I've taken the view that generally we really don't have news as we did in "the old days" (which itself is a bit of a myth as going back farther than what one might call the golden age of journalism/reporting - 60s/70s era perhaps - I think we'd see the same type of outcomes.). Generally I take most news or media outlets to basically be about opinion that is hung on a few facts. Fits right in with the view on biases and incomplete information (selected or just incomplete).
I also somewhat see this as a case of nature abhorring a vacuum. When we started up with the 24/7 outlets and added the increased speed of transmitting information (and reduced costs) I think the industry ended up with way more slack for the actual new information generated per unit time. Something had to fill the gaps. I think that also drove a dynamic related to (self declared?) expert personalities and all the talking heads we find.
That said, there probably is good value in knowing or at least being a bit familiar with the current framing and meme that are dominant in any given topic space. So perhaps there is news but just new on a slightly different margin.
You might need to narrow you question down by clearly defining just what you mean by "prepared".
For example, we (most governments and international organizations) were not prepared to respond and protect people in general nor prepared with some fallback plan for continuing needed economic and social activity during the event. We muddled though and in many cases individuals and individual organizations figured out what to do.
However, if we look at what happened when Trump got sick maybe government was prepared to perserve itself. The was a recent story about how he was actually much sicker than let on, almost to the point of putting him on a respirator. That was the report and I did not attempt to verify so.... If that was the case then clearly we have something that works wonders for the virus -- it's just not something the general public is being offered.
We might see the same with regards to any big electromagnetic event that causes sever damage to power grids and electronic things we depend so much on in our 21st Century lives. One might think that power to key government, military and research facilities will have a different experience than say, payment platforms, Amazon or Google processing data centers or even your local power provider or gas stations.
To me the big wakeup call here is less about what social institutions like government can do or could be expected to do and much more about everyone realizing the nature of the world we do live in. It's not safe, it's not kind and caring and in the end it is very important for everyone to take that into consideration as they live their own lives. While I am not a doom's dayer or survivalist I do think they get that aspect of living right.
In other words, I think people in general have gotten very complacent about the risky and unpredictable nature of our world. Adjustments on that margin will probably make the world as a whole a bit more robust than calls for government or international actions -- not that such is not also needed but I think it only gets so far due to the inherent problems of that type of collective action.
I'm a bit confused by "you" in the claim. If we're talking about individuals I'm not at all sure one must put a monetary value on something. That seems to suggest nominal values are more accurate than real, subjective personal values those monetary units represent.
In a more general setting, markets for instance, I think a stronger case can be made but for any given individual am not certain it would be required.
Broadening it out more, where multiple people are trying to work together to some ends I think would be the strongest case.
Willingness or ability?
Doesn't this speak to your concern:
Spike 802-823cir: FSQ c LPDPSKPSKRSF c EDLLF ( Cys4, Cys17 disulfide)
IN TESTING, vaccine Generations 5, 6, 7, 8. 9
To preserve the loop structure present in the native conformation, we substituted cysteines for amino acids 4 (Ile>Cys) and 17 (Ile>Cys).
They perform the substitution to keep the shape that our immune system is looking for by recreating a disulfide bond that to form a loop with the same sequence the B-cells are targeting in the virus.
While I agree their expression was "potentially beneficial" (or close) it seems clear to me the point was our B-cells are bonding to that loop and if there are not other aspect in the larger peptide that lead the cell to that site for bonding, construction the loop via the disulfide bond they introduce logically should result in triggering an immune response.
I'm not sure why they would need to provide some type of citation for this, much less that they would even have a source for this specific application.
That somehow doesn't feel quite right -- something of a different class of things, unless you're saying that the general American perception now is we deserved the attack.
I would think perhaps the Vietnam War memorial might be a better case -- still not quite the same (I might even go as far as to say something of a mirror image).
Would an alternative (and possibly easier) approach be to simply take some additional doses -- it's my understanding that you really cannot make yourself sick with this type of vaccine -- over a week and then retest for antibodies?
If that still fails then consider figuring out how to perform your own mucus testing.
Thanks for the write up! I started to do this myself but quickly found I was a bit confused on how to even order the peptides. I was expecting to be able to search product lines but.... Not really possible. So...is the process to simply identify some suppliers (not hard to find with Google) give them the amino acid sequences in the instructions and ask for a quote? (Hit that initial speed bump and have not gotten back to looking for phone numbers or customer support chat windows.)
Just a thought. So this doesn't scale well for storage and shipping it sounds but production is pretty simply and materials seem to be fairly durable for storage (I don't think the peptides decay quickly). If so, couldn't the model be that a small lab at the many, many, many pharmacy (or at lest the big chains) stores make batches for the appointments they have scheduled. Given that the delivery method seem to be better (thanks for bringing that up -- was going to ask) and that should take out a lot of the supply chain bottlenecks we have been seeing I would think. (Or once the transition and supporting setup/infrastructure locally is done.)
The other question, having taken this is there any concern about being required later to also take one of the officially blessed vaccines. This might be even more important is you don't show the antibodies for some reason but have reacted to the vaccine. I don't think I completely read the radvac white paper but don't recall them having any section that might have spoken to that.
Again, great write up and contribution.
One potential implication seems to be that if there are things I need to get done and an 80% level of done is acceptable then I can save a lot of time for things I really need to get 100% done.
A few comments on aspects I think under/not noted.
I think perhaps sometimes the retirement focus on the financial aspects only could miss some important aspects of that retirement as well as reduce the options set considered for accomplishing the more general goal of achieving those "golden years".