this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2023
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Apparently, a strain of influenza, B/Yamagata, went extinct, perhaps because of COVID. Go figure.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Oh for sure ... by "lockdown" I'm referring to the general suite of civil measures including masks etc ... basically anything other than a vaccine or preventative medicine.

And of course, an additional dimension here is that influenza is no slouch of a virus .... eradicating the flu would be significant for public health. So to my mind, kinda accidentally eradicating a strain of it should be a big "huh ... how did we do that again?" rather than just "now we need to adjust our vaccines".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for posting this. Most I read about these days is how it has never made any dent scientifically but maybe I‘m getting sucked into propaganda there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What has never made a dent scientifically? The lockdowns during the pandemic? I mean that’s demonstrably false … fewer people got the virus without without the protection of a vaccine because of them. And some places managed to eradicate the virus with them, which saddens me because if we’d managed to limit infections and the amount of mutations and variants until vaccines came through, we could be in a different world now. Like, COVID could be extinct and no one talks about it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

I‘m actually not even sure where I heard this. Good that you mention it now. I‘ll be on the lookout. This is why it’s important to talk about stuff every now and then.