos Union Buster?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/16/technology/amazon-unions-virginia.html

Court-packing isn't the right fix for our courts. Ending life tenure is. (Washington Post Editorial Board)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/court-packing-isnt-the-right-fix-for-our-courts-ending-life-tenure-is/2021/04/09/482af550-994d-11eb-b28d-bfa7bb5cb2a5_story.html