"The act bars the use of genetic information in health insurance and employment: it prohibits group health plans and health insurers from denying coverage to a healthy individual or charging that person higher premiums based solely on a genetic predisposition to developing a disease in the future, and it bars employers from using individuals' genetic information when making hiring, firing, job placement, or promotion decisions."
How abstracted-away does it have to be? Say one of the credit agencies bought 23andme, and your genetic predispositions became just one factor in a new "life score".
Do we honestly believe the law would consider the whole score tainted and unusable for all the named purposes? Would it have teeth to do anything about it?
Furthermore, it's easy to end-run around it like they've done with car insurance. Instead of raising the rates of privacy-conscious drivers, we'll raise everyone's rates and then offer "discounts" to people willing to submit to tracking. There, perfectly legal!
Gain of function? You realize that mother nature is far more sophisticated than us humans. She has manufactured many plagues over the eons. we will likely never come up with viruses that have the kind of crazy cascading systemic building block chaos causing destruction in the human body. Radiation doesn't count because we just figured out we could harness it, but we have very little control over that. Viruses make ionic radiation look like child's play as just like ionizing radiation, studying the thing could kill you within days/weeks/months. You have a voodoo science belief that Dr Evil might create the next real zombie, only @9pm on Fox.
It's really funny how media coverage, combined with all the conspiracy-inducing effects of a global pandemic, have made the concept of "gain of function research" into something that is somehow combinable with 23andMe's database.
I haven't been following much of the media coverage of things like this, or the social media rumor mills, but a comment like that makes it clear that public perception is going way off kilter. And that mismatch between public perception and reality is exactly what fuels bad policy in governments.
Your lack of concern for gain-of-function research is not shared by experts in the field. They almost uniformly appreciate that that there is a risk of creating a pandemic that would be unlikely to arise naturally, and they take strong (but, imo, not nearly strong enough) safety steps to prevent it.
Nature generally didn't develop wheels or nukes either, but humans did and use them to great effect.
You don't have to halt science to decide that the benefits of gain-of-function research is not worth the risk. We don't test nuclear weapons anymore either.
Our knowledge of pathogens is not good enough. See the current pandemic. The question is whether the net benefit of this sort of research, once the risk are properly accounted for, is larger than the benefit we could get with alternative research methods.
The fact that someone else is taking huge risks of unleashing another pandemic is not a good reason for us to do so.
0.000004 * 320,000,000 = 1,280 deaths for the entire USA.
Your higher estimate yields 10,240 deaths.
In reality we’ve had at least 700,000 deaths.
For those who are infected, the naive Case Fatality Rate is about 1-2%. See for example, https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid
There are reasons to suspect the real rate is lower in several countries - many places under test cases, so the denominator in deaths/cases is too small.
Additionally, this rate isn’t static - we were seeing upwards of 10% death rates before effective treatments became known and available.
This whole area might fall into the Sam Clemens quote:
"There are lies, damned lies and statistics"
Since 30 to 40 percent of humans experience no illness with this thing the denominator can be quite different depending on what you use for it. Notwithstanding that...
CFR (Case Fatality Rate) is very different than IFR (Infection fatality Rate). Many many more people have been infected but only the more severe cases tend to end up and be counted in the hospitals.
With this virus, especially the Delta variant, you can pretty much assume at least 80% of the population to get infected if there hadn't been all these measures.
Also not necessarily in the first or second wave...
I use an iPhone, keep all my casual media and textbooks on an iPad, and use a MacBook Pro for work. I'd really like to use Apple if I could, but I have no idea why all these people are supporting Apple maps.
I tried desperately to use it for half a year (in the US), gritting my teeth at the endless frustrations. From the inability to get info on any business or location other than a highly biased Yelp popup, to the voice directions telling me to turn as I'm approaching the turn before it actually wants me to turn, to the flat-out wrong streets. I've found myself being led to random dead-ends that the map said should be a thoroughfare, but obviously never had been and would unlikely be in any near future.
Similarly, I'm astonished at the bad service in their cloud, files, photos, music, and suite of office document programs. Just terrible for such a huge company. I can only conclude that they don't care, since they're making more than enough money on hardware.
