Category: Journalism

Inflation running at 13 percent is characterized as being 8.6 percent

by philg

Inflation is at 8.6 percent: “Consumer prices jumped 8.6 percent in May compared to last year as inflation holds grip on U.S. economy” (NBC).

If we dig into the article a little, however, we find that current inflation, month-to-month, is actually at 13 percent per year (up 1 percent from month to month).

Another example… “U.S. inflation hit a new 40-year high last month of 8.6 percent“ (Politico):

America’s rampant inflation is imposing severe pressures on families, forcing them to pay much more for food, gas and rent.

The costs of gas, food and other necessities jumped in May, raising inflation to a new four-decade high and giving American households no respite from rising costs.

Consumer prices surged 8.6 percent last month from 12 months earlier, faster than April’s year-over-year surge of 8.3 percent, the Labor Department said Friday.

On a month-to-month basis, prices jumped 1 percent from April to May, a steep rise from the 0.3 percent increase from March to April. Much higher gas prices were to blame for most of that increase.

What does Zillow expect for inflation in house prices in our ZIP code (the non-waterfront parts of Jupiter, Florida)? (note that real estate inflation is explicitly excluded from official government CPI) A 14.6 percent boost.

Full post, including comments

New York Times discovers that a person cannot be killed twice by COVID-19

by philg

From this morning’s email, “The Covid death rate for white Americans has recently exceeded the rates for Black, Latino and Asian Americans.” by David Leonhardt, one of the New York Times journalists who enjoys covering numbers and economics.

One of the defining characteristics of the pandemic’s early stages was its disproportionate toll on Black and Latino Americans.

During Covid’s early months in the U.S., the per capita death rate for Black Americans was almost twice as high as the white rate and more than twice as high as the Asian rate. The Latino death rate was in between, substantially lower than the Black rate but still above average.

Covid’s racial gaps have narrowed and, more recently, even flipped. Over the past year, the Covid death rate for white Americans has been 14 percent higher than the rate for Black Americans and 72 percent higher than the Latino rate, according to the latest C.D.C. data.

In other words, the best minds of New York City have figured out that a person cannot be killed twice by COVID-19.

[A friend’s comment on the above: “Democrats previously advocated giving preferential access to COVID medical treatment to People of Color. Now that whites are dying at a higher rate, should whites get preferential access to medicine?”]

Let’s check in on Sweden. Given their horrific heresy, maybe COVID-19 is killing them twice?

The country that gave the finger to SARS-CoV-2 and kept its schools open has a much lower case rate than still-masked Portugal (“In Portugal, There Is Virtually No One Left to Vaccinate” (NYT), 2021) or the U.S. (cases trending up, despite Science-following leadership (TM) since January 20, 2021). Those are just “cases”, though, right? How about deaths? Same pattern…

Reminder: When COVID-19 hit, friends who are medical school professors said that humans would have to co-evolve with SARS-CoV-2 and all of the measures being taken and proposed were going to be counterproductive because they would slow down this co-evolution. (Also, that if they pointed this out publicly they would never get another research grant!)

Full post, including comments

NYT: It is now women who become pregnant

by philg

From the May 11, 2022 NYT, “Don’t Be Fooled. It’s All About Women and Sex”:

When I was back in high school — a Catholic girls’ school in Cincinnati at the beginning of the sexual revolution — our religion class covered the abortion issue in approximately 45 seconds.

“Abortion is murder,” said the priest who was giving the lesson, before moving on to more controversial topics, like necking and heavy petting.

On Wednesday the Senate failed to pass a Democratic bill supporting women’s right to choose in anticipation of a Supreme Court decision going in the other direction.

The many, many activists who have focused their political careers on constraining women’s sexual activity aren’t going to just declare victory and go home.

All this is basically about punishing women who want to have sex for pleasure.

No mention of pregnant men and their right to choose.

From 2018, same newspaper, “A Family in Transition”:

Two fathers and the baby girl they never expected.

As traditional notions of gender shift and blur, parents and children like these are redefining the concept of family.

Paetyn’s father Tanner, 25, is a trans man: He was born female but began transitioning to male in his teens, and takes the male hormone testosterone.

“I was born a man in a female body,” he said.

His partner and Paetyn’s biological father is David, 35, a gay man.

Their daughter, they agree, is the best thing that ever happened to them.
“She’ll grow up in a very diverse home,” David said. “We surround her with people who are different.”

The first time that they saw the fetal heartbeat on ultrasound, they wept.

“Yeah, I’m a pregnant man,” he told friends and acquaintances. “What? I’m pregnant. I’m still a man. You have questions? Come talk to me. You have a problem with it? Don’t be in my life.”

The journalist and editors regard them as legitimate fathers (i.e., men):

As fathers to be, they got some of their most enthusiastic congratulations from the drag world — the regulars at the club where both men perform, dancing and lip-syncing, Tanner as a drag king and David as a sassy, 6-foot-tall drag queen in a tight skirt and size 12-wide high heels.

Apropos the current debate:

And, David said: “I hope she’s a lesbian. Then we won’t have boys coming to the house and we won’t have to worry about her getting pregnant.”

Also recently from the NYT opinion section, “It’s Time to Rage” (by Roxane Gay):

My wife’s stepfather began raping her when she was 11 years old. The abuse went on for years, and as Debbie got older, she was constantly terrified that she was pregnant. She had no one to talk to and nowhere to turn.

Her stepfather often threatened to kill her younger brother and her mother if Debbie told anyone, so when the fear of pregnancy became too consuming, she told her mother she was assaulted at school. Her mother took Debbie to a doctor, who said that because of her scar tissue, she was sexually active and must have a boyfriend. It was the early 1970s.

A pregnancy would have, in Debbie’s words, ruined her life. Today, she is 60 years old. She is still dealing with the repercussions of that trauma. It is unfathomable to consider how a forced pregnancy would have further altered the trajectory of her life.

This story is supposed to make readers see how misguided conservatives who oppose abortion are, but couldn’t the article support those who advocate for conservative sexual values? Stepfathers did not exist in significant quantities until the 1970s no-fault (“unilateral”) divorce revolution. The author’s wife was unlikely to have been abused by a stepfather in the (mythical?) white picket fence era to which Republicans yearn to return because there were hardly any divorces that left moms free to bring an unrelated adult male into a girl’s household.

Circling back to the first topic, pregnant men only recently won their own emoji but now the mainstream media pretends that they don’t exist?

Full post, including comments

New York Times story on the baby formula shortage

by philg

Timed to coincide with the national shortage of baby formula, “The Feminist Case for Breast Reduction” (NYT, May 10):

Over the next 25 years, my breasts drew attention that I would not otherwise have received. Like a sexual beacon, they signaled to men everywhere. I’d always known I was queer and began dating women as a teenager. While I found some refuge in these intimate relationships, I still lived in the world of men, and the size of my breasts meant that my body was theirs for the staring, commenting, grabbing and fetishizing.

Frye and I were the same height, but her breasts were larger than mine, which were a 36D.

How much weight is 36D? Approximately 1.5 lbs. per breast. (source)

Cosmetic surgery is off-limits to the true feminist, but the implication is that working as a prostitute is consistent with feminism:

I grew up in the 1980s and ’90s, thumbing through my mother’s issues of Ms. and occasionally attending NOW meetings with her. Despite never having read any feminist writing on cosmetic surgery, I knew that the consensus was, as Kathy Davis, the foremost contemporary feminist theorist on the subject, wrote in a 1991 article in the journal “Hypatia,” that cosmetic surgery was “regarded as an extreme form of medical misogyny, producing and reproducing the pernicious and pervasive cultural themes of deficient femininity.” The woman who yielded to the desire to commit such violence to her body was a “cultural dope,” afflicted by false consciousness, believing she made a personal choice while actually yielding to a system that controls and oppresses women.

Years later, I found plenty of loopholes in my inherited feminism that permitted me to do things I would have thought off limits at 13, but none were big enough to fit cosmetic surgery. Even by my early 20s, the only people I knew who’d done it were friends who worked in the sex industry, for whom it seemed a professional investment rather than a personal one. I would need a more powerful kind of permission that I didn’t yet feel the authority to give myself.

The author has some experience with body modification:

My conception of feminism also permitted me to cover myself in tattoos, pierce just about every flap of skin on my body and stretch inch-wide holes in my earlobes as well as have them sewn back up 10 years later (a permissible “deformity” to have corrected). To change my body through cosmetic surgery, however, would violate the often-conflicting ideologies behind these allowances.

The supposed dichotomy between “medical” and “aesthetic” surgeries is reflected perhaps most starkly in today’s medicalization of sexual transition, the manner in which transgender people seeking surgery must pathologize their experience in order to receive permission from medical gatekeepers. Listening to the experiences of my trans friends and reading the works of trans writers pushed me to think differently about my own dilemma.

The summer before I made the first appointment, my wife and I spent an afternoon in a private room at a bathhouse in Port Townsend, Wash., and that is where I told her about my decades-long struggle with my breasts and my interest in surgery. I had never spoken aloud about it to anyone.

In other words, the NYT gives us a story about two members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community that begins in a bathhouse. The self-described “feminist” chooses a male plastic surgeon and the result is a happy ending:

I had always experienced my body, particularly my breasts, as something I needed to keep hidden or to manage. In the first weeks after my surgery, I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror because the sight of the incisions made me woozy. Instead, I asked my wife to look and tell me what she saw. I stood and opened my shirt. It felt like baring myself to the sun for the first time. How warm it was. How quickly I had stopped treating my body like a terrible secret. It was less the physical alteration that made it possible than the conversation we had in that steamy room and the decision that followed. Naming my experience returned my body to me more conclusively than a scalpel ever could.

How bad is the formula shortage right now? Amazon offers some infant formula that they promise to deliver… in June. Most products are shown as simply “unavailable” with no promises regarding restocking.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Is the New York Times the primary promoter of white replacement theory?

by philg

“White Replacement Theory” is in the news as a potential motivation for the recent mass murder in Buffalo. After a decent interval to mourn the victims, perhaps it is worth asking “Who could be responsible for spreading this false narrative?”

“It Was a Terrifying Census for White Nationalists” (New York Times, August 2021):

The white power acolytes saw this train approaching from a distance — the browning of America, the shrinking of the white population and the explosion of the nonwhite — and they did everything they could to head it off.

They tried to clamp down on immigration, both unlawful and lawful. They waged a propaganda war against abortion, and they lobbied for “traditional family values” in the hopes of persuading more white women to have more babies. They orchestrated a system of mass incarceration that siphoned millions of young, marriage-age men, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, out of the free population.

On every level, in every way, these forces, whether wittingly or not, worked to prevent the nonwhite population from growing. And yet it did.

Meanwhile, the white population, in absolute numbers, declined for the first time in the history of the country.

“What the ‘Majority Minority’ Shift Really Means for America” (NYT, August 2021):

In 2015, the Census Bureau published a report projecting that by 2044, the United States’ white majority would become merely a white plurality: immigration and fertility trends would lead to America’s ethnic and racial minorities outnumbering its white population.

Because of the status white people retain in American society, a degree of privilege and belonging still awaits those who can claim it. People who identify as white hold disproportionate power and resources today, and this pernicious reality seems unlikely to change even if white people do become a 49 percent plurality in about two decades.

“Fewer Births Than Deaths Among Whites in Majority of U.S. States” (NYT, June 2018):

Deaths now outnumber births among white people in more than half the states in the country, demographers have found, signaling what could be a faster-than-expected transition to a future in which whites are no longer a majority of the American population.

The Census Bureau has projected that whites could drop below 50 percent of the population around 2045, a relatively slow-moving change that has been years in the making. But a new report this week found that whites are dying faster than they are being born now in 26 states, up from 17 just two years earlier, and demographers say that shift might come even sooner.

“Why the Announcement of a Looming White Minority Makes Demographers Nervous” (November 2018):

For white nationalists, it signifies a kind of doomsday clock counting down to the end of racial and cultural dominance. For progressives who seek an end to Republican power, the year points to inevitable political triumph, when they imagine voters of color will rise up and hand victories to the Democratic Party.

Of course, the mass shooting was a terrible event and directed against non-elites who had no role in creating our open borders nor the economic policies that have reduced fertility among working class whites. (chart source)

(According to the chart, the best times to have kids are when you’re on welfare and when you’re rich. Note that there are a lot more poor people than rich people and, therefore, the United States is becoming increasingly a society of the children of the poor. See The Son Also Rises: economics history with everyday applications and The Son Also Rises: Policy Implications for what that might mean.)

The New York Times blames “far-right online platforms” for spreading this “racist belief” (5/14/2022):

The idea that white people should fear being replaced by “others” has spread through far-right online platforms, shaping discussions among American white nationalists, The Times has reported.

Should the paper look at its own triumphalist articles?

Circling back to the tragedy in Buffalo, are there any lessons to be learned? Republicans are often blamed for insufficiently restrictive gun laws, but New York State is free of political influence by Republicans. The perpetrator was mentally ill, but we don’t have effective treatments for mental illness. Two years of school lockdowns and mask orders probably did not improve his mental condition (he reportedly wore a hazmat suit to school for a week). Maybe he would have been happier if his parents had moved him to Florida. I see a fair number of mixed-skin-color teenage voluntary gatherings. Black guys in their 20s and 30s here generally refer to me as “brother”. I have not determined whether it is acceptable to reciprocate.

Related:

Full post, including comments

NYT: the broadest economic recovery entails a falling GDP

by philg

This is one of my favorite New York Times headlines ever: “G.D.P. Report Shows the U.S. Economy Shrank, Masking a Broader Recovery”.

Our technocratically-managed economy is thriving, even if shrinking a bit (the per capita shrinkage would be more dramatic if you consider population growth, just as the headline “GDP growth” figures that we’re accustomed to seeing don’t represent an actual improvement for the average person because there are more people in the US every day). So we shouldn’t lose faith in the central planners.

Speaking of central planners, I visited a friend in D.C. who works as an economist at the Federal Reserve. A few days earlier, she had received the Economist magazine in the mail. The cover story: “The Fed that failed; Why the Federal Reserve has made a historic mistake on inflation”.

One of the things that I like least about the Economist is their faith in technocracy. All of the world’s problems can be solved with enlightened leadership. Here’s how the article begins…

Central banks are supposed to inspire confidence in the economy by keeping inflation low and stable. America’s Federal Reserve has suffered a hair-raising loss of control. In March consumer prices were 8.5% higher than a year earlier, the fastest annual rise since 1981. In Washington inflation-watching is usually the preserve of wonks in shabby offices. Now nearly a fifth of Americans say inflation is the country’s most important problem; President Joe Biden has released oil from strategic reserves to try to curb petrol prices; and Democrats are searching for villains to blame, from greedy bosses to Vladimir Putin.

It is the Fed, however, that had the tools to stop inflation and failed to use them in time. The result is the worst overheating in a big and rich economy in the 30-year era of inflation-targeting central banks.

(I’m not a subscriber, so I don’t know how it ends. Maybe a reader can enlighten us all!)

Update: After disabling JavaScript for this site in Microsoft Edge, I can see the whole article. Some choice excerpts:

Strip out energy and food and the euro zone’s inflation is 3%—but America’s is 6.5%. Also, America’s labour market, unlike Europe’s, is clearly overheating, with wages growing at an average pace of nearly 6%.

Uncle Sam has been on a unique path because of Mr Biden’s excessive $1.9trn fiscal stimulus, which passed in March 2021. It added extra oomph to an economy that was already recovering fast after multiple rounds of spending, and brought the total pandemic stimulus to 25% of gdp—the highest in the rich world. As the White House hit the accelerator, the Fed should have applied the brakes.

Is it fair to blame the Fed? When the government is spending like an alimony plaintiff, what could the Fed possibly have done to stop inflation?

The good news is that we can continue cheating hard-working foreigners, even as Americans continue to relax at home:

Inflation that is stable and modestly above 2% might be tolerable for the real economy, but there is no guarantee the Fed’s stance today can deliver even that. And breaking promises has consequences. It hurts long-term bondholders, including foreign central banks and governments which own $4trn-worth of Treasury bonds. (A decade of 4% inflation instead of 2% would cut the purchasing power of money repaid at the end of that period by 18%.)

When the Japanese (holders of $1.3 trillion of our debt) come over to redeem the 30-year Treasury Bonds that they purchased in good faith reliance on our integrity, they’ll be able to use that money to buy a one-week visit to Disney World for a family of three?

Full post, including comments

The Science of abortion

by philg

“What Quantum Mechanics Can Teach Us about Abortion” (Scientific American):

As light can exist as both a particle and a wave, an abortion provider can honor birth and fight for a person’s right to give birth when it’s right for them

Quantum mechanics, a discipline within physics, has demonstrated that both are true. Sometimes light acts like a particle, sometimes a wave. This duality explains all the characteristics of light that have been observed experimentally, and has allowed scientists to explore the cosmos in previously unimaginable ways. That these two seemingly irreconcilable beliefs could come together gives me hope that similar harmony could be achieved in the discussion of other deeply polarizing topics, including abortion.

Instead of either/or, imagine both/and. We recognize the value placed on a desired and loved pregnancy by families and understand that ending a pregnancy is the right decision for some people some of the time. Individuals may have ethical objections to abortion and recognize that anti-choice laws can harm people. We can value human life and recognize the complexities of reproductive decision making. Attending thousands of births has been a great joy in my career and has cemented my belief that forcing a person to give birth against their will is a fundamental violation of their human rights.

Generally, the article takes the scientifically correct position that those who identify as “men” are just as likely to get pregnant and give birth as those who identify as “women”. But then the author and editors for some reason slip into distinctly unscientific (and hateful) language:

Given that one quarter of women in the U.S. have an abortion, many Americans have benefitted directly or indirectly from abortion care. I implore readers to emulate previous generations of scientists who changed our understanding of the universe by their willingness to consider seemingly opposite empirical truths: Particle and wave, abortion providers and ethical physicians, pro-life and pro-choice.

Scientific American says that correct political and moral decision regarding abortion (legal right through 37 or 39 weeks in Maskachusetts so long as one doctor thinks it will help the birthing person) can be established scientifically, in other words, and therefore anyone who has a different opinion is factually and scientifically incorrect.

Is this idea new? A Duke econ professor‘s 2007 introduction to Nobel-winner F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom:

The British were not Continental socialists, but still, the danger signs were there. Clearly, the nearly universal sentiment among the intelligentsia in the 1930s that a planned system represented “the middle way” between a failed capitalism and totalitarianisms of the left and right was worrisome. The writings of what Hayek called the “men (and women!) of science” could not be ignored. Look at this message from the weekly magazine Nature, taken from an editorial that carried the title “Science and the National War Effort”:

“The contribution of science to the war effort should be a major one, for which the Scientific Advisory Committee may well be largely responsible. Moreover, the work must not cease with the end of the war. It does not follow that an organization which is satisfactory under the stress of modern warfare will serve equally well in time of peace; but the principle of the immediate concern of science in formulating policy and in other ways exerting a direct and sufficient influence on the course of government is one to which we must hold fast. Science must seize the opportunity to show that it can lead mankind onward to a better form of society.”

The very next week readers of Nature would find similar sentiments echoed in Barbara Wootton’s review of a book on Marxism: “The whole approach to social and political questions is still pre-scientific. Until we have renounced tribal magic in favour of the detached and relentless accuracy characteristic of science the unconquered social environment will continue to make useless and dangerous our astonishing conquest of the material environment.” Progressive opinion was united behind the idea that science was to be enlisted to reconstruct society along more rational lines.

From the same 2007 intro, potentially of interest now that we’re in Year 3 of a “National Emergency” (see “Notice on the Continuation of the National Emergency Concerning the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-⁠19) Pandemic” (whitehouse.gov, February 18, 2022))

Another theme, evident perhaps more explicitly in this introduction than in specific passages in Hayek’s own text, but nonetheless very much a part of his underlying motivation in writing the book, is Hayek’s warning concerning the dangers that times of war pose for established civil societies—for it is during such times when hard-won civil liberties are most likely to be all-too-easily given up. Even more troubling, politicians instinctively recognize the seductive power of war. Times of national emergency permit the invocation of a common cause and a common purpose. War enables leaders to ask for sacrifices. It presents an enemy against which all segments of society may unite. This is true of real war, but because of its ability to unify disparate groups, savvy politicians from all parties find it effective to invoke war metaphors in a host of contexts. The war on drugs, the war on poverty, and the war on terror are but three examples from recent times. What makes these examples even more worrisome than true wars is that none has a logical endpoint; each may be invoked forever. Hayek’s message was to be wary of such martial invocations. His specific fear was that, for a war to be fought effectively, the power and size of the state must grow. No matter what rhetoric they employ, politicians and the bureaucracies over which they preside love power, and power is never easily surrendered once the danger, if there ever was one, has passed. Though eternal vigilance is sage advice, surely “wartime” (or when politicians would try to convince us that it is such a time) is when those who value the preservation of individual liberty must be most on guard.

Related:

  • “Governor Newsom Signs Legislation to Eliminate Out-of-Pocket Costs for Abortion Services” (gov.ca.gov, 3/22/2022): “In the face of nationwide attacks on reproductive rights, California has taken action to improve access to reproductive care by removing financial barriers to this essential health care,” said First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom. “In the Golden State, we value women and recognize all they shoulder in their dual roles as caregivers and breadwinners. California will continue to lead by example and ensure all women and pregnant people have autonomy over their bodies and the ability to control their own destinies.” SB 245 prohibits health plans and insurers from imposing a co-pay, deductible, or other cost-sharing requirement for abortion and abortion-related services. The legislation also prohibits health plans and insurers from imposing utilization management practices on covered abortion and abortion-related services. California is one of six states that require health insurance plans to cover abortion services, but out-of-pocket costs for patients can exceed a thousand dollars.
Full post, including comments

WSJ: Covid-19 was more destructive of American life than World War II

by philg

“One Million Deaths: The Hole the Pandemic Made in U.S. Society” (Wall Street Journal, 1/31/2022):

Covid-19 has left the same proportion of the population dead—about 0.3%—as did World War II, and in less time.

So Covid is only about twice as bad as fighting World War II on two fronts? (same number of deaths in half the time) No.

Unlike the 1918 flu pandemic or major wars, which hit younger people, Covid-19 has been particularly hard on vulnerable seniors. It has also killed thousands of front-line workers and disproportionately affected minority populations.

According to the journalists, the 1918 flu and “major wars” weren’t that bad because they killed “younger people” (who are annoying and we are better off without them?) rather than “vulnerable seniors” (median age of a Covid-19 death in Maskachusetts was 82 (and 98.2% had “underlying conditions”)). World War II also killed white people, apparently, who are overly numerous and expendable, unlike “minority populations” that we want to preserve because they are precious.

By saying that Covid-19 has done more damage than Adolf Hitler, is this Wall Street Journal article an illustration of Godwin’s Law?

Separately, if Covid-19 is actually killing more Americans and more valuable Americans (the vulnerable elderly and minorities) than those who were killed in World War II, why are there so many frivolous stories in the same newspaper? Look to your left and look to your right. One of those neighbors will soon be dead from Covid-19 (best to budget for a 40% increase in rent even as this viral neutron bomb depopulates the U.S.). The same newspaper that urges you to wait apprehensively to see who dies next also wants you to check out Rihanna (the birthing person photo below shared the home/front page with the story about 1 million precious Americans who died):

Also on the front page, a football team will play in a football game, which football fans probably didn’t realize from watching football on TV:

We’re about two years into the war that we declared against Covid-19. What did an American newspaper look like two years after Pearl Harbor? Every story is about the war except for one about a union strike against New York City’s public schools.

Related:

  • “Across regions: Are most COVID-19 deaths above or below life expectancy?” (Germs, March 2021): The reported age of those suffering from COVID-19-related deaths was evaluated across eight countries (United States, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland, South Africa, Sweden, and Switzerland). … COVID-19 differs from recent pandemics of the 21st century because it disproportionately targets individuals over 65 years of age. … Given this dataset, the findings revealed that ∼65% of COVID-19 deaths occurred above life expectancy.
  • Cost of all U.S. wars versus cost of coronapanic (adjusted for inflation, we have spent more than 2X on Covid compared to World War II)
  • Memorial Day Thoughts: One sobering statistic is that only about 25 percent of the early B-17 crewmen completed their 25 missions and came home in one piece.
Full post, including comments

A corrected history of mRNA vaccines

by philg

According to the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, here’s how the history of mRNA vaccines begins:

In late 1987, Robert Malone performed a landmark experiment. He mixed strands of messenger RNA with droplets of fat, to create a kind of molecular stew. Human cells bathed in this genetic gumbo absorbed the mRNA, and began producing proteins from it.

Realizing that this discovery might have far-reaching potential in medicine, Malone, a graduate student at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, later jotted down some notes, which he signed and dated. If cells could create proteins from mRNA delivered into them, he wrote on 11 January 1988, it might be possible to “treat RNA as a drug”. Another member of the Salk lab signed the notes, too, for posterity. Later that year, Malone’s experiments showed that frog embryos absorbed such mRNA. It was the first time anyone had used fatty droplets to ease mRNA’s passage into a living organism.

Those experiments were a stepping stone towards two of the most important and profitable vaccines in history: the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines given to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Global sales of these are expected to top US$50 billion in 2021 alone.

The above Nature article is dated September 14, 2021. In late December 2021/early January 2022, the above-referenced Robert Malone was censored by YouTube (UK Independent) and unpersoned by Twitter (Daily Mail). A mixture from the two sources:

Given the doctor’s contested views on Covid-19, including his opposition to vaccine mandates for minors, the act by YouTube has sparked several accusations of censorship amongst right-wing politicians and political commentators.

Malone even questioned the effectiveness of Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine in a tweet posted the day before his account was suspended on December 30

He told Rogan that government-imposed vaccine mandates are destroying the medical field ‘for financial incentives (and) political a**-covering’

Malone responded by questioning: ‘If it’s not okay for me to be a part of the conversation even though I’m pointing out scientific facts that may be inconvenient, then who is?’

(What did Malone do for work between 1987 and now? According to Wikipedia, he graduated medical school in 1991, was a postdoc at Harvard Medical School (yay!), and then worked in biotech, including on vaccine projects. “Until 2020, Malone was chief medical officer at Alchem Laboratories, a Florida pharmaceutical company,” suggests that he might live here in the Florida Free State.)

How long would we have to wait for a corrected history of mRNA vaccines from which the unpersoned Malone would be absent? January 15, 2022, “Halting Progress and Happy Accidents: How mRNA Vaccines Were Made” (New York Times), a 30-screen story on my desktop PC. The Times history starts in medias res, but if we scroll down to the point in time where Nature credits Malone, both Malone and Salk are missing:

The vaccines were possible only because of efforts in three areas. The first began more than 60 years ago with the discovery of mRNA, the genetic molecule that helps cells make proteins. A few decades later, two scientists in Pennsylvania decided to pursue what seemed like a pipe dream: using the molecule to command cells to make tiny pieces of viruses that would strengthen the immune system.

The second effort took place in the private sector, as biotechnology companies in Canada in the budding field of gene therapy — the modification or repair of genes to treat diseases — searched for a way to protect fragile genetic molecules so they could be safely delivered to human cells.

The third crucial line of inquiry began in the 1990s, when the U.S. government embarked on a multibillion-dollar quest to find a vaccine to prevent AIDS. That effort funded a group of scientists who tried to target the all-important “spikes” on H.I.V. viruses that allow them to invade cells. The work has not resulted in a successful H.I.V. vaccine. But some of these researchers, including Dr. Graham, veered from the mission and eventually unlocked secrets that allowed the spikes on coronaviruses to be mapped instead.

Perhaps the Times just didn’t have enough space in 30 screens of text to identify Malone? The journalists and editors found space to write about someone who wasn’t involved in any way:

“It was all in place — I saw it with my own eyes,” said Dr. Elizabeth Halloran, an infectious disease biostatistician at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle who has done vaccine research for over 30 years but was not part of the effort to develop mRNA vaccines. “It was kind of miraculous.”

There was plenty of space for a photo of an innumerate 79-year-old trying to catch up on six decades of biology. The caption:

From left: Dr. Graham, President Biden, Dr. Francis Collins and Kizzmekia Corbett. The scientists were explaining the role of spike proteins to Mr. Biden during a visit to the Viral Pathogenesis Laboratory at the N.I.H. last year.

For folks in Maskachusetts who’ve had three shots and are in bed hosting an Omicron festival, the article closes with an inspiring statistic:

He was in his home office on the afternoon of Nov. 8 when he got a call about the results of the study: 95 percent efficacy, far better than anyone had dared to hope.

See also the NYT for Massachusetts hospitalization stats in a population that is 95 percent vaccinated with a 95 percent effective vaccine:

So… it was two weeks from Robert Malone being unpersoned by the Silicon Valley arbiters of what constitutes dangerous misinformation to an authoritative history in which Malone is not mentioned.

Full post, including comments

Supreme Court hears arguments on forced vaccination in two parallel universes

by philg

The Supreme Court recently took up the question of whether elderly elites can order young peasants to get vaccinated against a virus that attacks the elderly. The argument took place in two parallel universes.

Let’s first check my usual source for truth… “Conservative Majority on Supreme Court Appears Skeptical of Biden’s Virus Plan” (New York Times):

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said the states and Congress, rather than a federal agency, were better situated to address the pandemic in the nation’s workplaces. Justice Amy Coney Barrett said the challenged regulation appeared to reach too broadly in covering all large employers.

The court’s three more liberal justices said the mandate was a needed response to the public health crisis.

“We know the best way to prevent spread is for people to get vaccinated,” Justice Elena Kagan said.

Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he would find it “unbelievable that it would be in the public interest to stop these vaccinations.”

The NYT has one sentence regarding Sonia Sotomayor, the self-described “wise Latina”:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has diabetes and has worn a mask since the justices returned to the courtroom in October, participated remotely from her chambers.

What about the Deplorables over at the Washington Examiner? “Liberal Supreme Court justices spread COVID-19 misinformation”:

Kagan began by claiming “the best way” to prevent the spread of COVID-19 is “for people to get vaccinated,” and the “second best way” is to “wear masks.” Neither claim is true. While the vaccines appear to slow the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the chance of death, there is absolutely no evidence that they prevent transmission, especially not against the much more contagious omicron variant. The cloth masks mandated in different parts of the country don’t prevent the spread of the virus either, as several public health experts have recently admitted.

Breyer continued to spread misinformation by falsely claiming that 750 million people — there are only 330 million people living in the United States — tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday. That would mean every single one of us tested positive for COVID-19 on Thursday twice.

Breyer then implied, like Kagan before him, that Biden’s vaccine mandate would bring the number of daily cases down to zero. Again, this is not true. Fully vaccinated and boosted adults are testing positive for COVID-19 at about the same rate as unvaccinated people, which means everyone is going to get the virus one way or the other, vaccinated or unvaccinated.

But the worst falsehoods by far came from Sotomayor, who claimed the omicron variant is just as deadly as the delta variant was and that more than 100,000 children have been hospitalized by COVID-19, with “many” on ventilators.

he current national pediatric COVID-19 census from the Department of Health and Human Services shows 3,342 children with COVID-19 in hospitals. And, as Anthony Fauci admitted last week, there is a huge difference between children hospitalized by COVID-19 and those hospitalized with COVID-19. The vast majority of pediatric cases are from children hospitalized with COVID-19, meaning they were hospitalized by something else first and happened to test positive at about that same time.

“If you look at the children [who] are hospitalized, many of them are hospitalized with COVID as opposed to because of COVID,” Fauci said last week. “What we mean by that is that if a child goes in the hospital, they automatically get tested for COVID, and they get counted as a COVID-hospitalized individual, when in fact, they may go in for a broken leg or appendicitis or something like that.”

There is almost no overlap between what the NYT reported as having happened and what the Washington Examiner reported as having happened.

How about the Sotomayor 100,000? That’s a lot of hospitalized and/or ventilated kids. But could we ever establish the truth or falsehood of her statement? I thought the whole point of the U.S. is that we can’t distinguish between people who go to the hospital because of COVID-19 or who go to the hospital for some other reason and then happen to test positive for what might be an asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Readers: Who wants to guess the outcome? (and when will the Supreme Court rule?) I’m 95 percent sure that the Supreme Court says it is okay for President Biden to order the health care industry around. The health care industry is essentially part of our government, with most of the costs socialized (albeit with the profits privatized). I’m less confident regarding the order directed at private employers, but I still think it will be approved since Americans desperately crave central planning and management whenever a crisis is declared. A ruling against President Biden would be taking away the president’s emergency powers. Who on the Supreme Court would be willing to risk a lifetime Facebook and Twitter ban by saying “COVID-19 is not an emergency”?

Related:

  • Why doesn’t the raging plague in Maskachusetts cause doubt among the true believers in Faucism? (infections and transmission in a 95% vaccinated population doesn’t dim anyone’s faith in vaccines)
  • Email received today from a hospital in Massachusetts: “As you may know, hospitals and health care providers across the country are busier than ever. The number of hospitalized patients is the highest since the start of the pandemic. The high demand for care and staffing challenges are causing longer than normal wait times for all types of care, which we know can be frustrating.” (Summary: NYT says nearly everyone in the state is vaccinated; CDC says they are therefore protected from severe illness; this email says that the vaccinated righteous are nonetheless hospitalized…)
Full post, including comments