Partial reprogramming in mice has shown promising results in alleviating age-related symptoms without increasing the risk of cancer.
Actually, it’s not really known whether or not partial reprogramming increases the risk of cancer.
Florin
Karma: 127
rates of cancer in biologically young people are very low.
And in the OP:
Anti-aging is more feasible for extending healthy lifespan rather than solving the individual diseases of aging
Sometimes, focusing on one disease is necessary, like in the case of cancer. To reach LEV, the risk of dying from cancer would need to be zero. The only way to get there in any reasonable amount of time is to developed a way (like WILT) of dealing specifically with cancer.
Aging Biotech Info
https://agingbiotech.infoLongevityList (companies search)
https://longevitylist.com/explore/?type=company&sort=latest
Mistakes
Not wearing a respirator
Living with people that don’t wear respirators
Assuming that if you don’t have symptoms, you weren’t infected
Assuming that you won’t get long covid because you’ve had minimal symptoms
Mask synthesis: Use elastomeric respirators. Elastomerics offer better fit and more protection (N100) than any disposable PPE. If necessary, develop respirators that fit even better with little to no fit testing (like PAPRs).
Expert consensus: “Don’t wear a mask...oops, wear a cloth or surgical mask until you get vaccinated.” This advice has led to millions of preventable deaths and counting.
Conclusion: Don’t worship experts. When making critical decisions, quadruple-check any expert advice (especially if it’s about a soft science). If the advise doesn’t make sense, disregard it and make a decision based on your own research and reasoning.
I understand that you’re trying to analyze the policy failures in terms of dialectic reasoning, but the policy about masks that results from that reasoning is not good enough. So, perhaps first-principles thinking should be emphasized as a better way to formulate policy, at least in certain situations.
The policy position about masks would be to recommend the use of elastomerics (assuming adequate supply) but not to mandate their use. Mandates would only be required if compliance was so low that there was a high risk of hospitals becoming overwhelmed.
Assuming adequate supply of elastomerics again, vents are mostly a non-issue. If some people would want to risk infection by not wear an elastomeric, that would remain a personal decision. Also, the users of elastomerics would have a much lower chance of being contagious.
Vents would be a problem only in special circumstances like nursing home care where disposable PPE would be more appropriate.[Ventless elastomerics are available such as the MSA Advantage 290, so disposable respirators seem completely unnecessary in any circumstance.]
PAPRs have the potential to be better than elastomeric respirators. They can be cheaper (the DIY kind), filter incoming and outgoing air as well as an N100 filter, and fit testing and seal checks aren’t needed.
For any pandemic (especially bioengineered pandemics), the worst case scenario should be assumed:
1) Any treatment or prophylactic will either not work or not be able to be scaled up quickly enough.
2) Some viruses will spread completely asymptomatically and have very long incubation periods.
3) Some viruses will kill effectively regardless of age or health status.
The strategy that has the best chance of successfully dealing with this threat is to develop 1) a global pathogen surveillance system and 2) cheap and effective personal aerosol filtration systems. The surveillance system should ideally be decentralized for data collection and data access. An example of this kind of system is the demonpore platform. The filtration system would be (or similar to) an elastomeric respirator or PAPR. Everyone will need to possess and know how to correctly use the filtration system before a pandemic hit.
https://www.demonpore.com
https://wefunder.com/demonpore
Actually, I didn’t mean to advise against developing treatments and prophylactics, but in the context of a zero sum game or in a fund-only-the-best-approaches game, I would advise pursuing the surveillance/PPE strategy rather than treatments and prophylactics. To be clear, I should have wrote something like this: “While treatments and prophylactics might work for some pandemics, we should assume that they won’t work for others, especially the bioengineered kind. Since we won’t know ahead of time which pandemic we’ll have to deal with next, we should assume that it will be the worst-case kind and plan accordingly.” In a mild pandemic (like this one), a lot of people won’t want to wear PPE, and that’s why treatments and prophylactics should still be developed.
I don’t see how any kind of virus (bioengineered or otherwise) could evade a surveillance system that could detect the presence of any unknown viruses and cause a pandemic even if nearly everyone wore PAPRs. That seems physically impossible.
If you’re only concerned about how limited funding should be allocated between antivirals and vaccines, most of the funding should go to vaccines, because we already know that they can work well. However, with more development, antivirals have the potential to overtake vaccines in performance (e.g., DRACO), so a smaller but substantial amount of funding should be allocated for this research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2020/09/kimer-med-founded-to-develop-the-draco-antiviral-strategy/
If everyone wears ventless FFP2s, I doubt that enough aerosols could escape regardless of factors such as fit, mask degradation, or talking. However, I’d like to see this assumption tested in a controlled environment.
If we should wear anything, it should be elastomeric respirators with P100 filters or DIY PAPRs (along with eye protection), not masks. While masks may have worked to control the transmission of the earlier, less contagious strains, they failed to prevent the massive winter wave caused by more contagious variants, and since Delta is even more contagious, mask are probably close to useless now.
Masks can can act as a source control measure and as PPE. Unfortunately, while masks may eliminate droplets, they don’t seem to have done a good enough job at eliminating aerosols. So, source control isn’t practical with masks. And masks are usually a lot less effective PPE than well-fitted, N95 respirators.
But N95s often provide poor fit, and when that’s the case, they are no more effective as PPE than surgical masks. However, they may provide far better source control than masks, but unfortunately, nearly everyone needs to wear them to make a significant difference.
In the US, there probably won’t be high mortality or hospitalization rates from Delta largely due to high vaccination rates in older age groups, so there probably won’t be a return to widespread lockdowns or even mask mandates. That means PPE will be one of the best means of protection, and elastomerics and PAPRs are the best forms of PPE.
Microcovid.org seems to be using an outdated source, “Howard et al. Evidence Review (version 4 from Oct 2020),” but frankly, it doesn’t matter much anyway since we know that masks (mostly the cloth and surgical kind) couldn’t stop the more contagious variants that caused the winter wave nor could masks stop the UK’s massive surge of Delta infections.
If masks were the only PPE available, doing a hail mary by wearing them might be okay, but since vastly better PPE is readily available today, advising people to wear poor protection makes no sense.
...I note here that if vaccines were sufficiently ineffective in practice against Delta, there would be no reasonable way to stop the pandemic, and I’d want to do the opposite of the implications listed here and stop trying.
I don’t see how this can be correct. Effective PPE exists in the form of elastomeric respirators and PAPRs that should be able to stop any pandemic.
The same reasoning was deployed against wearing masks and doing most of the restrictions and I suspect also against switching from masks to respirators before and even during the winter wave. Millions died as a direct result of this poor reasoning. The same mistake is being repeated in countries that have little access to vaccines. Millions more will die there, if they haven’t already. And what if it will become clear that vaccines won’t be able to prevent (due to some variant worse than Delta) another massive wave of infections that leads to lots of long covid and death? Should the arbitrary personal preferences about face coverings of a handful of policy makers determine the fate of millions or even billions of people? No, the lesson should be that how you feel about personally using an option shouldn’t shape general recommendations or public policy; all reasonable options should be presented and the public should be allowed to choose which option to use, if any.
The argument depends on the population. If people have access to effective vaccines, then effective PPE like elastomeric respirators are probably not needed except perhaps by the most risk-averse individuals. I say “probably” because there still seems to be a bit of uncertainty about long covid even for the vaccinated. At any rate, elastomerics should still be recommended as a replacement of masks in case a variant comes along and makes vaccines significantly less effective or as an option for people that still don’t trust vaccines. This would also encourage the public to get used to the idea of using respirators for future pandemics and give a larger part of the public motivation and more time to prepare. For the rest of the world where vaccines are scarce or of poor effectiveness (and given the fact that masks don’t seem to work all that well against variants), respirators could be used as a bridge to vaccination or other effective medical interventions.
Calls for more effective PPE for the public is nothing new but has mostly fallen on deaf ears. Elastomerics were mentioned on this site and in a few other places near the start of the pandemic but were mostly were ignored. There was a push during the winter wave for better PPE, but instead of switching to respirators, multi-layered masks were recommended in the US for poor personal preference reasons. Germany started to recommend everything from surgical masks all the way up to disposable (and often leaky) respirators but elastomerics were not mentioned as far as I know. I haven’t bothered looking for more recent face covering recommendations of other countries, but I highly doubt that any are recommending elastomerics, and the WHO (like the CDC) certainly doesn’t mention respirators at all. The situation is a lot worse for PAPRs. Very few people know that these things exist and even fewer know that cheap (and seemingly effective) PAPRs are possible; even I wasn’t aware of the things until a few months ago. This persistent and widespread avoidance of recommending effective PPE for no good reason seems bizarre and quite insane.
Another point that should be emphasized is that the longer people don’t have access to effective vaccines and also don’t have adequate protection (respirators and PAPRs), the more likely it will be for more dangerous variants to evolve. This situation is a repeat of what happened during the start of the pandemic when mask wearing was discouraged: it allowed the virus to spread like wildfire and accelerated the emergence of dangerous variants.
Another potential problem with giving up is that you may get reinfected multiple times if enough dangerous variants emerge and your risk of death and long covid may dramatically increase.
4. If you do worry about it...
...wear effective PPE (elastomeric respirator + eye protection or PAPR) and never worry about it again.
SENS and Hallmarks shouldn’t be mixed as was done here and in the OP; although both sometimes overlap, they’re separate and distinct. Aubrey de Grey was the first to categorize aging damage and strategies to repair that damage (SENS) back in 2002 and published Ending Aging in 2007 to further popularize it. But he didn’t publish Hallmarks, and Hallmarks doesn’t always overlap with SENS (e.g., no cure for cancer, ignores crosslinks). Hallmarks also advocates lots of messing-with-metabolism (gerontology rather than the engineering/maintenance/damage repair approach), which is a big no-no from the SENS perspective. And while Hallmarks is popular in academia, SENS is not, unfortunately. It all boils down to this: the SENS approach has a decent chance of reaching LEV in the not-too-distant future, whereas Hallmarks doesn’t and never claimed to.