The BBC is reporting that a European Medicines Agency study found a small but statistically significant link between mRNA vaccines and myocarditis (2 per million for Pfizer, 1 per million for Moderna - but spread out over nearly 100 million people, many of whom have no especial predisposition to myocarditis). Young men were the most common group affected OxfordAstrazeneca and Janssen had no reliably-linked cases, but in your position it would be wise to wait for more information before opting for either over Novovax (which wasn't in the study but as far as I know isn't connected to myocarditis).

I see the words as a page (or, later, two pages if both were visible) of text, and the text pretty much goes in one line or one short paragraph at a time. Which was great until I had to say what I was reading (since, like everyone else, I can only speak one phoneme at a time...) My secondary school had a speed-reading class, but the requirement was to be below a certain reading speed, so I never qualified. I think it was aimed at teaching techniques to get the gist of an exam question quickly, to avoid situations where the entire question was missed due to being daunted at the amount of reading involved under time pressure.

That would be the best answer, I think. The intern co-ordinator should know who she worked with and pass on thanks to everyone. It's OK to list departments if there were too many individuals to make thanking every single individual plausible (even then, thanking a few standout individuals as well is awesome).

I wouldn't do it, because we don't even know what amount of vaccine is needed for it to work in an 11-year-old yet (it may well be less than for a 12-year-old), nor whether there will be reactions in that age group not seen (or not yet seen) in the 12-15 crowd. While it's not likely that there would be adverse consequences since trials in 12-year-olds have been successful, there could be a lot of problems if DD turns out to be the exception (especially since, being in the USA, getting the vaccine against medical advice). Is there a trial to which DD can be signed, or is it feasible to defer returning to school until January? Indeed, if there are some special reasons why DD should be an exception, is there a doctor who would be willing to grant a medical exemption [EDIT: exemption to the conventional rules regarding vaccine administration] (if an exemption is to be granted, it definitely shouldn't be by internet forum but by professional medical opinion)?

Masks are still technically law where I live, but most people seem to have stopped wearing them, and the only place that appears to be successfully enforcing it is the library (which unlike the other shops, has a security guard due to staff getting assaulted in the last few years). It feels quite dangerous, especially since lots of people either aren't vaccinated or are partway through vaccination (I can't have dose #2 for another month). I am quite sure this is part of the reason the law requiring masks and social distancing has been delayed by 4 weeks - as if people are paying attention to that any more. Many people are bored with the virus, but the virus is not bored of them if the increased infection statistics are any sign.

Novovax has been trying to get UK approval since March, but so far as not managed it due to problems with production consistency (presumably because of the sap issue @Corraleno cited). It is not clear when it will successfully demonstrate the necessary production consistency. Penelope, the reports do mean two shots are needed to get the headline figure for not catching COVID-19 in the first place (symptomatic or otherwise). Due to the problems that are being reported from people who have complications not involving a hospital visit for COVID (11.6% chance of post-COVID first-time psychiatric/neurological problem in certain specific categories in the 6-month period after catching COVID without hospitalisation for COVID), that's starting to become a concern for the medical profession; we could be carrying the consequences of COVID for a long time even after reducing the infection itself to a rare and mostly-minor issue.

LD - licenced dietician. It's probable that this is a genuine doctor specialising in nutrition. but that your friend needs either a different doctor in the same field - or a specialist in a different field (as it's not obvious that the issue is necessarily to do with diet, and there's nothing in those postnominals to suggest this doctor is specialised in non-diet medical matters). Unfortunately I have no further advice to offer, and can only wish your friend the best in the search for treatment.

North Korea is a monoculture. While I believe there are other reasons for its current position, I do not think it can be considered an advertisement for monoculture. I think it's one of those things, that there are places that are monocultural, but once other cultures become established, the process is irreversible using ethical means. It makes about as much sense to talk about multiculturalism failing as it does currency bartering. More likely, the person complaining multiculturalism is failing is trying to express something else and struggling to find a way of phrasing it where both speaker and listeners would universally agree on what the issue was (let alone its solutions).

You assume correctly. Hence why only dose 1 is the aim for the next 4 weeks. New York's stance does not surprise me; I believe the UK is having the equivalent rule for at least some of its test re-openings of mass events, assessed via the NHS app (that is to say, non-UK-approved vaccines aren't treated as valid vaccination by the app, thus don't allow access on "vaccination" grounds). It's just that, since the UK has approved four of the most common vaccines and is on course to approve two more, so many fewer people are caught out. Also, they're also allowing anyone to turn up with a recent negative test, partly to avoid age discrimination charges (most adults under-40 are still in the process of vaccination) and partly to avoid exclusions based on not having a smartphone (over 20% of UK adults don't have one and therefore can't have the NHS app). Must be really frustrating for the people who want tickets, are likely to be immune and would probably be happy to prove it if given a mechanism actually accessible to them. Effectiveness against Delta in the UK drops for all vaccines (links to sources in the news article), as expected for a variant with partial vaccine escape, but the drop for OxfordAstrazeneca is only to 60% (slightly lower than J&J's against COVID-19 in general). Pfizer drops to 79% - a bigger fall but the baseline effectiveness is so high that the fall still protects most people who get it. Of those who get Delta while double-vaccinated, there's over 85% protection from going to hospital regardless of whether Pfizer or OxfordAstrazeneca is the chosen vaccine (as you'd expect given the other statistics so far, Pfizer is even more protective). I hope Melissa Louise finds this reassuring.

If it's any comfort, puberty temporarily causes many children (possibly the majority) to have more difficulty with academics and anything else requiring clear thinking. Your daughter will get all her academic ability back, and more. Unless you have some specific reason to suspect learning disabilities (some become more apparent at puberty), I'd be inclined to extend grace to your daughter and yourself, give her some good resources on puberty's effect on thinking if she's not had any yet, and take things steady (as in, keep academic requirements consistent and ease off a little if necessary at a specific point) for a while until things stabilise.

This is true. People who cannot afford to learn - or who are obliged to be in places which cannot afford to teach - is incompatible with college/university, let alone a STEM career. Considering the number of STEM people I know who are having trouble getting jobs, perhaps issuing more specific and helpful careers advice (to the government as well as to potential employees) wouldn't hurt either. After all, there are degrees in many fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and there's demand for graduates with specific versions of these degrees, but I've never seen a degree in STEM universally accepted by employers who want "STEM" graduates...

In Manaus, we don't know where the reinfections ended up, because most people in the first wave didn't get tested (even if they went to hospital). Much like the UK at its overwhelm phase, they had to go with "if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck..." assessment. That's why the serological testing is the only alternative to anecdontal evidence available in most parts of the world. Also, Manaus is very crowded, has lots of districts in severe poverty and unlike Queens and Mumbai, had a government that at that time was refusing to put in any meaningful protections against the virus. Obviously Queens and Mumbai had multiple reasons for not being able to fully implement said protections, but at least they weren't been told by officialdom to carry on as usual and that masks were for [slur]s. These point to high infection and re-infection rate. (I'm also going to add that the range I saw in the research was 25%-61%. There's no scope for a 76% in there, so I've no idea where Penelope is getting that figure from.) In the UK, everyone 18 and over will be able to book a 1st vaccine appointment by the end of this week, with the hope that every adults who wants a vaccine will have had their first dose by the point, in 4 weeks' time, when social distancing limits are removed.

They took the high seroprevalence and worked out it was mathematically impossible for there not to have been reinfection, and that unless the sample was deliberately selected to find people who'd been infected twice at the time of the study... So no, that assumption cannot be faulty - the faults are more likely to be in the mathematical model used to figure out how much of it was happening (which is why the range is so large). Bear in mind that this is also the model used for assessing it in other studies such as this one among the US Marine Corps recruits (which indicates 80% protection from infection in that population at 1-12 months from previous infection, assuming detectable amounts of antibodies from the original infection). Due to common advice to not go to places that would have involved tests before testing becoming widely available, that severely limits which parts of the world would be able to provide the standard of evidence you want (I think only south-east Asia had decent asymptomatic test regimes for the first wave, and most of that didn't and doesn't involve genetic sequencing, which cannot be reliably done with lateral flow testing because it doesn't deliberately retain the virus if found. As Pen said, even PCR testing has some complications). For the rest of the world, if serological evidence is to be ignored, anecdontal reports are the only remaining path to collecting evidence. Since by this point I know several people who have had COVID two and even three times (the former category is perhaps 20% of the people I know, in a place that has made efforts to stop the virus), I can't dismiss it as a rare event the way I've seen some try to do, (Most of them didn't go to hospital any of the times they got it, but two people died as a result of their second infection). We have seen partial immune escape with the Delta and P.1 variants, certainly in the UK. That's why the UK's so concerned with those variants. (They've proven far less apt to vaccine-based immunity than initially feared, though).

The first link is about original SARS, which is extinct. (The conclusions are rock-solid for people who got original SARS in 2003/2004; we just can't assume the same will happen with COVID-19). The second link indicates that immunity from infection varies widely depending on which features changed (spike protein-based protection appears to last a lot longer than the CD4+ T and CD8+ T cells that respond to other elements of the protein). This may help explain why people's resistance to reinfection (from any source) varies.

Brazil had received some vaccines as part of various international vaccine creators' testing phases - notably OxfordAstraZeneca and SinoVac, as early as July 2020. During this phase, 14,000 Brazillians were due to be vaccinated with OxfordAstrazeneca , which was then increased to 19,000 later in the phase (14,000 other people had SinoVac, which failed its Phase III test phase due to only 50% effectiveness). Sputnik also did Phase III testing in September. While "production" vaccination had not begun, SinoVac turned out to be not much use, and proportional vaccination counts pre-second-surge will have been low, some people were test participants for OxfordAstrazeneca and therefore had been vaccinated. The 25% is the lowest figure in the range used by The Guardian , which used this study from CADDE as its reference point that looked at serological (i.e. blood) samples from blood donors in Manaus. The samples themselves seem to be at the lower rate, but among other issues, all of the samples were from blood donors... ...and people with known COVID don't donate blood while still infected. Note the study has not been peer-reviewed, but is modifiable by anyone approved to edit files in that section of CADDE. Also note the researchers state that other forms of epidemiological testing need to be done to confirm the exact rate of reinfection, which is reasonable considering the potential range provided. For both these reasons, I'm inclined to believe the true figure is at/around the lower end of the provided range, rather than the 61% reinfection rate offered as an upper figure. (Note that if natural immunity at 6-8 months is 75% and not lower, that still gives natural infection a better protection rate than either one-dose or two-dose Johnson & Johnson, though other vaccines approved in the USA have considerably better performance against COVID. This is a relative vilnerability, not an absolute one). Other things I found out while checking that particular statistic: there has been a study in The Lancet from the collected Danish PCR data. 0.65% of people who had a positive test in the first surge later recorded a separate result in the second surge (compared with 3.27% of those who didn't have a positive test prior to the second surge). It was calculated from this in the Denmark cohort, infection gives just over 80% protection against reinfection (lower than the mRNA vaccines, either lower or higher than OxfordAstrazeneca depending on which dataset one uses, but higher than Johnson & Johnson single-dose). My understanding was that the vaccines offered broader-scope protection than infections, because of the "improved training ground" hypothesis, and I've never previously seen the other school of thought expressed. So far, none of the Chinese vaccines has passed Phase III testing in the UK, so I'm sceptical of the notion that those vaccines would be an improvement over the vaccines that have so far succeeded at that stage of testing (Pfizer, Moderna, OzfordAstrazeneca, both Johnson & Johnson versions - as well as Novovax, which is only awaiting approval due to delays in proving production consistency). While looking for the information here, I discovered that The Gambia has had someone get reinfected with a similar strain of COVID-19 (B.1, then B.1.1.74) five months after the initial infection, without long COVID being involved. A Danish study has revealed that 95% of people who get infected do develop some sort of immune response after infection, which is well above herd immunity at the outset - but the protection from infection appears to fade faster than vaccine protection does. (The April 2020 OxfordAstrazeneca Phase I trial participants have thus far not needed a booster).

This sounds like Pathological Demand Avoidance may be part of the picture (which is more common in autistic people than neurotypicals), and that is hard. I'd be inclined to apologise (or not) as you see fit, on a case-by-case basis - and give yourself as much grace as possible. Looking after yourself is something you will definitely need to do, especially since a lot of people with autism pick up on stress in people around them (potentially resulting in cascades in their behaviours) without necessarily identifying that it's come from someone else (let alone that they might be able to do anything about it). If Pathological Demand Avoidance gives you any further sources of support (especially ones not needing to engage with the "two states" problem), investigating that angle may be wise. Here is a guide for parents/carers, a guide aimed at autistic adults (which you might want to read yourself before deciding whether to share it with DD14) and an account from an autistic adult with PDA. The PDA Society may also have some helpful information, though if there's an American equivalent, that would likely be more helpful.

There were three things going on there: 1) Brazil's vaccination rate was very low at that point due to low supply partly brought on by political issues and partly due to supply. This meant a bunch of people with no source whatsoever of immunity got the P.1 variant. 2) 25% of people that the sample showed to have had COVID earlier got it again. My understanding is that having COVID-19 gives immunity to that specific variant in most people, but that the effectiveness against other variants depends on the extent to which the immune system is able to adapt its behaviour to those variants - not something that can be relied upon. Vaccines, at least in theory, offer a better "teaching environment" and thus work more reliably against a broader range of variants for the average person than infection does - but good luck making a scientifically valid experiment testing that theory! 3) The total of 1) and 2) was sufficient to overload Manaus' not-especially-good hospital services. This led to a lot of people dying from complications brought on by lack of treatment, rather than the people in 1) and 2), who died from COVID-19 despite medical care. This is why flattening the curve matters - it's the difference between a relatively small number of people dying and a large number. There isn't really a situation where a moderate number of people die, because either the hospitals are overloaded or they're not.

The UK accepts two doses of approved vaccines as full vaccination, including mixed doses (trials, plus some people who were allergic to OxfordAstrazeneca/mRNA on dose #1 and given the opposite type to avoid allergies on dose #2), and other countries that accept proof of vaccination are accepting NHS-backed mixed doses as proof of full vaccination. Provided you can get both doses recorded, I do not think mixed doses will be a barrier to travel. At this point, the larger issue is that many countries don't take vaccination into account for their travel policies at all. Can't comment on the effectiveness situation yet because the research is ongoing, but I've not heard any safety-related horror stories from mixed vaccination.

The policy is outright dangerous, and it is not surprising that boss is having trouble holding onto staff.

I would not consider "demented" an acceptable insult for a psychiatrist to use. Especially over an entire category of people on the basis of perceived impossibility to understand. "Demented" isn't simply fighting words, like "no good apples" or "bullying" might be seen. In the psychiatrist's profession, it's a relatively precise word with powerful consequences. Psychiatrists encounter patients who initially seem impossible to understand on a frequent basis. "Demented" can be and often in the past has resulted in inappropriately sending people into restrictive, institutional settings. "Demented" has wongly cost some people their freedom, their quality of life, and sometimes their lives. For some people, the very fear of being treated as "demented" worsens their conditions, so even if the psychiatrist can't or doesn't directly sign any such order, it increases the risk of something happening down the road that results in someone else consigning that patient to an institution. The licence to practice psychiatry carries the potential to have the power to send patients into an institution, and most patients never find out if a psychiatrist has that power unless and until it's used against them. (If the psychiatrist is in a private institution, it's worse, since every single member of medical staff in such an institution has the power to extend or worsen the situation). It's particularly worrying given that this psychiatrist appears to specialise in treating Black people. Partly due to a history of being misunderstood, Black people are far more likely than white people to be minsunderstood in therapeutic settings, and in the UK are four times more likely than white people to be referred to a restrictive institution. Thanks to the white-centered approach still taught by most psychology schools, the race of a practitioner is no bar to race-based alienation. If psychiatrists behave like patients' worst expectations of one race, the fact they are of an entirely different race is neither use nor ornament to retaining healthy responses to that situation. I would be seriously concerned that this psychiatrist would be at risk of sending too many of her patients into institutions unnecessarily - especially Black people. Thus, I can see exactly why there are calls for the medical licence to be revoked - even if the most that would be likely to happen in the UK would likely be a reprimand (since no actual patients were involved and this does not appear to be a deliberate attempt to sway general public opinion). (I can overlook pretty much everything else as potentially being rhetorical effect to really bring the message home to a group of people who are in unusually high need of understanding the psychodynamics of racial oppression, even as I recognise it would be an awful way to speak about anyone outside that controlled environment initially intended by Yale. Trigger warnings are a reasonable response to this getting such large amounts of public traction, since a lot of people looking at the link won't know what to expect, and the warning is a courtesy that allows people to self-manage their information content).

The definition I was using for the UK's of "mild" covers any symptom believed to have been caused by a vaccine (on that system, myocarditis diagnosed as such requires a hospital visit long enough to get the diagnosis and is therefore automatically "severe"). I did not realise you or the articles to which you referred were defining degrees of myocarditis. Sorry for causing confusion.

Perhaps one sense is being experienced as another (synaesthesia)? Accommodation is your best course here; previous posters have proposed many good ideas for helping with this.

Other things to ask about: Ask about memory aids. Sometimes it's possible to get recommendations for these through the IEP process, even if they are not then funded on the IEP. An anxiety plan (that is to say, make sure dd knows what she can do, and (if that doesn't work) where would be a safe place to go, if she feels an anxiety incident coming on - updated for each location where the answer is different). Sometimes knowing there's a safety valve in place can reduce the need for the safety valve to be used. Have a plan for how to initiate contact, that can be consulted at need (and prompted if necessary, as it likely will the first few times). You are asking good questions. Best wishes with the IEP meeting!

I've seen transcripts that are 12 pages long, and I've seen some of the "as little information as possible" school. My guess is that Hillsdale wants something in between, with certain expected information, and that for a time it thought advising people to go through a third party was more likely to get it what it wanted. Happy to see it realised clearer instructions were more likely to work.

To expand: "building a class" is not a lottery system, but a "meritocracy" where some of the "merit" features are hidden from the applicants (and often, at least initially, from the admissions team - the tubist in 8filltheheart's example might not be known to be needed until the tubist quits playing at concert-level halfway through the spring semester to focus on their sophomore engineering course, for example). "Building a class" is a valid recruitment system, but inadvertent moulding applicants to the implied mean (that may not even be what the schools wanted in the first place) is a clear downside when lots of prominent schools employ it in similar ways. If students mostly hear about schools with moulding requirements, the majority will mould accordingly - even if they're only hearing about 6 schools out of thousands and all the ones they don't hear about use different criteria. That in turn affects the applicant pools for the schools who use different criteria... (Good school advice would probably help here, though this is difficult in a system with thousands of options, all of which are viable for at least some students but none of which are viable for every student).