Results for “concentration” 203 found
The Biden Executive Order on promoting competition
Here is the text, I won’t attempt a summary but here are some running comments:
1. The beginning of the piece suggests that concentration is rising in the American economy. But this probably isn’t true. See also these comments by me.
2. Industry concentration has not driven wages down by “as much as 17%” — that’s a porky! OK, they say “advertised wages,” but come on…
3. I am happy to see the document take on occupational licensing.
4. Contra to the recommendation, we should not ban non-compete agreements outright. Many non-compete agreements are perfectly normal institutions designed to protect corporate assets against IP theft, client lists for instance. We should restrict non-compete agreements in some more sophisticated manner, still to be determined.
5. Lower prescription drug prices? Maybe. Do they estimate the elasticity of supply? No. Thus this discussion would fail my Econ 101 class. We do know, however, that prescription drugs are one of the very cheapest ways our health care system saves lives, so this is not obviously a good idea.
6. Right to repair laws? Again, maybe. But show me the trade-off and cite a cost-benefit analysis. If software gives more consumer surplus to consumers (again, a maybe), should we be wanting to tax it with contractual restrictions? Should we be wanting to tax Tesla right now?
7. Portability of bank account information is a good idea.
8. “Empower family farmers…” — do you even need to know what comes next? Aarghh!!!
9. The order “encourages” the DOJ and FTC to take various actions. I won’t blame Biden for this, but we’ve way overstepped what executive orders should be doing, some time ago. The net feeling the honest reader of this section receives is that our antitrust policies toward the large tech companies are not based in much of a notion of rule of law.
10. Should HHS “standardize plan options” in the NHIM to make price shopping easier? Makes me nervous — diverse market offerings can be good.
11. Lots of tired and not typically true claims and insinuations about concentration in airline markets; see my book Big Business or read Gary Leff. And shouldn’t airlines charge for bags? Maybe yes, maybe no, but prices per item are not in general a bad thing.
12. We are warned that farmers and ranchers take in an ever-smaller share of the food dollar spent — thank goodness! And there are a bunch of other selective, scattered observations about food prices (“corn seed prices have gone up as much as 30% annually…”), but nothing close to systematic or showing an actual market failure (corn prices by the way have been plummeting since 2012).
13. Broadband policy should indeed be improved, but this section reads as messy, should do more to emphasize the notion of competition and common carrier platforms, and how about a mention of StarLink?
14. There’s not really any point in marching through a discussion of the “Big Tech” section.
15. Is there a problem with bank concentration in this country? Not where I live. Maybe in some rural areas?
16. YIMBY > NIMBY would do more to limit market power than just about anything else, by the way.
17. Is there even a peep about this country’s biggest and worst-performing monopoly in K-12? Of course not. It is Amazon you have to worry about!
So overall this is not great economics. It is good to see the Biden administration pick up on a few pro-competition issues, but much of the document is not clearly pro-competition either. The reasoning and evidence are pretty much politicized from start to finish.
Use Fractional Dosing to Speed Vaccination and Save Lives
I’ve been shouting about fractional dosing since January, most recently with my post A Half Dose of Moderna is More Effective Than a Full Dose of AstraZeneca and the associated paper with Michael Kremer and co-authors. Yesterday we saw some big movement. Writing in Nature Medicine, WHO epidemiologists Benjamin Cowling and Wey Wen Lim and evolutionary biologist Sarah Cobey title a correspondence:
Fractionation of COVID-19 vaccine doses could extend limited supplies and reduce mortality.
Exactly so. They write:
Dose-finding studies indicate that fractional doses of mRNA vaccines could still elicit a robust immune response to COVID-192,3. In a non-randomized open-label phase 1/2 trial of the BNT162b2 vaccine, doses as low as one third (10 μg) of the full dose produced antibody and cellular immune responses comparable to those achieved with the full dose of 30 μg (ref. 4). Specifically, the geometric mean titer of neutralizing antibodies 21 days after the second vaccine dose was 166 for the group that received 10 μg, almost the same as the geometric mean titer of 161 for the group that received 30 μg, and 63 days after the second dose, these titers were 181 and 133, respectively4. For the mRNA-1273 vaccine, a dose of 25 μg conferred geometric mean PRNT80 titers (the inverse of the concentration of serum needed to reduce the number of plaques by 80% in a plaque reduction neutralization test) of 340 at 14 days after the second dose, compared with a value of 654 for the group that received the standard dose of 100 μg (ref. 5). According to the model proposed by Khoury et al.6, if vaccine efficacy at the full dose is 95%, a reduction in dose that led to as much as a halving in the post-vaccination geometric mean titer could still be in the range of 85–90%. Although other components of the immune response may also contribute to efficacy, these dose-finding data are at least indicative of the potential for further exploration of fractionation as a dose-sparing strategy. Durability of responses after fractional doses should also be explored.
…Concerns about the evolution of vaccine resistance have been posited as a potential drawback of dose-sparing strategies. However, vaccines that provide protection against clinical disease seem to also reduce transmission, which indicates that expanding partial vaccination coverage could reduce the incidence of infection. As described in a recent paper, lower prevalence should slow, not accelerate, the emergence and spread of new SARS-CoV-2 variants8.
…In conclusion, fractionated doses could provide a feasible solution that extends limited supplies of vaccines against COVID-19, which is a major challenge for low- and middle-income countries.
Also a new paper in preprint just showed that 1/4 doses of Moderna create a substantial and lasting immune response on par with that from natural infection.
Here we examined vaccine-specific CD4+ T cell, CD8+ T cell, binding antibody, and neutralizing antibody responses to the 25 ug Moderna mRNA-1273 vaccine over 7 months post-immunization, including multiple age groups, with a particular interest in assessing whether pre-existing crossreactive T cell memory impacts vaccine-generated immunity. Low dose (25 ug) mRNA-1273 elicited durable Spike binding antibodies comparable to that of convalescent COVID-19 cases. Vaccine-generated Spike memory CD4+ T cells 6 months post-boost were comparable in quantity and quality to COVID-19 cases, including the presence of TFH cells and IFNg-expressing cells.
Finally, an article in Reuters notes that Moderna are preparing to launch a 50 ug dose regimen as a booster and for children. Thus, contrary to some critics of our paper, the technology is ready.
Frankly, governments are way behind on this–they should have been pushing the vaccine manufacturers and funding trials on alternative dosing since at least January. Indeed, imagine how many lives we might have saved had we listened to Operation Warp Speed advisor Moncef Slaoui who advocated for half doses in January. On a world scale, we could have vaccinated tens even hundreds of millions more people by now had we ramped up fractional dosing.
At this point, it’s my view that there is enough knowledge to justify rolling out alternative dosing in any hot spot or in any country worried about outbreaks. Roll it out in a randomized fashion (as Kominers and I discussed in the context of the US vaccination rollout) to study it in real time but start the roll out now. Lives can be saved if we speed up vaccination, especially of the best vaccines we have, the mRNAs. Moderna and Pfizer have together pledged to deliver (mostly Pfizer and mostly through the US) some 250m vaccine doses to COVAX in 2021 for delivery to less developed countries. If we go to half-doses that becomes 500m doses–a life saver. And recall these points made earlier:
Judging by neutralizing antibodies, a 50 ug dose of, for example, Moderna looks to be more effective than standard dosing of many other vaccines including AZ and J&J and much better than others such as Sinovac. Thus alternative dosing is a way to *increase* the quality of vaccine for many people.
A 50 ug dose vaccine available today is much higher quality than a 100 ug dose vaccine available one year from now.
If we have the will, we can increase vaccine supply very rapidly.
Long COVID in a prospective cohort of home-isolated patients
Long-term complications after coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) are common in hospitalized patients, but the spectrum of symptoms in milder cases needs further investigation. We conducted a long-term follow-up in a prospective cohort study of 312 patients—247 home-isolated and 65 hospitalized—comprising 82% of total cases in Bergen during the first pandemic wave in Norway. At 6 months, 61% (189/312) of all patients had persistent symptoms, which were independently associated with severity of initial illness, increased convalescent antibody titers and pre-existing chronic lung disease. We found that 52% (32/61) of home-isolated young adults, aged 16–30 years, had symptoms at 6 months, including loss of taste and/or smell (28%, 17/61), fatigue (21%, 13/61), dyspnea (13%, 8/61), impaired concentration (13%, 8/61) and memory problems (11%, 7/61). Our findings that young, home-isolated adults with mild COVID-19 are at risk of long-lasting dyspnea and cognitive symptoms highlight the importance of infection control measures, such as vaccination.
That is from a new Nature paper by Bjørn Blomberg, et.al. Via SK. On vaccinating the young, here are further relevant observations from Francois Balloux.
Which are the most striking elements of Monkey Pong?
Watch this if you haven’t already:
What comes to your mind is an interesting kind of Rorschach test. A few options (not necessarily endorsed by me) are:
1. Where did they get that background from?
2. Can I have some of what that monkey is drinking?
3. Wealth concentrations are going to make IRB regulations less relevant over time.
4. How many people want to play Pong against a wired monkey? Will we employ or enslave monkeys to enable this? What is in fact the relevant difference?
5. What else can that monkey (cognitively) do better than I can?
6. Which regulatory agency will have jurisdiction over the (presumably disabled) humans who want this as a medical treatment? What about the non-disabled humans? The Navy pilots?
7. Where does this all end?
8. Will this raise or lower the price of monkeys?
What else?
A Miniature Masterpiece
Superb NYTimes disquisition on a masterpiece of Indian miniature painting. The text, formatting, visuals, all beautifully done–better than any museum exhibit I can recall.
In addition to the subject matter this piece has a lot to say about online education and how news is becoming a winner take-most market. Note what Tyler and I said on endogenous fixed costs in our piece on online education in the AER and consider how many newspapers could put together a display of this quality.
Shaked and Sutton (1987) and Sutton (1998) show that when quality is primarily vertical, meaning that there is a measure of quality such that all consumers agree that higher quality is more preferred, then increased market size does not result in reduced concentration. Instead, as market size increases, firms invest more in quality, which endogenously increases economies of scale and maintains market concentration.
Along related lines, Berry and Waldfogel (2010) show that there are many more restaurants in larger than smaller cities, but even as city size increases by a factor of 10 there is no tendency for the number of newspapers to increase. Larger cities have more restaurants than smaller cities because economies of scale are limited and quality differs “horizontally,” according to taste (thus, larger cities have more diverse restaurants). Yet larger cities are served by roughly the same number of newspapers as smaller cities because quality is more vertical, most newspaper consumers want more coverage, better writers and more features.
Addendum: Tim and Marcos remind of previous items in this series which I also loved, The Birth of the Self Portrait and A Picture of Change.
Canada: An Official Strong Recommendation for First Doses First
Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI), a scientific advisory group to the government, has made a forceful and dramatic statement strongly favoring First Doses First (delay the second dose.) This is a very big deal for the entire world. Basically NACI have endorsed everything that Tyler and I have said on First Doses First since my first post tentatively raised the issue on December 8. I am going to quote this statement extensively since it’s an excellent summary. No indentation.
—-NACI Statement—-
Based on emerging evidence of the protection provided by the first dose of a two dose series for COVID-19 vaccines currently authorized in Canada, NACI recommends that in the context of limited COVID-19 vaccine supply jurisdictions should maximize the number of individuals benefiting from the first dose of vaccine by extending the second dose of COVID-19 vaccine up to four months after the first. NACI will continue to monitor the evidence on effectiveness of an extended dose interval and will adjust recommendations as needed. (Strong NACI Recommendation)
-
- In addition to emerging population-based data, this recommendation is based on expert opinion and the public health principles of equity, ethics, accessibility, feasibility, immunological vaccine principles, and the perspective that, within a global pandemic setting, reducing the risk of severe disease outcomes at the population-level will have the greatest impact. Current evidence suggests high vaccine effectiveness against symptomatic disease and hospitalization for several weeks after the first dose, including among older populations.
Protecting individuals
- By implementing an extended four month interval strategy, Canada will be able to provide access to first doses of highly efficacious vaccines to more individuals earlier which is expected to increase health equity faster. Canada has secured enough vaccines to ensure that a second dose will be available to every adult.
- As a general vaccination principle, interruption of a vaccine series resulting in an extended interval between doses does not require restarting the vaccine series. Principles of immunology, vaccine science, and historical examples demonstrate that delays between doses do not result in a reduction in final antibody concentrations nor a reduction in durability of memory response for most multi-dose products.
- Assessment of available data on efficacy and effectiveness of a single dose of mRNA vaccine was a critical factor in assessing the impact of a delayed second dose at this time. The two available clinical trials for mRNA vaccines (Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna) provide evidence that indicates that efficacy against symptomatic disease begins as early as 12 to 14 days after the first dose of the mRNA vaccine. Excluding the first 14 days before vaccines are expected to offer protection, both vaccines showed an efficacy of 92% up until the second dose (most second doses were administered at 19-42 days in the trials). Recently, real world vaccine effectiveness data presented to or reviewed by NACI assessing PCR-positive COVID-19 disease and/or infection from Quebec, British Columbia, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States support good effectiveness (generally 70-80%, depending on the methodology used and outcomes assessed) from a single dose of mRNA vaccines (for up to two months in some studies). While studies have not yet collected four months of data on effectiveness of the first dose, the first two months of population-based effectiveness data are showing sustained and high levels of protection. These data include studies in health care workers, long term care residents, elderly populations and the general public. While this is somewhat lower than the efficacy demonstrated after one dose in clinical trials, it is important to note that vaccine effectiveness in a general population setting is typically lower than efficacy from the controlled setting of a clinical trial, and this is expected to be the case after series completion as well.
- Published data from the AstraZeneca clinical trial indicated that delaying the second dose to ≥ 12 weeks resulted in a better efficacy against symptomatic disease compared to shorter intervals between doses.
- The duration of protection from one or two doses of COVID-19 vaccines is currently unknown. Experience with other multi-dose vaccines after a single dose suggests persistent protection could last for six months or longer in adolescents and adults. Longer-term follow-up of clinical trial participants and those receiving vaccination in public programs will assist in determining the duration of protection following both one and two doses of vaccination. NACI will continue to monitor the evidence on effectiveness of an extended interval, which is currently being collected weekly in some Canadian jurisdictions, and will adjust recommendations as needed if concerns emerge about waning protection.
Protecting populations
- Although effectiveness after two-doses will be somewhat higher than with one dose, many more people will benefit from immunization when extending the interval between doses in times of vaccine shortage; offering more individuals direct benefit and also the possibility of indirect benefit from increasing population immunity to COVID-19 disease. Everyone is expected to obtain the full benefit of two doses when the second dose is offered after 4 months.
- Internal PHAC modelling reviewed by NACI based on Canadian supply projections suggested that accelerating vaccine coverage by extending dose intervals of mRNA vaccines could have short-term public health benefits in preventing symptomatic disease, hospitalizations, and deaths while vaccine supply is constrained. Even a theoretical scenario analysis in which intervals were extended up to six months and protection was lost at a rate of 4% per week after the first dose also showed that extending the mRNA vaccine dose intervals would still have public health benefits. External modelling results have also suggested that extending dose intervals can avert infections, hospitalizations and deaths.
- The impact on variants of concern by extending the interval between doses is unknown, but there is currently no evidence that an extended interval between doses will either increase or decrease the emergence of variants of concern. COVID-19 mRNA vaccines and AstraZeneca vaccine have shown promising early results against variant B.1.1.7. As effectiveness of the first dose against other variants of concern is emerging, ongoing monitoring will be required.
- Vaccine distribution will be optimized through this strategy, and current vaccine supply projections will work well with an extended dose strategy that aims to immunize as many Canadians as efficiently as possible. Extending the dose intervals for mRNA vaccines up to four months has the potential to result in rapid immunization and protection of a large proportion of the Canadian population….
Ola Malm on the future and industrial organization of chess
It was great to see your “Thursday assorted links” link regarding chess. It has been fascinating to follow the recent online boom to which the game has been subject and to think about what it may mean for the organization, and business, of chess over time.
I speculate, of course, but – as to what the future holds – I believe at least one possible path for the sport runs as follows:
1. The three major chess-focused online platforms (chess.com, lichess, and chess24) reduces to one through a self-reinforcing cycle of greater revenue concentration, the attainment by one party of progressive technical superiority, and the increasing convergence of the chess-playing public on a single provider.
2. The market leader signs exclusivity agreements (governing non-FIDE play) with a significant portion of top players and becomes the de-facto organizer of most commercially significant tournaments. In contrast to (1), this could conceivably happen quite quickly, as it involves only a limited set of individuals.
3. The centralization of elite-level play on a single platform enables that platform’s Elo rating to emerge as the chess world’s most important manifestation of achievement, thus furthering the leading provider’s competitive position (and affording it, through subscription fees, the financial means of accelerating (1) and of maintaining (2)).
4. FIDE’s tight grip on the sport is somewhat loosened, and the organization reverts to being something more akin to what it used to be and was originally intended to be – a (gentler) gentlemen’s club (in the English, rather than the American-English, sense of the term) focused on advancing the sport of chess.
Step (2) is, to a certain extent, already underway in the form of Nakamura’s link with chess.com and Carlsen’s ownership interest in Play Magnus (which owns chess24 and hosts the Champions Chess Tour). Attempting to negotiate individual agreements with single players would very likely turn out no easier than herding cats (and a rather resourceful and independent sort of cat, at that); rather, I believe whichever party may seek to implement a form of player exclusivity would find it easier to, on a unilateral basis, simply issue rating-based cash compensation (in exchange for promises of exclusivity) to the top-10-ranked (or top-50-ranked – the precise number is of course unimportant) Grandmasters. To rate players, the provider could adopt the current FIDE ranking as its starting position, but thereafter “fork” it (much like an open-source piece of code is forked) and base future rankings (for payment purposes) exclusively on play on its own platform (to enable (3)).
Some would no doubt scoff at such a development as unwelcome commercialization. And, yet, I think it would constitute a step, if not indisputably forward, certainly not backward, for chess. International sports tend to be organized in one of two ways: through one-nation-one-vote Swiss associations (such as soccer’s FIFA); or through commercial corporations (such Formula1’s Liberty Media). Time has undeniably imbued governing bodies in the former category with a certain cachet, but it has also made many of them inefficient and corrupt, as their governance systems – designed for a pre-WWI European world of volunteerism and gentlemanly conduct – have failed to adapt to, and to ward off, an extent of contemporary cynicism. If the Guardian is to be believed, FIDE has not been entirely spared: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jun/03/chess-rights-multimillionaire-model-agency-owner-david-kaplan; https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2016/jun/03/chess-fide-president-offshore-firms-rights-kirsan-ilyumzhinov. I think most sports, including chess, would be no worse managed – in the sense of attracting both a broad player base as well as a vibrant elite tier – were they to convalesce around corporate organizations rather than Swiss associations.
I am pleased to report that Ola was an earlier Emergent Ventures recipient.
The energy optimism of Austin Vernon
I’m pretty convinced that even with business as usual carbon emissions will drop like an anvil in most developed countries over the next decade.
Solar panels are getting so cheap, new plants will add many more panels than what their grid connection can handle. The industry refers to this as a high DC:AC ratio. You might have 300 MW of panels (DC) for 100 MW of inverters (AC). This means even when it is cloudy you are sending power to the grid at 100% of AC capacity. And you can produce at high output later into the evening. This makes solar firm power. In many ways this firm solar is more reliable than an analog fossil power plant. Most new projects also include batteries. They charge on DC so they can use some of the excess power during the day and then use the same inverter and grid connection to sell into the evening peaks. I’m not sure many people have fully internalized this change yet. Off grid folks have started doing it at a small scale, because it is cheaper to add more solar than buy more batteries to get through cloudy periods. You only need enough batteries to get you through the night.
Offshore wind is also going to be pretty incredible. The taller the turbine, the more reliable and predictable its power output. Onshore is limited by needing to truck the parts. Offshore is not limited and there are 10+ MW turbines coming out where onshore is usually no larger than 2.5 MW. It is technically challenging to keep going bigger, but some think it will go as high as 50 MW monster turbines. All three major US grids could have access to this resource. Instead of a 30% capacity factor for onshore, big offshore can be up in the 60% type numbers.
If you overbuild capacity, like using a high DC:AC ratio, there will be a lot of cheap DC power out there to use. Water electrolyzers to make hydrogen use DC. Hydrogen is a terrible vehicle fuel, but it is a good industrial feedstock. Eventually it may be converted to methane for use in homes and power plants.
If you do the learning curve math, any vehicle driving over 25,000 miles a year will be able to switch to electric and still be cheaper than running an existing, depreciated gasoline or diesel vehicle by 2030. There will still be lots of gasoline cars out there, but the average miles a gasoline car drives per year will drop a lot.
There is a lot of hoopla about ERCOT and what regulations and capacity should be. Unless most customers are exposed to real time incentives, any grid will always have periods of outages. Trying to get to 100% reliability only on the supply side is probably impossible and gets increasingly expensive.
Improvements in building heat, industrial, agriculture, and non-road transportation are harder for both political and technical reasons. Nuclear powered freighters, please! But cheap electricity and hydrogen would make them much easier to solve. You may have to live with ship and plane emissions or use direct air capture for those.
Part of me really believes we will be back to pre industrial CO2 concentrations somewhere between 2070 and 2100. There will be shortages of carbon as fossil fuel (soon to be a misnomer!) production rebounds and is stretched for use as material feedstocks. If that doesn’t happen, it will be a terrible slow growth tragedy.
That is from an email by…Austin Vernon.
Who Runs the AEA?
That is a new paper by Kevin D. Hoover and Andrej Svorenčík:
The leadership structure of the American Economics Association is documented using a biographical database covering every officer and losing candidate for AEA offices from 1950 to 2019. The analysis focuses on institutional affiliations by education and employment. The structure is strongly hierarchical. A few institutions dominate the leadership, and their dominance has become markedly stronger over time. Broadly two types of explanations are explored: that institutional dominance is based on academic merit or that it based on self-perpetuating privilege. Network effects that might explain the dynamic of increasing concentration are also investigated.
I wonder how the AEA budget will hold up now that interviews can be done by Zoom and meeting attendance is not required.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
The case for geographically concentrated vaccine doses
Here goes:
A central yet neglected point is that vaccines should not be sent to each and every part of the U.S. Instead, it would be better to concentrate distribution in a small number of places where the vaccines can have a greater impact.
Say, for the purposes of argument, that you had 20,000 vaccine doses to distribute. There are about 20,000 cities and towns in America. Would you send one dose to each location? That might sound fair, but such a distribution would limit the overall effect. Many of those 20,000 recipients would be safer, but your plan would not meaningfully reduce community transmission in any of those places, nor would it allow any public events to restart or schools to reopen.
Alternatively, say you chose one town or well-defined area and distributed all 20,000 doses there. Not only would you protect 20,000 people with the vaccine, but the surrounding area would be much safer, too. Children could go to school, for instance, knowing that most of the other people in the building had been vaccinated. Shopping and dining would boom as well.
Here is one qualifier, but in fact it pushes one further along the road to geographic concentration:
Over time, mobility, migration and mixing would undo some of the initial benefits of the geographically concentrated dose of vaccines. That’s why the second round of vaccine distribution should go exactly to those people who are most likely to mix with the first targeted area. This plan reaps two benefits: protecting the people in the newly chosen second area, and limiting the ability of those people to disrupt the benefits already gained in the first area.
In other words, if the first doses went (to choose a random example) to Wilmington, Delaware, the next batch of doses should go to the suburbs of Wilmington. In economics language [behind this link is a highly useful Michael Kremer paper], one can say that Covid-19 infections (and protections) have externalities, and there are increasing returns to those externalities. That implies a geographically concentrated approach to vaccine distribution, whether at the federal or state level.
Here is another qualifier:
…there will be practical limits on a fully concentrated geographic distribution of vaccines. Too many vaccines sent to too few places will result in long waits and trouble with storage. Nonetheless, at the margin the U.S. should still consider a more geographically concentrated distribution than what it is likely to do.
Do you think that travel restrictions have stopped the spread of the coronavirus? (Doesn’t mean you have to favor them, all things considered.) Probably yes. If so, you probably ought to favor a geographically concentrated initial distribution of the vaccine as well — can you see why it is the same logic? Just imagine it spreading out like stones on a Go board.
Of course we are not likely to do any of this. Here is my full Bloomberg column.
Bee Fact of the Day
Murder hornets are in the news. Japanese honey bees have an amazing defense:
Wikipedia: Beekeepers in Japan attempted to introduce western honey bees (Apis mellifera) for the sake of their high productivity. Western honey bees have no innate defense against the hornets, which can rapidly destroy their colonies.[3] Although a handful of Asian giant hornets can easily defeat the uncoordinated defenses of a western honey bee colony, the Japanese honey bee (Apis cerana japonica) has an effective strategy. When a hornet scout locates and approaches a Japanese honey bee hive, she emits specific pheromonal hunting signals. When the Japanese honey bees detect these pheromones, 100 or so gather near the entrance of the nest and set up a trap, keeping the entrance open. This permits the hornet to enter the hive. As the hornet enters, a mob of hundreds of bees surrounds it in a ball, completely covering it and preventing it from reacting effectively. The bees violently vibrate their flight muscles in much the same way as they do to heat the hive in cold conditions. This raises the temperature in the ball to the critical temperature of 46 °C (115 °F). In addition, the exertions of the honey bees raise the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ball. At that concentration of CO2, they can tolerate up to 50 °C (122 °F), but the hornet cannot survive the combination of high temperature and high carbon dioxide level.[45][46] Some honey bees do die along with the intruder, much as happens when they attack other intruders with their stings, but by killing the hornet scout, they prevent it from summoning reinforcements that would wipe out the entire colony.[47]
Detailed research suggests this account of the behavior of the honey bees and a few species of hornets is incomplete and that the honey bees and the predators are developing strategies to avoid expensive and mutually unprofitable conflict. Instead, when honey bees detect scouting hornets, they transmit an “I see you” signal that commonly warns off the predator.[48]
By Takahashi – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=348351
New results on the Chinese vaccine
Importantly, this was the first study of an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine to include participants older than 60 years—the most vulnerable age group for this infection. In the phase 1 dose-escalating trial, the vaccine was given at a two-dose schedule at three different concentrations (2 μg, 4 μg, and 8 μg per dose) and was well tolerated in both age groups (18–59 years and ≥60 years). The older age group had lower rates of solicited adverse events than the younger adults: the overall rates of adverse events within 28 days after vaccination were 34 (47%) of 72 participants in the group aged 18–59 years, compared with 14 (19%) of 72 participants in the group aged 60 years and older. At the same time, in both age groups the vaccine was similarly immunogenic: the geometric mean anti-SARS-CoV-2 neutralising antibody titres measured by a 50% virus neutralisation assay 14 days after the booster dose were 88, 211, and 229 in the group aged 18–59 years and 81, 132, and 171 in the group aged 60 years and older for 2 μg, 4 μg, and 8 μg vaccine doses, respectively. Moreover, the authors tested cross-reactivity of the neutralising antibodies against several drifted SARS-CoV-2 isolates and showed the potential of their vaccine to protect against evolutionary diverged viruses, should they appear in circulation.
And:
The current study is the second to report the interim results of safety and immunogenicity of inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine, with the first being the another β-propiolactone inactivated aluminium-adjuvanted whole-virion SARS-CoV-2 vaccine developed by Wuhan Institute of Biological Products.
Both studies showed very similar levels of adverse events and neutralising antibody titres post vaccination, which indicates the reproducibility of clinical results of similar vaccine modes produced by different manufacturers.
All good news of course, and this vaccine exists right now. Just not for you! Here is the piece from The Lancet, and here is associated commentary, also seeming to confirm the positive results. A phase III trial is underway in the UAE to measure efficacy. I cannot speak to data reliability issues, but presumably the referees at The Lancet find this credible enough to recommend publication.
Via Alan Goldhammer.
Frequent, Fast, and Cheap is Better than Sensitive
A number of firms have developed cheap, paper-strip tests for coronavirus that report results at-home in about 15 minutes but they have yet to be approved for use by the FDA because the FDA appears to be demanding that all tests reach accuracy levels similar to the PCR test. This is another deadly FDA mistake.
NPR: Highly accurate at-home tests are probably many months away. But Mina argues they could be here sooner if the FDA would not demand that tests for the coronavirus meet really high accuracy standards of 80 percent or better.
A Massachusetts-based startup called E25Bio has developed this sort of rapid test. Founder and Chief Technology Officer Irene Bosch says her firm has field-tested it in hospitals. “What we learned is that the test is able to be very efficient for people who have a lot of virus,” she says.
The PCR tests can discover virus at significantly lower concentration levels than the cheap tests but that extra sensitivity doesn’t matter much in practice. Why not? First, at the lowest levels that the PCR test can detect, the person tested probably isn’t infectious. The cheap test is better at telling whether you are infectious than whether you are infected but the former is what we need to know to open schools and workplaces. Second, the virus grows so quickly that the time period in which the PCR tests outperforms the cheap test is as little as a day or two. Third, the PCR tests are taking days or even a week or more to report which means the results are significantly outdated and less actionable by the time they are reported.
The fundamental issue is this: if a test is cheap and fast we shouldn’t compare it head to head against the PCR test. Instead, we should compare test regimes. A strip test could cost $5 which means you can do one per day for the same price as a PCR test (say $35). Thus, the right comparison is seven cheap tests with one PCR test. So considered a stylized example. If a person gets infected on Sunday and is tested on Sunday then both tests will likely show negative. With the PCR test the infected person then goes to work, infecting other people throughout the week before being the person is tested again next Sunday. With the cheap test the person gets tested again on Monday and again comes up negative and they go to work but probably aren’t infectious. They are then tested again on Tuesday and this time there is enough virus in the person’s system to show positive so on Tuesday the infected person stops going to work and doesn’t infect anyone else. Score one for cheap tests. Now consider what happens if the person gets tested on another day, say Tuesday? In this case, both tests will show positive but the person doesn’t get the results of the PCR test until next Tuesday and so again goes to work and infects other people throughout the week. With the cheap test the infected person learns they are infected and again stops going to work and infecting other people. Score two for cheap tests.
Indeed, when you compare testing regimes it’s hard to come up with a scenario in which infrequent, slow, and expensive but very sensitive is better than frequent, fast, and cheap but less sensitive.
More details in this paper.
Megan McArdle on Patrick Collison on China
On first read, that sentiment might seem banal. Of course we should clearly oppose China’s intensifying political repression. But is easier to list American business leaders who have cravenly excused the inexcusable than to name those such as Collison, who have been brave enough to state the obvious. When it comes to China’s human rights abuses, the position of the American business community is prone…
“It must be possible,” Collison tells me, “to acknowledge the basic facts — for example, that concentration camps and forced sterilization programs are reprehensible evils. If it becomes de facto unacceptable to do so, as part of some kind of self-perpetuating silence, it really seems to me that that’s a positive feedback loop that we should hurry to break.”
There is much more at the link, definitely recommended.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Short video feature on Curative, Inc., an earlier Emergent Ventures winner.
4. Andrew Potter, a former newspaper editor, on why people hate the media.
5. Henry Farrell on the evolution of libertarianism. And the pandemic, government, and libertarianism. By Brink Lindsey.