Measles: The race to understand 'immune amnesia' Scientists have known for years that measles can alter the immune system – but the latest evidence suggests it's less of a mild tweaking, and more of a total reset.

"In a way, infection of the measles virus basically sets the immune system to default mode," says Mansour Haeryfar, a professor of immunology at Western University, Canada, "as if it has never encountered any microbes in the past".

www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Scientists Crack A 50-Year-Old Mystery About The Measles Vaccine When the U.S. introduced the measles vaccine, childhood deaths from all infections plummeted. Scientists think they might know why: Benefits of the measles vaccine go way beyond the measles.

Measles infection also wipes your immunity to other diseases.

www.npr.org/sections/goa...

RKF has been pushing anti-vax lies since 2005. So no, it's not all on him as HHS Sec -- most of that damage will be down the road, as he's sabotaging vaccine pipelines and research -- but he's certainly culpable.

I wonder what they expected. A mild "flu"?

Plus, not soul-sucking to walk around in.

Most of my life, Target was accessible and Walmart wasn't.

bsky.app/profile/mind...

Yeah, I'd always gone to Target because it was reasonably convenient (bus or bike at least) to my urban locations, and reliably had the jeans, underwear, and kitchen supplies that were most of what I bought there. Backpack too, probably. Past few years hit a lot of "can't find what I want."

Last couple years:

Berkeley Target: no jeans, no hats.
Albany Target: jeans, limited hats.
Philly Target: no shorts I liked, better hats. No backpacks I wanted. Belt style I wanted, but not long enough.

tbf Walmart no better on the backpack front.

Tariffs and bad weather/drought.

Always travel with backup masks.

I think it is absolutely scandalous that in just one year of an HHS under the leadership RFK.Jr the US has lost its Measles elimination status and is now on track to do same for perinatally acquired Hepatitis B. These are huge public health wins that took years to accomplish.

I've been a teacher for over 20yrs and I used to get sick regularly (not a *lot* but like 2-4 times a year, where I'd have to take a day or two off work)...

And I'm the only person still masking in class, and I haven't been sick with ANYTHING communicable in the last 5yrs. Feels good ☺️

I had hopes for the CAN99 but it fails fit on me badly; nose wire was weak. Have worn a couple times on airplanes, with a mask fitter to keep it in place.

Draeger 1950 is bigger than Aura. I have big head, Auras feel like they want to pop off my chin if I talk, 1950 is just clamped on.

Sometimes feels like it should be leaking, especially sliding down my nose (but no real leak detected) but it keeps passing challenge mode QLFT even after a day out.

Kind of some obvious differences here:

From memory, Taiwan was generally between SK and AU/NZ/CN. Very low and better than any other non-lockdown country, but not quite hitting zero transmission. JP was usually worst of the 'good' countries.

My "safe to eat out" threshold was 20/cases per million.
2021 close up. Some countries stayed under 20 for much of the year, and all under 200. Singapore was very low but then breached 200 on Sep 23, and then wrecks the Y-axis entirely with a high of 652 so isn't shown.

Sadly, they don't have data for Taiwan for some reason, though Worldometers did at the time. (They also don't break Hong Kong out.)

I remember that 200 new daily cases/million people was my semi-arbitrary threshold for "things are getting bad", back in 2020-1.

Here's the actual history. Looks pretty controlled into Dec 2021.

Source: ourworldindata.org/covid-cases

Omicron didn't hit until Jan 2022. Covid was controlled by good countries through 2021; I was tracking things closely. China didn't give up until Dec 2022, and the explosion of cases after that proves their policies were having effect.

WastewaterSCAN Dashboard WastewaterSCAN Data Dashboard tracks infectious diseases across the US via wastewater surveillance.

Iowa is down from 2024 but 2026 is already beating 2025.

data.wastewaterscan.org/tracker/?cha...

Or Aug/Sep, I guess.

To be fair, Michigan only looks better for Oct 2025

I'm just presenting data on current levels, not making a claim of continuous decline.

Past infections: 2+ over 6 years.
Future infections: 1 per 5 years.

Whether that's true, I dunno. But various non-Hoerger wastewater trackers do look lower than they have been.

Charitably, what Fuhrer is saying badly is that the _current_ rate of infections, measured over 2025, is about 1 per 5 years. This doesn't mean the total infections per person is 1 per 5 years; the past infections still happened, likely at least 2 per person. But the future rate may be lower.

Good NPIs controlled covid. Omicron is more infectious, so logically needed stronger NPIs. But no place used stronger NPIs; in practice they got weaker after vaccines.

But "we don't want to control omicron" is not the same as "we do not know how to control omicron".

China's lockdowns were struggling with omicron, but from outside we can't say why; maybe the lockdowns were leaky as people got tired of complying. We do know the lockdowns were still having a lot of effect, because omicron absolutely blew through once China gave up.