In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled in Grutter v. Bollinger that universities may consider race in their admissions processes as part of their efforts to achieve diversity on campus. On Oct. 31, the justices will hear oral arguments in a pair of cases asking them to overturn Grutter and outlaw race-based affirmative action in higher education altogether.
The challengers urge the justices to rule that the Constitution and federal civil rights laws bar any consideration of race in college admissions. But the universities at the center of the dispute, as well as their supporters, counter that overruling Grutter would have sweeping effects well beyond university admissions, affecting everything from the performance of U.S. businesses to the practice of medicine in an increasingly diverse society.
Both of the lawsuits were filed in federal court in 2014 by a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which describes itself as “dedicated to defending the right to racial equality in college admissions.” The group was created that same year by Edward Blum, a stockbroker and conservative activist who, though not a lawyer, has backed other prominent lawsuits challenging the consideration of race in undergraduate admissions as well as a challenge to the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act. SFFA says it has more than 20,000 members.
The two universities being challenged are Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. But according to Harvard’s brief, over 40% of all U.S. universities — and 60% of selective universities — consider race in some form during their admissions process. The cases being heard on Monday could affect all of them.
“Consider race” = “discriminate by race” and it was legally okay for decades despite a U.S. Constitution that apparently barred such discrimination, at least for the government and its affiliates. I wonder if we can cut through all of the briefs that have been filed in this case. Can the issues be summarized with the following?
It is settled law that discriminating against white people is okay and, in fact, something to be proud of.
Asians now wear the “people of color” mantle.
It is not okay to discriminate against one subgroup within “people of color” in favor of another subgroup within that victimhood category.
Universities are not just discriminating against white people (permissible/legal/praiseworthy), but they’re also discriminating against Asians (impermissible/illegal/deplorable).
Who wants to bet on the outcome of these cases?
The current ruler is on the side of the righteous:
The Biden administration, which filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting the universities, pushes back sharply against SFFA’s suggestion that the universities’ consideration of race as one factor in their admissions programs is inconsistent with the court’s decision in Brown. SFFA’s “persistent attempts to equate this case with Brown trivialize the grievous legal and moral wrongs of segregation,” U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar writes.
The Ivy League schools from which the Supreme Court justices graduated are on the side of the righteous and, in fact, are the most eager and aggressive sorters of applicants by skin color.
So if we think of courts as helping the powerful, this one should go in favor of righteousness (continued racial discrimination).
On the other hand, it is tough to think of a way for the justices to write a decision that would allow continued discrimination against whites (the oppressors) while forbidding discrimination against Asians (successfully established in the victimhood category). The previous decision was absurd: “Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary to further the interest approved today.” Via this approach to Constitutional law we could say that slavery is permissible right now because we’re in an inflation crisis and high wages are driving up prices, which then drive up wages in a spiral. Since we can’t stop indexing government spending to inflation, the only way to break the spiral is for 25 percent of working-age Americans to be enslaved. “Court expects that 25 years from now, the use of slavery will not longer be necessary to stop the inflation spiral that was launched in 2021.”
Because I am not creative enough to envision how a decision barring discrimination only against Asians could be written, my prediction is that race discrimination by these universities that get taxpayer money will be outlawed.
A Harvard job ad for an astronomy professor requires “Statement describing efforts to encourage diversity, inclusion, and belonging, including past, current, and anticipated future contributions in these areas” and “Demonstrated strong commitment to teaching, advising, and broadening institutional diversity is desired.”
We are informed that the San Francisco police, presumably armed with guns and clad in bulletproof vests, were spectators as a violent attack on a taxpayer occurred. From the New York Times:
In the early hours of Friday morning, the intruder entered through a back door of the stately home in San Francisco’s upscale Pacific Heights neighborhood, yelling, “Where is Nancy?”
Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, was thousands of miles away in Washington, D.C., protected by her security detail, but her husband, 82-year-old Paul Pelosi, was home. By the time police officers arrived after being dispatched at 2:27 a.m., they found the assailant and Mr. Pelosi wrestling for control of a hammer. The intruder then pulled the hammer away and “violently attacked” Mr. Pelosi with it in front of the officers, said William Scott, San Francisco’s chief of police.
In other words, if we are to believe Pravda, at least for a period of time, the police took no action to stop the crime in progress.
Chief Scott said in a late-afternoon news conference that when the officers arrived, they saw Mr. Pelosi and the suspect, each with a hand on a hammer. They ordered both men to drop the hammer, he said, and the suspect pulled it away and struck Mr. Pelosi “at least once.”
There are multiple officers (plural). One of the guys involved in the struggle is 82 years old. The other one is probably not a prime specimen of physical fitness (see below). Why wouldn’t the police officers have rushed in to take the hammer away instead of waiting for the struggle for hammer possession to be resolved?
More aggressive policing in Los Angeles 30 years ago:
DePape lived with a notorious local nudist in a Berkeley home, complete with a Black Lives Matter sign in the window and an LGBT rainbow flag, emblazoned with a marijuana symbol, hanging from a tree. … Neighbors described DePape as a homeless addict with a politics that was, until recently, left-wing, but of secondary importance to his psychotic and paranoid behavior. “What I know about the family is that they’re very radical activists,” said one of DePape’s neighbors, a woman who only gave her first name, Trish. “They seem very left. They are all about the Black Lives Matter movement. Gay pride.”
A November 27, 2008 article in the Oakland Tribune said Taub and DePape were married with three children. But DePape’s stepfather, Gene, told AP yesterday that Taub was his stepson’s girlfriend, not wife; that David and Taub had two, not three, children together; and that David’s third child was with another woman.
(At least two generations of children growing up without two biological parents.) The family structure evolves to become more complex over time:
Taub was in the news again five years later when she, then 44, married a 20-year-old man, Jamyz Smith, naked, at City Hall in San Francisco. A photo in the December 16, 2013 edition of The San Francisco Chronicle shows DePape, Taub, Smith, and the three children huddled under a blanket watching television together. The caption describes DePape as “a family friend.” … Ryan La Coste, who lives in an apartment directly behind the Taub-DePape house, said that the day after Taub’s wedding to Smith, “There was a huge fight. The guy [Smith] that she married got locked up. And so Taub married somebody else. My understanding was that David [DePape] was the best man to her husband at the wedding.”
Based on Twitter and Facebook, it is primarily Donald Trump who is to blame for this attack and, after Trump, Republicans generally. Let’s assume that this is correct. But why aren’t the San Francisco police at least partly responsible for not stopping what Donald Trump told David DePape to do? The Pelosis pay property tax on their Pacific Heights mansion. Aren’t they entitled to police protection rather than police spectators?
(Note that the disintegration of public safety in San Francisco is not a bad thing from the perspective of the Florida real estate industry or from the perspective of a Florida taxpayer. We would be delighted if everyone who owns a mansion in Pacific Heights (“the most expensive neighborhood in the United States”) sold it and moved to Palm Beach County to start paying property taxes to the school system here.)
It’s been a month since Team DeSantis began the Hurricane Ian rebuilding effort (“build back quickly” will not be the motto?). The hated tyrant, from a Democrat’s point of view, spent the week prior to the hurricane organizing an army of about 100,000 utility workers, soldiers, state workers (to clear roads and inspect bridges), etc. During all of this time Ron DeSantis was in close contact with other humans, many of whom were no doubt infected with SARS-CoV-2.
Here’s Ron with a taxpayer:
Today, I met with Marta, who had her house destroyed and was rescued by one of our high-water vehicles.
Neither of them is Following the Science with an N95 mask. There has been plenty of COVID-19 transmission outdoors and yet… no masks (and where is the hand sanitizer?):
With a vast swath of Florida’s Gulf Coast facing the possibility of a direct strike from a major hurricane in the coming days, Gov. Ron DeSantis urged residents to finish making preparations and not focus too much on where the storm’s center currently is predicted to track, noting there still is significant uncertainty about its path.
“It’s important to point out to folks that the path of this is still uncertain,” DeSantis said Sunday during a press conference at the state Emergency Operations Center in Tallahassee. “The impacts will be broad throughout the state of Florida. Don’t get too wedded to those cones where they” show the projected landfall location.
This turned out to be great advice, but what’s relevant for this post is that we see Ron DeSantis in a room full of people with… no masks (and no vaccine requirement either, since that would be illegal in Florida).
There is no evidence that the new bivalent vaccines protect against the currently circulating strains of SARS-CoV-2. In any case, it seems doubtful that Governor DeSantis would have had time to stop at CVS and then take two days off for the vaccine side effects. There is plenty of evidence that the old vaccines, which he might have gotten, do not protect against the currently circulating strains of SARS-CoV-2. Death with a COVID-19 tag is common among both the vaccinated, the vaccinated and boosted, and the vaccinated and boosted and boosted (and boosted?).
Unless we’ve been fed lies regarding SARS-CoV-2, how is it possible that Ron DeSantis has survived his contact with so many people in such a short time period? At a minimum, shouldn’t he be in bed with Long COVID?
Laboratory data suggest these updated vaccines provide increased protection against currently circulating variants. If you received your last COVID-19 vaccine >2 mo. ago, I encourage you to join me & get your updated vaccine now. pic.twitter.com/SZS7VeJict
The US has a history of enthusiasm regarding whatever is new and shiny from the pharmaceutical industry (see Book review: Bad Pharma, about a book by a British doc). So it isn’t surprising that the CDC recommends emergency use authorized COVID-19 booster shots for anyone 5 or older:
People ages 5 years and older are recommended to receive 1 bivalent mRNA booster dose after completion of any FDA-approved or FDA-authorized monovalent primary series or previously received monovalent booster dose(s). This new booster recommendation replaces all prior booster recommendations for this age group.
Let’s check in with Science in Denmark. The COVID-19 shots are recommended for those age 50 and older. What about the flu vaccine, that cornerstone of American public health? Denmark says it is for the old and the young:
We recommend influenza vaccination for everyone aged 65 and over as well as for persons with certain chronic diseases, children aged between 2 and 6, pregnant women in the second and third trimesters and staff in the healthcare and elderly care sector and selected parts of the social services sector.
Let’s go to the UK and see what Science has decided there. The flu vaccine is for those 65 and older and also children from 2 to the end of “primary school” and, depending on how much they have left over, maybe some child in secondary school (Science is all about the leftovers!). How about the miracle COVID shots? A “1st booster” for those 16 and older and “seasonal booster” for those over 50.
As a humble engineer, of course, I cannot say which of the policies described above is best. But I am capable of noticing that they’re different, which is not what one would expect for policies for which a Scientific basis is claimed.
Maybe we should celebrate diversity, as London did in 2015:
Now that I have finished the book myself and have given folks a chance to avoid spoilers, a brief post about the end of the book.
It turns out that it wasn’t clear that WaMu had actually failed. Even when it was seized by the FDIC, wiping out shareholders and bondholders, and then sold for almost nothing to politically connected and savvy JPMorgan Chase, the bank may well have had sufficient liquidity under Federal rules. A quiet bank run, in which billions of dollars left WaMu daily, was precipitated by the following factors: (1) leaks from Washington, D.C., (2) the FDIC insurance limit of $100,000 per depositor (almost enough to buy a car today!), (3) consumer ignorance regarding the practicalities of FDIC insurance, (4) consumer reluctance to become embroiled in a process of getting money from the FDIC. If not for the leaks about the regulators’ concerns, the bank run probably wouldn’t have happened and the regulators wouldn’t have been able to seize WaMu’s assets.
We may never know the answer to whether the bank actually met the relevant criteria for being shut down. Kirsten Grind, the Wall Street Journal reporter who wrote the book, gives various estimates for the bank’s liquidity on the day of shutdown but is unable to say which one is correct.
Partly this is due to the reasons discussed in the previous post regarding this book. But it is also due to the fact that the government treated some of the biggest New York banks differently than WaMu, only slightly smaller. The NY banks, donors to Senator Charles Schumer, had similar liquidity issues to what WaMu suffered. But they were deemed “systemic risks” a.k.a. “too big to fail” and, therefore, were showered with government money (taxed, borrowed, or printed) that was denied to WaMu. A handful of political appointees and government workers at the Fed, the US Treasury, the FDIC, and the OTS had a tremendous amount of discretion regarding which banks would get bigger and which would be seized.
So in addition to the topics mentioned in my previous post, the book serves as a good example of the importance of lobbying and political donations!
Related:
“A Champion of Wall Street Reaps Benefits” (NYT, 12/13/2008): Senator Schumer plays an unrivaled role in Washington as beneficiary, advocate and overseer of an industry that is his hometown’s most important business. Mr. Schumer led the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the last four years, raising a record $240 million while increasing donations from Wall Street by 50 percent. That money helped the Democrats gain power in Congress, elevated Mr. Schumer’s standing in his party and increased the industry’s clout in the capital. Calling himself “an almost obsessive defender of New York jobs,” Mr. Schumer has often talked of the need to avoid excessive regulation of an industry that is increasingly threatened by global competition.
A text message exchange with a friend who owns a car wash in a Democrat-run sanctuary city. I asked whether Governors Abbott and DeSantis were sending him a good supply of migrants.
Him: Not yet!
Me: Would be good for your labor costs. What are you paying now?
Him: Average wage is about $22 per hour.
Me: We are informed that $15 is fair.
Him: I can’t get high school kids for $15. I don’t understand how people afford life.
Me: What do they make after tips? I always tip 20% at car wash.
Him: $22 is the average wage with tips. It’s all reported income because 90 percent of tips are credit card. I pay employment taxes on the tip wages. So if you tipped him, I owe taxes on that amount.
Me: Is there a variation in wage depending on skill?
Him: Most people that are full time make $25-29 per hour. High school kids make $19, which is insane. They are useless. College kids even worse. Entitled and can’t solve problems on any level. Wish we had more legal migrants. I would hire them all. White [local] kids = not good workers. We need more migrants. Just legal ones who are willing to work.
Me: I am seeing a good blog post here.
Him: I think another 50 million legal migrants would solve all our issues. The government could continue to pay the elite natives to stay home and print money to pay migrants to do all the work. Of course it would cause housing inflation, but that’s the Ponzi scheme we all benefit from. [“we all” being those rich enough to own homes!]
Related… a tastefully understated vehicle at the local car wash (entire crew from Latinx America):
Also, in the Department of Diversity is Our Strength, “Diversity is important in all industries, but perhaps especially so in supercomputing,” from my former employer Hewlett-Packard:
Diversity is important in all industries, but perhaps especially so in supercomputing. Alison Kennedy joins an #ExascaleDay discussion with HPE's Shin-Wen Kuo, sharing practical ways organizations can encourage, hire, and promote diversity. Watch now: https://t.co/dH2mKtfgcqpic.twitter.com/j5wTnXOMDy
What did I do for HP, you might ask? Helped in 1982-83 with the first implementation of the Precision Architecture, a RISC processor that eventually morphed into the Intel Itanium server chips (final shipments in July 2021, nearly 40 years after my efforts on a wire wrap prototype).
Here’s part of an invitation that I received to an election night party:
The party is here in South Florida, but the host is a lockdown refugee from San Francisco. Some political signs have gone up in our town. There is a lot of enthusiasm for Governor DeSantis and a bit for Congressman Brian Mast (a Republican who is somewhat hostile to civilian gun ownership). Marco Rubio is predicted to win, but I haven’t seen any signs for him (compare to 50+ for DeSantis and a handful for Mast).
Charlie Crist has run a 99% negative campaign. Here’s a recent example:
Ron DeSantis has: ❌ Banned abortion with no exceptions for rape or incest ❌ Banned books ❌ Banned saying “gay”
What’s next, banning all those who disagree with him?
If you’re 15 weeks, 6 days pregnant or less, it is legal for you to get an abortion in Florida.
This rule allows for more abortion care than almost anywhere in the European Union (Germany has a 12-week limit, for example.) Doesn’t Crist’s statement at least merit some kind of warning sign to users that the facts are “missing context”?
Despite Crist’s crusade for freedom of the press (undoing DeSantis’s purported “banned books” action) and freedom of speech (undoing DeSantis’s purported “banned saying ‘gay'” action), he apparently has failed to generate excitement among people who live in Jupiter. I have seen no signs for him.
Who else has been invited to an election night party? I can’t remember this much excitement for the typical mid-term election. I wonder if it is because government has become larger and more pervasive and therefore there is now much more at stake than in previous decades. For example, if you have a student loan outstanding the outcome of this election can determine whether you’re going to be $10,000 richer or not. That’s a tax-free bonanza, right? If the election doesn’t go well, the gender studies graduate might have to work a second job to earn $20,000 pre-tax to be equally well off compared to if Democrats prevail and the college debt can be shifted onto the backs of the working class?
The newspaper that assures us that replacement theory is false, like other “fringe right-wing conspiracy theories”, gleefully points out the Dämmerung der Weißen (the twilight of the whites; see also Götterdämmerung):
The county in recent years has become one of the nation’s most diverse, where the former white majority has fallen to just 30 percent of the population.
A shrinking white share of the population is a hallmark of the congressional districts held by the House Republicans who voted to challenge Mr. Trump’s defeat…
Because they are more vulnerable, disadvantaged or less educated white voters can feel especially endangered by the trend toward a minority majority,…
… the white population of the United States expected within about two decades to lose its majority.
Maybe there could be an opera about this. I would love to see Donald Trump portrayed as a character by the Metropolitan Opera.
in the recent image below, we can see that native-born whites are in the minority on the Juno Beach (FL) Fishing Pier. Discussions of election integrity are uncommon on the pier, however.
The NBAA BACE convention, a.k.a., “NBAA”, was a fun experience even though I’m not in the market for the $20-75 million airplanes that are the core of the show.
NBAA includes some safety talks. At a talk about a Challenger 605 accident at Truckee, I learned that only 1% of unstable approaches result in a go-around (it should be closer to 100%). The talk was also notable for the blame-the-pilot culture, with the panel of experts predictably calling for more training. Nobody asked why Air Traffic Control refused to give the pilots a straight-in approach, thus setting the crew up for failure in a vastly more challenging circling approach. Nobody asked why the $20 million machine couldn’t be smarter, e.g., by giving pilots guidance during the circle, noting the unorthodox configuration of full flaps before lining up on final, shouting out ”stall” instead of playing a confusing tone, and shouting out ”go around” like in an Embraer Phenom 300. The Challenger prohibits the use of spoilers below 300′ AGL and it was the continued use of spoilers in the fast/high approach that resulted in the stall, according to the NTSB. Given that the machine has a terrain database and a radar altimeter, why didn’t it say “you have left the boards out“? Everyone killed by the B737 Max’s runaway-trim-by-design would likely still be alive if the machine had simply spoken “I am trimming forward” when its MCAS system was operating.
Turboprops are about as low as NBAA goes. The Cessna Denali, a competitor to the Pilatus PC-12, has been afflicted with an additional year of delay because the General Electric turboprop, developed by Walter in the Czech Republic, isn’t going to be ready. The GE folks say that certification is delayed because the FAA is freaked out by all of the 3D-printed parts in the engine. The Cessna folks say that certification is delayed because the GE and Walter folks responded to SARS-CoV-2 by stopping work for 1-2 years. “They haven’t done anywhere near as many of the certification hours as they were supposed to,” said a Cessna employee. The engine looks good at least!
In other low-end news, I learned that after-market gear overhaul is now available for the Embraer Phenom 100 ($85k) and Phenom 300 ($125k). This is a 10-year item, even if the plane isn’t flown at all, and these prices are less than half of what Embraer charges, thus reducing the total cost of ownership. There were a lot of changes from HondaJet, which I’ll cover in a separate post.
What about at the high end? Billionaires can’t buy Bernie, but they can get a 787-based Boeing Business Jet delivered in 2025 if ordered today for $250 million. Lufthansa needs 2 years of prep time and then 18 months of installation time for a $120 million executive interior. The proud new owner will ride in the back beginning in 2027.
Is it wasteful of the Earth’s limited resources when a rich family travels via personal Boeing 787? Absolutely not! If the plane is filled with sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), the impact is less than when you take your 2007 Camry to Publix. Example:
Speaking of sustainability, I attended a talk on climate risk presented by a Massachusetts Democrat who is an executive at a big aviation lender. In a regulated industry, one of the big risks is regulatory/tax. What if righteous rage/envy results in Gulfstreams and larger being banned?
We don’t have to think about how many trees humanity could have planted for the $370 million acquisition cost of the BBJ 787. We can fix this by changing the fuel:
We still might not be able to fly conveniently because it is a proven scientific fact that hurricanes are becoming more frequent and severe (contrary to “Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century” (Nature.com 2021); denying Science is sometimes okay). Separately, due to anthropogenic climate change it was a frosty-for-Orlando 60 degrees and cloudy on Day 2 of NBAA and everyone at the static display was seeking shelter.
I missed the first half of the climate change talk because I was at the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion talk scheduled at the same time:
My live notes from the talk:
“It’s absolutely not about quota.” And then … “Look at the complexion of your employee base to evaluate where your are.”
There are “dear friends” involved (can we agree to send everyone who uses this term to Venezuela in exchange for all of the folks that they’re sending to enrich our economy). “Lean In” is referenced tangentially. Creating emotionally safe spaces in the office is critical to safety.
Black pilots cannot be safe because they are constantly exposed to microaggressions [e.g., from customers and line guys and therefore out of the operator’s control] and that takes up a lot of energy [that they might otherwise be using to run checklists and focus on their job].
They’re sharing their diversity journeys. Executives are “very committed” and people are “walking this path together.”
Slide for Andrew Cuomo: “framing intimate interactions—permission & grace”.
For the those who celebrate gender ID diversity, any pronoun choice made during registration made it through to the printed badge. I’m sorry that I didn’t pick Xe/Xem:
If you’re a nerd, you’ll like all of the cutaway jet engines on display from manufacturers and overhaul vendors.
The biggest booths by far were from companies involved in selling fuel. They had the best parties with food and booze flowing freely starting at 4 pm. And live bands:
When I pointed out to an FBO owner that Million Air had taken over Marathon Key and raised the 100LL price to $9/gallon, he said “The consolidation is ongoing and probably irreversible. On top of that a lot of smaller airports are closing which traditionally served GA avgas users.” Did the government’s various coronapanic programs have something to do with this? “Indirectly yes, they lead to the largest money creation in history. That in turn caused all that money having to be spend and it was spent buying up assets like FBOs at highly inflated prices. Now the new consolidated FBO’s could and have to raise prices substantially to at least pretend to justify the huge investment. Not only fuel margins, also hangar margins, etc. are way up.”
In addition to the trade show at the rebuilt-from-the-flooding-in-record-time convention center, there was also a static display of aircraft at KORL, a 25-minute drive away. Gulfstream is the friendliest by far of the luxury jet vendors. I managed to bust into a G600:
Given that it is a clean sheet of paper design, I’m not sure why the cockpit needs so many controls.
Dassault and Bombardier give a big middle finger to any peasant who wants to see the interiors of the rich. Everything is “by appointment only”. Bombardier does remind the peasantry that it is actually the height of ecoawareness to ride solo in the back of a 100,000 lb. jet aircraft. They’re all about ESG. Greta Thunberg would be proud… if they would let her into the booth.
Let’s call this photo “Race to the Maintenance Shop” (Maserati in front of a 22-year-old Bombardier):
Vaerus Jet Sales brought the most beautiful plane to the static display (DC-3):
I managed to dominate a Facebook pilot group by posting “Certified airplanes cost too much so I have decided that it is time to buy an experimental aircraft.” over the following photo of a Gulfstream G800 and one showing a huge “EXPERIMENTAL” placard next to the front door.
The keynote by Neil DeGrasse Tyson covered the entire universe, but he did not explain how he survived cancelation after being accused by four different females. He did point out that most people are stupid because, unlike him, they don’t think scientifically (ergo, Dr. Fauci is the world’s smartest person because he personifies Science). He told the audience to “be ashamed to die until you’ve scored some victory for humanity” (he has already declared personal victory as a result of educating a lot of people). Dale Earnhardt Jr. was quite humble by comparison. Is it fun to win the Daytona 500? Yes, but it is also agony to lose. He said that he missed racing, but not the emotional rollercoaster of feeling great for a week after a win and then feeling terrible for a week after a loss. He didn’t talk about surviving a Cessna Latitude crash and fire at 0A9 (5000′ runway with a 902′ displaced threshold; good illustration of my general rule to avoid airports that don’t start with a K, i.e., those that meet ICAO standards, and also a good illustration of the statistic cited above: “Neither the pilot nor copilot called for a go-around before landing despite awareness that the approach was unstabilized.”).
Loyal readers know how much I would love to post pictures of the righteous in the crowded convention center wearing masks, but sadly the Followers of Science were thin on the ground. This is an industry where safety is always the #1 priority and the convention was packed with desk job and work-from-home heroes (actual pilots, who might be presumed to be less risk-averse, are a minority). If they’re so passionate about safety, why wouldn’t they adopt the cost-free strategy of wearing at least a cloth mask in accordance with CDC guidance?
I did find a software company whose operations are split between Sweden and California. Employees from both divisions were there. The Swedes thought that the Californians were crazy for locking down, not going into work, ordering everyone to wear masks, and closing their schools. The Californians said that the Swedes were the crazy ones, running around mask-free and sending kids to school. (Sweden, of course, ended up with a substantially lower COVID-tagged death rate and the age-adjusted death rates would be even more in Sweden’s favor (Sweden has a median age of 41 while California’s is about 37)).
What about the recession? “We’re a little less busy than we were in March 2022, which was our best month ever,” said one charter operator. “But part of that is that we don’t have capacity. Our owners are flying their planes like crazy. And there is a two-year wait to get pilots into some of the type-rating programs.”
CVS says “The bivalent vaccine provides added protection against COVID-19 and the Omicron variant”:
.@CDCDirector Rochelle Walensky visited a CVS Pharmacy today to get her bivalent COVID-19 booster. The bivalent vaccine provides added protection against COVID-19 and the Omicron variant and is available at CVS Pharmacy locations nationwide. https://t.co/wXDZYrmMydpic.twitter.com/BQojEnRpl4
Let’s ignore the fact that the customer depicted got COVID a month later. My question is how CVS is allowed to make the claim regarding “added protection” for this emergency use authorized injection. Ordinarily, a company cannot make claims for a medicine without a fair amount of data. But it is way too soon to know if these new shots will reduce hospitalization and/or deaths compared the rate among those who got their 4th or 5th shot with the 2020 version. The tests that have been done look at antibodies in the blood and the effect on someone who is exposed to SARS-CoV-2 is unknown. Shouldn’t CVS be limited to saying “We hope that it will work better…”?
Bivalent booster shots from Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. failed to raise levels of protective proteins called neutralizing antibodies against the dominant omicron strains any more than four doses of the original Covid vaccine, according to an early independent study on a small group of people.
Researchers at Columbia University and the University of Michigan compared levels of neutralizing antibodies in blood samples from 21 people who got a fourth shot of the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech SE bivalent boosters against antibody levels in 19 people who got four shots of the original vaccines.
The results don’t mean that getting a bivalent shot has no benefit, and it will need to be confirmed in much larger studies.
The results also contrast sharply with an Oct. 13 press release from Pfizer and BioNTech touting “positive early data” from a clinical trial suggesting that its bivalent vaccine “is anticipated to provide better protection.” The statement was based on data collected from subjects in the first seven days after immunization, and the company has not yet released details.
I like the highlight text! Our assumption should always be that whatever is new and shiny in pharma will benefit us! (See also Bad Pharma.)
Screen shot in case the above tweet is memory-holed:
Who here wants to brag about getting his/her/zir/their bivalent booster?
