№ 570. Had Covid? You May Need Only One Dose of Vaccine, Study Suggests

People who have already been sick with Covid-19 should still be vaccinated, experts say, but they may experience intense side effects even after one dose.

By Cassandra Willyard

Published Feb. 1, 2021 / Updated Feb. 8, 2021

Shannon Romano, a molecular biologist, came down with Covid late last March, about a week after she and her colleagues shut down their lab at Mount Sinai Hospital. A debilitating headache came first, followed by a fever that kept rising, and then excruciating body aches. “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t move,” she said. “Every one of my joints just hurt inside.”

It was not an experience she wanted to repeat — ever. So when she became eligible for the Covid-19 vaccine earlier this month, she got the shot.

Two days after her injection, she developed symptoms that felt very familiar. “The way my head hurt and the way my body ached was the same headache and body ache I had when I had Covid,” she said. She recovered quickly, but her body’s intense response to the jab caught her by surprise.

 

Pfizer's Vaccine

 

A new study may explain why Dr. Romano and many others who have had Covid report these unexpectedly intense reactions to the first shot of a vaccine. In a study posted online on Monday, researchers found that people who had previously been infected with the virus reported fatigue, headache, chills, fever, and muscle and joint pain after the first shot more frequently than did those who had never been infected. Covid survivors also had far higher antibody levels after both the first and second doses of the vaccine.

№ 569. Artificial Intelligence & Capitalism

Student News Daily

 

TED CHIANG: I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it’s hard to distinguish the two.

Let’s think about it this way. How much would we fear any technology, whether A.I. or some other technology, how much would you fear it if we lived in a world that was a lot like Denmark or if the entire world was run sort of on the principles of one of the Scandinavian countries? There’s universal health care. Everyone has child care, free college maybe. And maybe there’s some version of universal basic income there.

Now if the entire world operates according to — is run on those principles, how much do you worry about a new technology then? I think much, much less than we do now. Most of the things that we worry about under the mode of capitalism that the U.S practices, that is going to put people out of work, that is going to make people’s lives harder, because corporations will see it as a way to increase their profits and reduce their costs. It’s not intrinsic to that technology. It’s not that technology fundamentally is about putting people out of work.

It’s capitalism that wants to reduce costs and reduce costs by laying people off. It’s not that like all technology suddenly becomes benign in this world. But it’s like, in a world where we have really strong social safety nets, then you could maybe actually evaluate sort of the pros and cons of technology as a technology, as opposed to seeing it through how capitalism is going to use it against us. How are giant corporations going to use this to increase their profits at our expense?

And so, I feel like that is kind of the unexamined assumption in a lot of discussions about the inevitability of technological change and technologically-induced unemployment. Those are fundamentally about capitalism and the fact that we are sort of unable to question capitalism. We take it as an assumption that it will always exist and that we will never escape it. And that’s sort of the background radiation that we are all having to live with. But yeah, I’d like us to be able to separate an evaluation of the merits and drawbacks of technology from the framework of capitalism.