pseudorabies

I've been using the Howard Leight Laser Lites for the past 15 years.  They're very comfortable and the best out of all that I tried.  It took me a while to get used to riding with them but now I feel very uncomfortable riding without them.  It will probably sound strange (no pun intended) but I can hear the engine and other mechanical parts better with the plugs in than I can without.

1 hour ago, ikke1959 said:

It is their commission that made the decision...

That and lower sensitivity could be the reason.  A lab in Pakistan published a paper earlier this year looking at sensitivity of Lepu Medical kits and found ~50% and ~20% for nasopharyngeal and saliva samples respectively.  Well below the 90% stated by the manufacturer and in line with the FDA's letter.  Lower sensitivity would mean more false negatives and fewer positives.

https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-021-01505-3

A few weeks ago my wife mentioned that Anutin was asked about JnJ at a press conference/interview.  He replied that JnJ has stopped taking their calls.

If true then Anutin et al might have flaked and angered the people at JnJ to the point that they don't want to deal with the Thai government anymore.  It takes a lot of resources to apply and shepherd an application through the approval process.  You would expect that after jumping through all the approval hoops and ultimately getting approved that the government would then be eager to place an order.  But we know that the Thai government has NOT been interested in ordering Western vaccines.  I can imagine the run around that JnJ officials must have gotten from the Thai government.  And with so many nations in need and lined up ready to purchase it would make sense to not waste time on Thailand.

Quote

Anutin said Now I want to announce missing people. Johnson & Johnson vaccine that we are preparing to sign a Term Sheet contract, but can't contact the company. Jensen-See Exchange Co., Ltd. Is this our fault? Because we have accelerated. However, it is expected that vaccine manufacturers may have problems. We also have information from the National Vaccine Institute on this matter. A medical committee warned us that we had to listen because we wouldn't take people as lab rats. (Translated from Thai using Google Translate)

https://thestandard.co/anutin-cannot-contact-johnson-and-johnson-and-bought-20-million-doses-of-pfizer/

29 minutes ago, Mansell said:

I am American, and I got Pfizer yesterday in BKK after signing up last week. And I am I Pattaya. Just sign up on as many lists as possible…..that is what I did. They don’t care where you are from. They seem to have got on the ball with the Pfizer now.

Ditto here - Pfizer this Sunday at Medpark, driving up from Hua Hin.  If not for the protests on Rama4 it would have been a perfect in-out experience.

The only hiccup in the process is the confirmation email as others have reported.  I was able to choose my preferred vaccine and date/time without issue.  No confirmation email from them until I emailed them about 20 hours before my appointment.  They did respond immediately though.

I guess if it was perfect it wouldn't be Thailand...

By now with the number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths the government must have accumulated more than enough data to know how effective Sinovac and AZ are for each of the different endpoints.  I haven't seen any such data published.  Has anyone seen this? Every bioinformatics scientist that I've known would love to sink their teeth into such a dataset and would likely have summaries and conclusions ready in a day or so.

If it hasn't been published it is suspicious and likely does not cast one or both vaccines in a good light.

Maybe a bad regulator-rectifier or malfunction caused a voltage spike?  More about that here -

https://ricksfreeautorepairadvice.com/can-a-jump-start-damage-computers/

This was news to me but makes sense.

Earlier this week my wife and I drove from Hua Hin to Bangkok and back again for her to get her first AZ shot (She quickly and easily registered through my/our cell phone provider but it's for Thai's ONLY).  We did not see anything that resembled a checkpoint.

Every weekend in HH we still see a large number of vehicles, mostly Mercedes, BMW's and Porsches, with Bangkok plates on the roads. 

It seems that the talk about checkpoints is just that and nothing more. 

1 hour ago, GammaGlobulin said:

I find the Y chromosome off-putting.

 

I prefer my friends, my associates, and all those near me, to have two X chromosomes.

 

If I could board a Magic Carpet which might whisk me to a world in which I was the only individual with a Y chromosome, I would not hesitate to fly away.

 

This is my dream.

 

It's all in the chromosomes, the goodness, I mean.

Look up "Testicular Feminization". or "Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome".  It's a syndrome in which androgen signaling is impaired.  The result is a 46,XY individual whose body only sees female sex hormones (normal females have a mix of female and male homrones with a higher ratio of female:male hormones compared to males).  Such individuals have a female phenotype that is often extremely voluptuous.

There's also Klinefelter's syndrome - 47,XXY .  They present as more male than female but they don't measure up to 46,XY.  

5 hours ago, steve187 said:

with your views on Things , you will never be disappointed,

from all reports the service and staff at medpark are first class,

try getting out of bed the other side tomorrow

This is a matter of critiquing professionalism in patient care.  Once someone is confirmed, the confirmation email should go out to them immediately and automatically especially considering that many people need to travel considerable distances and plan their travel itineraries. My wife tells me that I'm not alone here - a friend of hers did not get the email from Medpark describing the medical docs that she needed to bring with her until the morning of the appointment. She had to postpone because she could not get them under such short notice.  I did not ask which side of the bed she got out of.

In 3 days I'm scheduled for a Pfizer jab at Medpark however I have not yet gotten a confirmation email.  Only an email instructing me on which documents to bring.  My wife called yesterday to find out if I'm really confirmed and the nurse told us over the phone that I am.  However she could not send out the confirmation email since this was the IT department's job.  Nothing yet from them however I understand how much work it takes to send out an what should be an automated email.

It seems that whether it's a private or public institution, if there is an opportunity to screw things up (or maximize the chances of a screw-up) it is seized upon.  If I ever get to Medpark for the jab I'd be surprised if they have functioning lights and air conditioning. I half-expect the staff to be straight out of a Thai version of The Hills Have Eyes. The incompetence and indifference for something so important and impactful to Thailand and human life is astounding.

Ouch.  It's all good fun until someone loses an eye.

I once shot down a pigeon in a warehouse, mid-flight, with the type of slingshot that uses a wrist brace.  The steel shot went straight through the pigeon.  Those things are no joke.

The intro to Delicatessen was pretty good.  As it progresses it makes you wonder W.T.F. is going on??!?  You soon find out nothing good....  Great movie btw if you haven't seen it.

I still remember people talking about the opening scene in "Jaws" when it hit the theaters in 1975. Living in the NYC area at the time I recall the effect it had on beachgoer's and coastal resort communities that summer.  Scared a lot of people.

12 hours ago, ThailandRyan said:

How is the effectiveness going to be increased with relaxation of some of the restrictions while failing to ensure the current ones including travel are not enforced.  These folks seem to believe in miracles.

Here in Hua Hin I was amazed to see people from Bangkok flooding in over the past few weekends. Mostly in BMW's, MB's, and Porsche's.  In my condo I'd see an influx of cars from BK in the parking garage, new faces at the pool.  Over at the Holiday Inn the hotel would be dark from Monday through Thursday then fully lit up on the weekends, including the rooftop restaurant and bar, with many rooms occupied.  Absolutely amazing.  Now Prachuap Khiri Khan is considered a dark red zone.  It was probably inevitable but accelerated by this bad behavior and lack of enforcement.  Given the glacial rollout of vaccines why help speed the spread of the virus?

18 hours ago, Taboo2 said:

If Drugs and Vaccine production was easy, starting from the lab, to scale-up, design transfer, validation productions, final approved production, fill finish, packaging and distribution, everyone would be doing it.

 

After 35 years in the industry, I can assure you it is not easy.

Oh for sure.  Same for me working in biotech.  It's one of the reasons I laughed when the anti-patent, Big, Evil Pharma groups started clamoring for Pfizer et al to allow production across the globe.  These aren't small molecules that we're talking about here, especially for the mRNA vaccines.  RNA is the trickiest macromolecule to work with and things can go wrong very quickly leaving you with a mass of ribonucleotides.  Then there is the matter of preparing the complexes which can be tricky even at small scale.  Combine this with the fact that there is a limited supply of people with expertise in these areas.  As you said the patents are not so much the barrier here as are facilities and expertise.

Regarding info in patents, many years ago while still in academia I was asked by a head of lab about making Taq polymerase from a recombinant expression E. coli strain someone in another lab had. The produced protein lacked a peptide tag that one would normally include to aid purification. But a purification scheme for native Taq was beautifully laid out in one of the patents I found and it worked perfectly.  After ~5 days of work I had a few hundred thousand dollars worth of enzyme that lasted us for about 6 months.

1 hour ago, GammaGlobulin said:

It is important to use proper statistics when calculating doubling time.  I mean, you don't just multiply by 2.  In order to calculate doubling time you can either understand the statistics, or you can use a doubling time calculator, if you do not know the statistical formula.

I have grown enough bacterial cultures to know exactly what doubling time is. Viruses too. Also have had to deal with radioisotopes and radioactive decay which is measured in half-lives.  Same for pharmacokinetics of drug compounds.

And FWIW CNN is also citing a 3-week doubling time.

4 hours ago, wombat said:

closet greenie says... 
check under what conditions they become carcinogenic 

I'd be more concerned about risk for Parkinson's disease.  There is a very strong link between exposure to pesticides and herbicides and neurodegenerative diseases like PD.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/parkinsons-disease-and-pesticides-whats-the-connection/

2 hours ago, HaoleBoy said:

So the 5,000 doses will go to the research team here in Thailand trying to create their own mRNA vaccine?  Reverse engineering possibly ????

Usually it's easier to read their patents to get methodologies -

https://www.citizen.org/article/biontech-and-pfizers-bnt162-vaccine-patent-landscape/ (references therein)

20 hours ago, sqwakvfr said:

As an American this was rather ironic because on the same day the US Embassy proudly tweeted out pictures of the first batch of the donated Pfizer Vaccine arriving in Bangkok.  I will probably never see any of these vaccines while I am in Thailand.  As a former staunch defender of the US Embassy/Consulate in Thailand I now say "screw the US Embassy".

And Biden recently announced a campaign to pay Americans $100 to get vaccinated.  I got extremely lucky and was able to pay $100 for the likely mirage of getting vaccinated at Bumrungrad.  In Q4-2021.  If I am even luckier.  Unbelievable.

Over the past month the doubling time has been around 3 weeks so without further intervention I would expect that we will easily exceed the predicted 40k per day by Sept 14 (2 doublings from the near-20k we are seeing today). 

https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2020/health/coronavirus-maps-and-cases/

13 hours ago, edwinchester said:

Sound foreign policy my hairy farang ass. If they can waste 10's of billions on useless track and trace and dubious PPE contracts they can afford to vaccinate their own citizens wherever that are.

I wonder what the Thai government, or any government in Asia, thinks about a country that does not put its own citizens first?  Do western countries like the UK, Australia and the US think that the Thai government will respect them and be more thankful for this?  I seriously doubt it.