rotting sea cow

Pfizer Shot Just 39% Effective Against Delta Infection, But Largely Prevents Severe Illness, Israel Study Suggests https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2021/07/23/pfizer-shot-just-39-effective-against-delta-infection-but-largely-prevents-severe-illness-israel-study-suggests/ I don't know how reliable is this. There have been critics online because Israel is not sharing its methodology nor raw numbers. (I got the second dose last Tuesday. I was hesitant because I've been feeling not great since the first dose and also because it really seems that spacing doses is overall better in terms of protection and side effects)

I understand you might be angry but calling PEOPLE "plague rats" is dehumanizing and from there is a slippery slope. You should know better.

The biggest and saddest Daenerys and Maester Aemon.

Yep. They knew the war was lost. Also, the Freys took a bunch of hostages from many houses, which make them hard to rebel. See, how Black Walder subdued Seagard. The Blackfish saw that and understood that Edmure was dead no matter what, so the Freys and Lannisters had no leverage and he could hold Riverrun for a very long time. As long as he was there the rebellion was not done. With Stannis in the North and still holding Dragonstone and Storm's End, it might have been even possible to look for an alliance.

No idea really. I was going down the rabbit hole and apparently a large fraction of the humans have antibodies against that particular herpes virus. The thing with those retroviruses (in my poor understanding) is they get (retro)-integrated into your genome, so you are never really out of the woods. They can reactivated again in particular conditions which is seems what it's happening with the long-covid syndrome. And yes, the symptoms, the fatigue, depression and associated BS can last months.

It's not that all clear. First, it might well be that vaccinating adults (and adolescents) might protect the children from infection. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01549-z Second. Any pharmaceutical intervention must weight the risks and benefits on that particular population. Given the low risk that kids face and uncertainty about the safety of the intervention, it isn't clear that it's ethically justifiable. In Germany the vaccine commission (STIKO) is holding against heavy political pressure and not recommending for now the vaccine in adolescents for these reasons. Sure, new variants change the calculation, but the argument go in both ways as herd immunity seem to be out of the reach with high infectious variants with such immune escape (if the numbers we're seen are correct), so why bother?

News has it there were like 26 Colombian mercenaries who previously belonged to the army and two American of Haitian origin. Some were killed during clashes with the policy. Others arrested after seeking refuge in the Taiwanese embassy. This shit is getting weirder. It stinks to CIA.

Typical outrage for the unimportant shit. Probably there are more pressing issues in Ukraine than this. We are talking about the military and they typically have the most outrageous ceremony costumes you can think of. High heel shoes is probably the least of them. If people do some google, there are plenty of servicewomen around the world marching in high heels. Notice, I'm against of high heel shoes (I don't know how/why women wear them willingly) and actually against shoes in general.

You know? We were discussing with @Chataya de Fleury about the similarities of Long-Covid with mononucleosis and it's turning out that there might be a link. https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-06-covid-symptoms-epstein-barr-virus-reactivation.html it might be not the only retrovirus that get activated during the infection https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-514541/v1 and some treatments might also activate the feared Kaposi's sarcoma virus https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.10.02.324228v1 There are also accounts of shingles and Bell's palsy associated to both disease and vaccine. Both are caused by Herpes virus. ETA: This in addition to organ damage caused by the disease or invasive procedures.

There is also the Singapore study that puts the efficacy at 69% https://sg.news.yahoo.com/covid-vaccination-singapore-effective-delta-variant-ong-ye-kung-123900712.html (ETA: according to other sources this is for Moderna and Pfizer vaccines) What is the origin of these differences? Well, assuming that everyone is doing correctly their job, It might well be that the UK scheme of separating doses by a larger span of time (afaik Canada is doing the same) is paying off. We also need to consider that in average the Israeli population was vaccinated earlier than those in Canada and UK. If this is the case, having a high level of circulating antibodies helps a lot against infection. More importantly however. The vaccines are protecting against hospitalization and death still at a high efficacy, which should be the primary goal. The question whether they are able to provide "herd immunity" should be secondary and in my opinion misplaced.

I'm a bit out of the loop. I got pfizered for first time two weeks ago and I've been kind of down since. I just want to sleep. Otherwise I hardly had any side effect except for a headache the same night and some arm pain. This is what I think re Delta variant. The news are bad, to the point that B. Johnson speech sounds like conceding defeat. I'm quite certain the advisers knew about the Israel breakthrough study. Seven hells! 30 points in efficacy reduction for the Pfizer vaccine. How many for the others? Something as contagious and with such immune escape cannot be contained unless we go full Wuhan lockdown and who wants that now? Nobody! It has certainly thrown the whole EU "safety concept" to the trash bin. You can put only vaccinated and tested people in a room and you are going to have an outbreak. Vaccines will do their work (hopefully!) and keep the people out of the hospitals. And the rest of the world? They are fucked. Delta means the end of the pandemic. It will run like wildfire until 90% of the world population get infected. There is no way we can vaccinate faster. A few more waves and this will end. The best we can expect is no new variants appear that escape immunity from Delta. And pray to the Seven or R'hllor that no ADE or something similar will appear. For me, it shows how rotten are our geo-political, social and economics systems. A few days ago, for example, was reading that you could do as good with a quarter of the Moderna dose as with the full one, meaning that you could have vaccinated four times as many people. Plainly more scientific, political and economic cooperation would have led us to a better outcome and faster.

A short chat that hardly influence Dany's actions.

To talk through glass candles both should have one. Dany has none. Otherwise you can give only dreams or illusions. Between Quaithe, Euron and Marwyn trying to influence Dany at the same time, she can get easily crazy. It might well be that it requires a lot of effort to find the target. Much like the palantirs.

This. Other things. Fulfilling his family commitments and marrying to Catelyn. Maybe the incident with Ashara played a role in his reputation (and why I don't believe that Ned "dishonored" her) and bringing his "bastard" back to Winterfell is something that only an honorable man would do.

I don't think that a time jump is necessary after TWOW if everything in that list is accomplished. Otherwise I agree. I actually think the cliffhanger should be the Wall falling down (I always imagined it as a funny but somber Dolorous Edd epilogue). However, it is extremely hard to achieve and the main difficulty is wrapping up Dany's Essos' story. She needs to arrive to Westeros before the 2/3 of the book to make the conflict with Aegon meaningful, before the Wall falls.