Category: pandemic

More evidence that COVID-19 had a zoonotic (animal) origin and didn’t come from a lab

August 19, 2021 • 10:30 am

“Zoonotic,” in case you didn’t know, refers to an infectious disease transmitted between animals. And, in a post a few days ago, I highlighted a paper in Science suggesting that the coronavirus did originate as a zoonotic disease: it came from horseshoe bats and was transferred by bats to another mammal (one likely candidate is the palm civet or “civet cat”, a viverrid, not a felid), and then from this mammalian carrier to humans in Wuhan “wet markets.” The authors emphasized that there was no evidence that the virus came out of the local lab.

A new paper in press in Cell comes to the same conclusion, though they summarize all the evidence, not just the phylogenetic evidence (family tree of viruses). The new paper, however, is not as certain about the species of mammal that transferred the virus from bat to human. But they are pretty sure that the virus was not cultured in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), and then either escaped or was somehow released to cause disease. This paper, which Matthew called to my attention, has an international team of distinguished disease experts as authors, and they summarize all the evidence that COVID-19 is a purely zoonotic disease and escaped from a Wuhan wet market, not from the WIV. The paper is really only 11 pages long, and you can download the pdf by clicking on the screenshot below.

I’ll just summarize the lines of evidence (there’s more in the paper, too, but the first 11 pages of double-spaced text is all you need to read.

1.) All previous coronavirus infections of humans (viruses other than SARS-CoV2, or what I’ll call COVID-19) have a zoonotic origin, several of which had their origin in “wet markets” selling animals like civet cats and raccoon dogs. Workers in these markets have high concentrations of antibodies against various coronaviruses.

2.) The sequence of COVID-19 is similar to that of other coronaviruses in humans known to have zoonotic origins.

3.) Epidemiologically, the spread of the virus strongly implicates the wet market in Wuhan as the source, not the WIV.  As the authors note:

Based on epidemiological data, the Huanan market in Wuhan was an early and major epicenter of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Two of the three earliest documented COVID-19 cases were directly linked to this market selling wild animals, as were 28% of all cases reported in December 2019 (WHO, 2021). Overall, 55% of cases during December 2019 had an exposure to either the Huanan or other markets in Wuhan, with these cases more prevalent in the first half of that month (WHO, 2021). Examination of the locations of early cases shows that most cluster around the Huanan market, located north of the Yangtze river (Figure 1B-E), although case reporting may be subject to sampling biases reflecting the density and age structure of the population in central Wuhan, and exact location of some early cases is uncertain. These districts were also the first to exhibit excess pneumonia deaths in January 2020 (Figure 1F-H), a metric that is less susceptible to the potential biases associated with case reporting. There is no epidemiological link to any other locality in Wuhan, including the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) located south of the Yangtze and the subject of considerable speculation. Although some early cases do not have a direct epidemiological link to a market (WHO, 2021), this is expected given high rates of asymptomatic transmission and undocumented secondary transmission events, and was similarly observed in early SARS-CoV cases in Foshan (Xu et al., 2004).

If you’re a conspiracy theorist that the virus was released from the lab by mistake, you’d have to say that it somehow got itself over to the wet market before it started infecting people. The wet market, not the WIV, was the epicenter of the infection.

4.) The COVID-19 virus was actually detected in “environmental samples” taken in the Hunan wet market, especially in the part of the market that sold animals and animal parts.

5.) As I showed in my post two days ago, the viruses closest in sequence to the human COVID-19 virus are three bat viruses from Yunnan. (It’s still not clear how they or their relatives found their way to the Yunnan wet market). But the telling part is, as the authors say, “None of these three closer viruses were collected by the WIV and all were sequenced after the pandemic had begun.”

6.) The absence of the known intermediate animal host for COVID-19 does not suggest that the virus was clearly engineered by humans in the lab, for the animal source of many human pathogens of zoonotic origin, including Hepatitis-C, polio, and Ebola, have not been identified.

7.) Although there have been isolated incidents in labs in which people got infected with viruses, there’s been only one documented example of a pandemic coming from human origin: “the 1977 A/H1N1 flu epidemic, that most likely originated from a large-scale vaccine challenge trial.” There are no epidemics known caused by the escape of a novel virus. (You might respond that, “Well, this could be the first one,” but the other evidence I adduce tells against this.)

8.) There is no evidence that the WIV or any other lab was working on the SARS-CoV-2 virus or any related virus before the pandemic.

9.) Despite extensive attempts to find the virus in workers at the WIV, there are no reports of COVID-19 infections in that institute.

10.) Previous experimental work on coronaviruses at the WIV have involved inserting a “genetic backbone” and other genetic markers that we do not see in the human COVID-19 virus that’s causing the pandemic.

11.) To culture the virus in the lab, workers would have to infect wild-type mice, but were unable to do so with SARS-CoV-2.  The virus has since been engineered to be culture-able in mice, but that occurred after the pandemic had already begun.

12.) Adaptive mutations that enhanced the infectivity of the virus arose after the pandemic started, ergo were not engineered in the lab.

13.) Sequences that “lab-contaminant” advocates say could only have been engineered into the virus by humans have in fact been found naturally in other coronaviruses. That they’re missing in close relatives of the coronavirus could reflect only our pretty profound ignorance of what strains SARS-CoV-2 evolved from from.  And there is no evidence that that kind of genetic engineering was ever going on at WIV.

The “conclusions” on pp. 10-11 are pretty clear:

“the most parsimonious explanation for the origin of SARS-CoV-2 is a zoonotic event” involving transfer from an intermediate host in a Wuhan wet market.

“There is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin.”

And the last paragraph:

We contend that although the animal reservoir for SARS-CoV-2 has not been identified and the key species may not have been tested, in contrast to other scenarios there is substantial body of scientific evidence supporting a zoonotic origin. While the possibility of a laboratory accident cannot be entirely dismissed, and may be near impossible to falsify, this conduit for emergence is highly unlikely relative to the numerous and repeated human-animal contacts that occur routinely in the wildlife trade. Failure to comprehensively investigate the zoonotic origin through collaborative and carefully coordinated studies would leave the world vulnerable to future pandemics arising from the same human activities that have repeatedly put us on a collision course with novel viruses.

This paper is of course tentative, like all such conclusions, but the data add up to a “normal” zoonotic event and not escape from the lab. It’s clear the virus was not engineered to kill humans as a bioweapon, as there’s no evidence that the WIV worked on it. And even if it did, why would it happen to escape to a wet market—places where these viruses are known to exist naturally.  Nor is there evidence that the WIV was simply studying the virus and it escaped as an accident that caused the pandemic.

In other words, conspiracy theories about the virus seem to be untenable, but, humans being human and prone to conspiracies, they’ll persist.

UPDATE: in the thread after this tweet, third author Rasmussen goes through the evidence that people think supports a lab origin, and then dispels it:

h/t: Matthew

The origin of the coronavirus

August 17, 2021 • 1:00 pm

A new paper in Science (click on screenshot below, pdf here, reference at bottom) suggests that Covid-19—referred to in this study as SARS-CoV-2—likely originated in horseshoe bats that were collected in Yunnan in southern China, were not contaminations from the Wuhan Institute of Viriology (WIV), but were transferred to humans via an intermediate animal vector (probably a civet cat) in a wet market. Note that two of the authors are Chinese, and one might think that they have an interest in exculpating the WIV, but that opens up a whole can of worms that I’d prefer to avoid.

Click:

Here’s a phylogeny (family tree) of the “sarbecoviruses” that are evolutionarily closest to the Covid-19 virus, with the caption from the Science paper. Click on photo twice to make it really big.

Note that the three viruses closet to human coronavirus in sequence are all from areas close together in Yunnan, and all in species of horseshoe bats ( genus Rhinolophus, variants RpYN06, RmYN02, and PRC31). Viruses in pangolins (Manis javanica), also presumably derived from bats, are much less closely related, and thus unlikely as a source of human infection. The virus RaTG13, sequenced and kept at WIV, seems too distant from the human coronavirus to have been the source, and horseshoe bats are found not just in Yunnan, but are widely dispersed throughout China.

The authors posit that, since bats were not sold in Wuhan markets, another animal—they think the civet cat—is the likely transmitter of the virus to humans in a wet market, and this happened in about December of 2019. The bat virus may have gotten into a civet (or a raccoon dog, or a fox, or a mink) on one of the many farms where these animals are raised for sale as meat, and then transported to wet markets in other places in China.

As an interesting sidelight, the authors suggest that the spread of the coronavirus was promoted by a shortage of pork in China in 2019, which itself was due to swine flu that led to 150 million pigs being killed. They posit that other animals, like civet, could have replaced pork in the diet, and those animals would be intermediate vectors that led to the interspecies leap in late 2019. (Our own species is now considered the main vector for Covid-19!).  They suggest, alternatively, that the virus could have survived in frozen wild meat rather than in live animals sold in wet markets.

Finally, now that we’re the main host of the virus, the authors worry that we ourselves could infect other wildlife, which would then become reservoirs for evolution and re-infection (this is called “reverse zoonoisis”)

There are several questions that are unanswered in this short paper, but may be common knowledge. How do the authors manage to discount a lab strain as a source of the human infection? Were the closest Yunnan viruses not kept in the Wuhan Institute? Did anybody sample civets or other animals sold in the Wuhan market for coronavirus? (The market, of course, is closed, so this may be impossible.) Why do the authors consider the civet cat (palm civet) the most likely intermediate host of the virus? They cite this paper, showing a near-identity of the human and palm civet virus, but do they have similar data from other mammals?

I am not an expert on the various theories of transmission of cornavirus from bats (the most likely origin) to humans, but offer this for your delectation.

___________

Lytras, S., W. Xia, J. Hughes, X. Jiang, and D. L. Robertson. 2021. The animal origin of SARS-CoV-2. Science: DOI: 10.1126/science.abh0117

Scary Australian ad promoting vaccinations

August 12, 2021 • 12:45 pm

Trigger warning: could be disturbing to those who don’t realize this is bad acting.

According to the New York Times article below, this Aussie government ad promoting vaccination got some pushback. But the article, besides describing the new surge of virus in Australia, also gives some disturbing information. First, only 9% of Australia’s population is fully vaccinated. Second, you can’t get the Pfizer vaccine there unless you’re over 40; otherwise you get the less effective AstraZeneca shot.

I find the ad overly dramatic and, to me, not that effective. Better show either more gruesome shots or, as i’ve suggested, show instead the verbal testimony of real people who have lost those they loved to the virus, urging people to get vaccinated. (You could also show recovering victims still in extremis, testifying about the need for vaccination, but I think you need the hint of death for an ad like this to be effective.)

 

Some pushback: a tweet from a former member of Australia’s Labour Party:

h/t: David

The latest from my doc on the pandemic, vaccinations, masks, and Delta

August 9, 2021 • 12:30 pm

My extremely competent and science-oriented physician, Dr. Alex Lickerman, has written post #14 in his continuing series about the coronavirus and the pandemic. It’s free, and you can read it by clicking on the screenshot below.

This one answers a number of questions that many of us have. I’ll give a precis of the answers at the end, but you need to read the whole thing. After all, immunized or not, it’s your health. I think you’ll find the answers reassuring.  And what I like about this post, as with the others, is that the answers are completely driven by data.  When the data are ambiguous or unclear, Alex lets us know.

Alex has volunteered to answer readers’ questions, so feel free to ask them in the comments section below.

Some of the questions asked and answered (or not answered if we don’t have data):

  • Is the Delta variant of cornavirus more contagious than other strains of the virus.
  • Does the Delta variant cause more severe disease than the other variants?
  • How effective are the vaccines against the Delta variant?
  • How much do we need to worry about “breakthrough infections?  Here I’ll quote something Alex notes:

But here’s the bottom line: the absolute risk of becoming infected to which vaccinated people are being exposed in most situations in which they find themselves will be far less than 7.2 to 28.8 percent.

This does explain, however, why breakthrough infections with Delta can and do occur. But what we care about most—and what the vaccines were really designed to mitigate—isn’t the risk of catching COVID-19. It’s the risk of being hospitalized and dying from it (as well as the risk of developing long-COVID). Here, the CDC data tells the real story: as of this writing (at a time when, as mentioned above, the Delta variant is the dominant strain infecting people in the U.S.), of 164 million people fully vaccinated (with a mix of the mRNA vaccines and the J&J vaccine), 5,285 people have been hospitalized for COVID-19 (which yields a risk of being hospitalized from severe COVID-19 if you’re immunized of 0.003 percent), and of those 1,191 died (which yields a risk of dying from COVID-19 if you’re immunized of 0.0007 percent). When you consider the risks most of us take every day without worrying about them at all—for example, over the course of a year, the odds of getting into a car accident are 3.7 percent on average and the odds of dying in a car accident are 0.3 percent, making the annual risk of dying from a car accident 0.01 percent, which is 14 times the risk of an immunized person dying from COVID-19—our inability to think statistically clearly has us afraid of the wrong things. (This goes for the decision to be vaccinated as well: our annual risk of dying from a car accident turns out also to be 14 times the risk of the most common serious adverse reaction to the vaccines—blood clots with the J&J vaccines—which occurs at the same rate as the rate of death from COVID-19 if you’re fully immunized, a rate of 0.0007 percent.)

  • Does immunity conferred by the vaccines wane over time? If so, at what rate?
  • Should we be looking to get “booster” (third) vaccinations?
  • Can fully vaccinated people spread the variant? If so, should vaccinated people mask up?
  • Is traveling safe now?

And I’ll give you a peek at the answers but, as I said, read the whole piece and then fire away with questions. A quote from the article:

CONCLUSION: It’s hard to know how to think about immunization, the Delta variant, and how we should behave in different circumstances to keep ourselves and those around us safe. We’re all seeing the science unfold in real time, revealing just how messy, uncertain, and difficult it is to figure out what’s really true. But, though it takes time, science ultimately gives us answers we can rely on. We can all argue about what policies make the most sense based on what the science shows, but it’s the science we should all use to help us guide our own behavior. And, as of this writing, the science says the following:

  1. The Delta variant is more contagious than other variants.

  2. The Delta variant may be more dangerous than other variants.

  3. The vaccines are likely somewhat less effective in preventing infection with the Delta variant, but still offer an enormous amount of protection. Breakthrough infections are occurring, but they are overwhelmingly mild.

  4. Vaccinated people probably can transmit the infection but almost certainly at a lower rate than unvaccinated people.

  5. The vaccines remain unbelievably effective at preventing hospitalization and death from the Delta variant, so much so that vaccinated people can continue to live as they did before the onset of the pandemic, with the possible exception of wearing masks to prevent asymptomatic spread to vulnerable people in areas of high prevalence of disease.

  6. A third booster shot for non-immunocompromised people doesn’t make sense at this point in the pandemic. Some people who are immunocompromised may want to consider a third shot.

Why do people think the coronavirus vaccine should be an exception to mandated vaccinations?

August 6, 2021 • 9:15 am

On the news last night, and almost every night, one can see irate parents objecting to their children having to be vaccinated for school (mostly college now), or having to wear masks. And the mantra they cry is “We’re the parents: we make the decisions for our children and know what’s right for them.” Likewise, much of the objection by adults to getting vaccinated centers around the freedom to make decisions that affect their own bodies. While that reason may hold water for things like abortion, it doesn’t work for vaccination, because your “freedom” can make other people sick, whether it be resistance to masks or to the jabs themselves.

Most of you, at least if you’re American, know that vaccinations are required to attend most public schools unless you file a religious objection, and so it’s not up to the parents to decide about getting jabs for their kids. They could, however, send their kids to religious schools, or try homeschooling, if they wish to avoid vaccination.

To check on this again, though, I looked up the public-school vaccination requirements for two states: my own liberal state of Illinois, which has been pretty strict about masks and restrictions during the pandemic, and Louisiana, which has the highest per capita rate of infection and a lot of vaccine resisters. It turns out that the school requirements for vaccination are pretty much the same for both states, and in fact require a fair number of jabs. Here are are for the states, with the links to where I got the data:

ILLINOIS:

Vaccinations

The State of Illinois requires vaccinations to protect children from a variety of diseases before they can enter school. Students must show proof of immunization against up to 12 vaccine-preventable diseases (the number and schedule of these vaccinations depend on a student’s grade and age).

More information about minimum immunization requirements for Illinois can be found here. A summary of State of Illinois immunization requirements by grade follows:

Pre-K: Immunization records that reflect the following:

    • Tetanus/Diptheria/Pertussis – four doses
    • Polio – three doses
    • MMR – one dose
    • Hepatitis B – three doses
    • Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) titer – 4 doses
    • Varicella (chicken pox) vaccine – one dose
    • Pneumococcal series, or one dose after the age of 2

Kindergarten: Immunization records that reflect the following:

    • Tetanus/Diptheria/Pertussis – 4 or more doses, most recent must be dated after 4 years of age
    • Polio – 4 dose series with the last dose dated on or after 4th birthday
    • MMR – 2 doses
    • Hepatitis B – three doses
    • Haemophilus influenzae type b (Hib) titer 4 doses – (not required after fifth birthday)
    • Varicella vaccine – 2 doses, first on or after first birthday, second no less than 28 days later

Grade 6: Immunizations as per kindergarten requirements listed above, plus

    • Proof of having received a Tdap booster
    • Proof of having received one Meningococcal vaccine (first dose received on or after student’s 11th birthday)

Grade 12: Immunizations as per grade 6 requirements listed above, plus

    • Proof of having received 2 doses of Meningococcal Vaccine with the second after age 16 (only one dose required if the first dose was received after the age of 16)

All students who are new to a district in any grade will be required to provide complete immunization records.

Exemptions to immunization requirements:

  • Religious: Parents/Guardians requesting religious exemptions from health requirements must complete the required form along with their child’s healthcare provider.
  • Medical: If your child has a physical condition that prevents adherence to the vaccination schedule, their healthcare provider should indicate this on a physical examination form or in written documentation. Depending on your child’s medical condition, this may need to be reviewed on an annual basis.

**************

LOUISIANA:

 

Note: Students can participate in school without the required immunizations listed above if either of the following are presented: 1) a written statement from a physician stating that the procedure is contraindicated for medical reasons; or 2) written dissent from the parent/guardian.

The requirements for both states are pretty much the same, except that Illinois requires flu shots and Louisiana doesn’t. Also, Illinois will exempt kids only if they have religiously-based objections or medical contraindications. In contrast, while Louisiana, like Illinois, allows religious exemptions, it also allows parental exemptions of any sort, and I’m not sure if any written dissent will suffice.

As I wrote several years ago, religious exemptions from vaccination requirements are nearly ubiquitous:

  • 48 states have religious exemptions from immunizations. Mississippi and West Virginia are the only states that require all children to be immunized without exception for religious belief.

That those two states don’t allow religious exemptions is surprising, as they’re both in the South. But good for them: there should be NO religious exemptions allowed for vaccination given that if you get ill you can make others ill. This is a case of rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s. And public healthcare is Caesar’s purview, not God’s.

This is only one of many religious exemptions from children’s healthcare that are required; see the post just above (and this one). Being religious gets you a real break if you don’t want to have to give your kids science-based medical care when they’re ill (I wrote about this in Faith Versus Fact.)

What about nonreligious objections? I assume that every state, like Illinois, allows students to be exempt from some vaccinations if they have medical conditions that may make vaccination dangerous, but I haven’t looked that up. What I have looked up is nonreligious and nonmedical exemptions: philosophical or “other” exemptions like those in Louisiana. Here’s what I found:

In 20 of those [48 states that allow religious exemptions from vaccination], you can also avoid vaccination if your exemption is based on philosophical reasons.

So in 48 states you can avoid jabs if you have a religious reason (and I’m not sure how strict they are about what “religion reason” counts), and in 20 you can avoid jabs if you have a philosophical reason. (I imagine that they’re not too strict about what constitutes a “philosophical reason.”) Ergo, religious belief trumps rational thought—though I’m not arguing that there are rational objections to most vaccines. It just shows how much American’s prize religion over philosophy.

In 30 states, then, your children must get vaccinated regardless of the parents’ wishes unless they can make a religious case.

But neither philosophical nor religious reasons constitute, in my view, valid reasons to exempt public-school students from vaccination. In fact, one can argue that all children, regardless of whether they attend public school or not, should be vaccinated unless there are medical contraindications.

The point of all this is that—except for religion—there is no parental “right” to decide whether or not to get their children immunized—not if they want them to go to public schools.  It makes me angry to hear those parents vehemently assert their “rights”, without any apparent awareness that those “rights” deprive other children of the “right to stay healthy by not being forced to go to school with unvaccinated kids.” It’s like the old but true bromide: “Your liberty to swing your fist ends just where my nose begins.”

I feel the same way about masking. Though the data on mask efficacy isn’t as thorough as for vaccine efficacy, if public-health officials in a state look at the data and decide that masks prevent the spread of infections to and fro, there should be no parental “right” to disobey. Parents can of course object and make a data-driven case, but if they fail, well, they’ll have to send their kids to St. Corona’s.

Now parents could argue that the mandated vaccines for school have been around a much longer time, so we know what any deleterious effects might be, while the newer jabs are “unproven”. But if you know the statistics, that objection doesn’t wash much. Yes, there may be longer-term effects of the jabs that we don’t yet know about, but what are the chances of those effects outweighing the substantial protection from illness and death that the vaccines confer?  Well over 95% of people in hospitals with Covid-19 now are unvaccinated.

I am always wary when one invokes “rights” as an argument stopper, for that smacks of objective morality when in fact, as with most things claimed to be “rights”, they are subjective decisions based on a philosophy of social harmony. As a consequentialist utilitarian, I prefer “dicta”—we should make those rules with the most salubrious effects. And I don’t think one can argue that allowing people to avoid avoid vaccination when they have no good reason to do so (unless they are hermits), or avoid letting their kids get vaccinated, is a better alternative than letting everybody decide for themselves.  Now, the U.S. yet has no laws for doing this except for schoolchildren, but I’m in favor of them, particularly laws that you can’t work at company X unless you are vaccinated against coronavirus. I hope Biden mandates this for federal workers.

Call me a hardass; it won’t bother me.

Jennifer Haller, left, smiles as the needle is withdrawn after she was given the first-stage safety study clinical trial of a potential vaccine for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, Monday, March 16, 2020, at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

My brilliant idea on how to get people vaccinated

August 3, 2021 • 12:30 pm

If you watch the evening news, as I do daily, you see that virtually all the commercials are aimed at medical problems of the elderly: psoriasis, metastatic cancer, arthritis, and so on. That alone tells you the demographic of people who watch the evening news (all the younger people get their news from Trevor Noah).

But the commercials I find most effective, although I don’t smoke, involve direct testimony from people who got cancer from smoking. They show people whose throats have been largely excised, who have to talk with a mechanical device, who are on permanent oxygen, who show their open-heart surgery scars, or who are on their deathbeds—all telling you that they wish they’d realized the consequences of their behavior. Actually seeing those consequences surely makes people think twice, and it’s for that reason that in some countries they put disgusting pictures of cancer-riddled lungs on the sides of cigarette packs. They wouldn’t have ads like that if they didn’t work.

And then, on the news reports themselves, you see people whose relatives or loved ones have died of COVID, or people who are recovering from a bad case of the virus; and these people often say, “I wish I’d gotten vaccinated.” Last night there was a segment on an unvaccinated woman who was pregnant. She had to be intubated, and while she was under the hospital delivered her 8-week-premature baby. Fortunately, both mom and baby are fine, but she added that she wouldn’t want anybody putting their children in danger like she did.

That inspired me. Why don’t the CDC or NIH turn those pronouncements into advertisements to get vaccinated? It can’t be hard to dig up people who got COVID and were sorry they didn’t get their jabs and who would also be willing to be on television. After all, I see them almost nightly. Or show a man in a hospital bed, recovering from a bad case of the virus, who tells the viewers not to let themselves be put in his position. Or show the relatives, friends, and loved ones of those who died, saying that they’d still have their people with them if they’d been vaccinated.

Surely those ads would inspire people to get vaccinated—at least inspire them more than hearing Anthony Fauci or Rochelle Walensky drone on about the delta variant—talking heads who also appear nightly, taking up far more time on the news. Of course we need to hear what they have to say, but they are not as much as a stimulus as hearing from the unvaccinated, those who got ill, on commercials aimed at the 100 million Americans who refuse to get their jabs.

And don’t tell me that the government doesn’t have the money to pay for such ads. For one thing, the television stations probably wouldn’t charge for them, as they are public-service ads. Second, the government is about to pay people $100 each to get vaccinated, so there’s spare dosh sitting around somewhere. Better invest that money in ads than in direct payments for those who get the needle.

I think this is a very good idea. Do you?

Or, if you have a better idea, or even a different approach, please put it in the comments.