I’ve thought long and hard about this. There is a constellation of circumstantial evidence around the most recently identified variant P.1, and what has been happening in Manaus, Brazil which makes me very seriously concerned. A thread 🧵

First Manaus has already been very hard hit by the pandemic. News reports in earlier stages told of rushed burials and bodies piling up https://t.co/sMkOwCmzVx
The crucial thing was the rapid rates of transmission, not really mitigated by ‘flattening the curve’ any. total per capita mortality was not as high as might be expected elsewhere, but only because the age structure of the population in Manaus skews young https://t.co/pZ43BPloj3
(I just did the calculation, the numbers of deaths are quite consistent with independent estimates of age stratified IFRs as per https://t.co/FlvXNRuECE)
By October 2020, 76% of the population were estimated to have been infected. This is based on a convenience sample of antibodies found in blood donors. I don’t like convenience samples and the true figure might well be lower, but not a lot lower https://t.co/gJ3nRJ19hL
That’s a large proportion, one might reasonably expect some degree of ‘herd immunity’, achieved at great cost. So given all that immunity, what’s happening in Manaus now? There’s actually an 'eruption' of infections, O2 shortages and escalating deaths https://t.co/8RSmY9MmVy
At the same time, the variant P.1, which I wrote about a couple days ago, has been identified.

https://t.co/M3r8hjlMKh
There’s not great sampling at present from the earlier stages of the pandemic in Manaus, so a lot may have happened evolution wise off camera, but the P.1 lineage is not recorded before November. It was 42% of samples from 15-23rd Dec CAVEAT not large numbers
I often complain that sampling doesn't account for sample size, bias etc. If this where a regular mutant, and somewhere other than Manau, I'd be complaining loudly. As it is I think we need to pay close attention
None of this is good but what does it mean? Well first Manaus shows what a ‘herd immunity’ strategy looks like in the absence of a vaccine: a huge amount of illness and death, a significant amount among those who cannot be callously written off as having 'comorbidities'
The factors favoring the emergence of P.1 in Brazil are not clear. If it’s like similar variants it may well be more transmissible. But is that enough in a place where you’d expect existing immunity to act as a brake? I don't know right now
We should be watching P.1 very closely indeed for data on both immune escape, and a different spectrum of severity from what we’re used to. I really hope this turns out to be a data artefact of some kind but worried it won’t. And the virus travels well
Especially when you close the stable door after... sigh

/end

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In the spring and summer of 2016, as reported by the Times, activity we traced to GRU was reported to the FBI. This was the standard model of interaction companies used for nation-state attacks against likely US targeted.

In the Spring of 2017, after a deep dive into the Fake News phenomena, the security team wanted to publish an update that covered what we had learned. At this point, we didn’t have any advertising content or the big IRA cluster, but we did know about the GRU model.

This report when through dozens of edits as different equities were represented. I did not have any meetings with Sheryl on the paper, but I can’t speak to whether she was in the loop with my higher-ups.

In the end, the difficult question of attribution was settled by us pointing to the DNI report instead of saying Russia or GRU directly. In my pre-briefs with members of Congress, I made it clear that we believed this action was GRU.
THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)