By Bobby Allyn @ NPR.org, May 20

Nearly half of the Twitter accounts spreading messages on the social media platform about the coronavirus pandemic are likely bots, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University said on Wednesday.

Researchers culled through more than 200 million tweets since January discussing the virus and found that about 45% were sent by accounts that behave more like computerized robots than humans.

It is too early to say conclusively what individuals or groups are behind the bot accounts, but researchers said the tweets appeared aimed at sowing divisions in America.

"We do know that it looks like it's a propaganda machine, and it definitely matches the Russian and Chinese playbooks, but it would take a tremendous amount of resources to substantiate that," said Kathleen Carley, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, who is conducting a study into bot-generated coronavirus activity on Twitter that has yet to be published.

Researchers identified more than 100 false narratives about COVID-19 that are proliferating on Twitter by accounts controlled by bots [....]

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Moderna stated that the antibody levels seen were on a par with — or greater than, in the case of the 100-microgram dose — those seen in people who have recovered from Covid-19 infection.

.... studies have shown antibody levels among people who have recovered from the illness vary enormously; the range that may be influenced by the severity of a person’s disease. John “Jack” Rose, a vaccine researcher from Yale University, pointed STAT to a study from China that showed that, among 175 recovered Covid-19 patients studied, 10 had no detectable neutralizing antibodies. Recovered patients at the other end of the spectrum had really high antibody levels.

So though the company said the antibody levels induced by vaccine were as good as those generated by infection, there’s no real way to know what that comparison means.....

....the exact ages of these eight people (with response) are unknown. If, by chance, they mostly clustered around the younger end of the age spectrum, you might expect a better response to the vaccine than if they were mostly from the senior end of it. And given who is at highest risk from the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, protecting older adults is what Covid-19 vaccines need to do.

By Floyd Abrams & John Langford, May 19.  Abrams is a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and author of “The Soul of the First Amendment.”.Langford is counsel at Protect Democracy.

All over Europe, 5G telephone towers are being set on fire. At least 16 masts in the Netherlands have gone up in flames. There have been attacks on 5G equipment in Italy, Ireland, Belgium and Cyprus. The United Kingdom, ever-keen to outperform the Continent, has witnessed more than 60 such acts of arson. The vandals draw from a sludge of absurd theories to explain their motivations: that 5G masts somehow spread the coronavirus, or that the radiation from these towers weakens our immune systems, laying us bare to Covid-19. Or even that there is no Covid-19 at all, that the disease is a myth to explain the worst effects of 5G rays.

Good news!  There is some cross immunity between a viral common cold and Covid-19.