Even If You Already Had the Plague, Get Vaccinated Now!; + BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-08-11 We
Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:
FIRST:
Erika Lynn-Green & Howard Forman: What Is “Natural Immunity”? & Why Should You Get the Vaccine Even If You Already Had COVID?: ‘People with immunity from prior infections, but no vaccine, are more than twice as likely to get reinfected with COVID–19 than people who had a prior infection and got the vaccine. There is enormous benefit to getting vaccinated, no matter your infection history… <https://www.thebulwark.com/what-is-natural-immunity-and-why-should-you-get-the-vaccine-even-if-you-already-had-covid/>
PLUS:
I was bitterly disappointed to learn that this did not mean that I would be able to order my fried squid with garum at the Pompeii Archaeological Park next week:
Ancient Snack Bar Discovered at Pompeii Archaeological Park Will Open to Visitors Next Week: ’At the end of December, experts said that they had uncovered the counter of a kind of ancient snack bar at the site in the Gulf of Naples Ash, mud and lava buried the city during eruptions of Mount Vesuvius in 79AD and the historic city was rediscovered in the 18th century… <https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3144258/ancient-snack-bar-discovered-pompeii-archaeological-park-will>
ONE VIDEO:
Richard Trumka (2008): Racism and Obama <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QIGJTHdH50>:
Very Briefly Noted:
Ani Adhikari & John DeNero: Computational & Inferential Thinking: The Foundations of Data Science <https://inferentialthinking.com/chapters/intro.html>
Maia Szalavitz: The Pain Was Unbearable. So Why Did Doctors Turn Her Away?: ’A sweeping drug addiction risk algorithm has become central to how the US handles the opioid crisis. It may only be making the crisis worse… <https://www.wired.com/story/opioid-drug-addiction-algorithm-chronic-pain/>
Jordan Hoffman: Tuvix, the Star Trek Controversy & Meme Star, Explained: ‘How an ethical debate and endless memes keep Star Trek’s most infamous one-shot character in the conversation… <https://www.polygon.com/22586158/tuvix-star-trek-memes-voyager-janeway-debate>
Ray Ginger: The Bending Cross: A Biography of Eugene Victor Debs: ‘“Let the people take heart and hope everywhere, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh with the morning.”-Debs in 1918… <https://archive.org/details/bendingcrossbiog00gingrich/page/n3/mode/2up>
William Powell, Myrna Loy, W.S. Van Dyke, Hunt Stromberg, & al. (1934): The Thin Man <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSThEEeFYeU>
Peter Falk & al.(1971): Columbo <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsDERFDo0k4>
Catherine Rampell: ‘Gallup asked Hispanic respondents about their preference among the terms “Hispanic,” “Latino” and "Latinx”…
Fernando P. Polack et al. for the C4591001 Clinical Trial Group: Safety and Efficacy of the [BioNTech-Pfizer] BNT162b2 mRNA Covid–19 Vaccine <https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577>:
Paragraphs:
Isaac Deutscher: The Ex-Communist’s Conscience: ‘The communist of the early drafts was a revolutionary before he became, or was expected to become, a puppet. The communist of the later drafts hardly got the chance to breathe the genuine air of revolution. Nevertheless, the original motives for joining were similar, if not identical, in almost every case: experience of social injustice or degradation; a sense of insecurity bred by slumps and social crises; and the craving for a great ideal or purpose, or for a reliable intellectual guide through the shaky labyrinth of modern society…. Socialism, classless society, the withering away of the State—all seemed around the corner…. Communism seemed a new Prometheus—except that he would not be pinned to the rock by Zeus’s wrath…. Our ex-communist now bitterly denounces the betrayal of his hopes. This appears to him to have had almost no precedent. Yet as he eloquently describes his early expectations and illusions, we detect a strangely familiar tone. Exactly so did the disillusioned Wordsworth and his contemporaries look back upon their first youthful enthusiasm for the French revolution…
LINK: <https://archive.org/details/hereticsrenegade00deut/page/n11/mode/2up> REFERENCE: Isaac Deutscher, “The Ex-Communist’s Conscience”, Heretics & Renegades, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969 [1957], pp. 9–22 <https://archive.org/details/hereticsrenegade00deut/page/n11/mode/2up>
Chad P. Bown & Thomas J. Bollyky: How COVID–19 Vaccine Supply Chains Emerged in the Midst of a Pandemic: ‘The fact that major economies heavily subsidized many more vaccine candidates than were ultimately deployed was unequivocally correct…. Unpredictable real-world problems could (and did) emerge to affect any given candidate. Some subsidized candidates (e.g., Merck and IAVI) failed entirely. Others (e.g., Novavax, CureVac, Valneva, and Sanofi/GSK) may yet succeed clinically, but they will have taken much longer than Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson…. Some of the at-risk public investments to scale up manufacturing for candidates that regulators green-lighted (e.g., Emergent in the United States to produce AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson) proved problematic. Some facilities ran into quality control issues; others were slow to expand because of learning challenges or inadequate access to inputs…. Pfizer and Moderna may turn out to be the success stories ex post. But if those previously untried technologies had not worked, vaccines from Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, and even Novavax or CureVac might have played an even more important role…. They were equivalent to an insurance policy…. Vaccine manufacturers complained about a series of input shortages. Lipids, bioreactor bags, filtration pumps, filters, and other equipment and raw materials were in short supply, potentially slowing the scaling up…. Was there enough public investment in expanding the capacity of the companies manufacturing those key inputs?… Another policy problem may have been too little global public investment in expanding the production capacity of those input suppliers. Although the United States, and to a lesser extent CEPI, subsidized upstream equipment and raw material providers in addition to downstream vaccine manufacturers, their efforts were likely insufficient…. The policy “failures” in these cases would be the lack of international policy coordination…. New vaccine manufacturing supply chains emerged to produce the billions of doses delivered by Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca/Oxford, and Johnson & Johnson. Heavy government involvement—especially considerable public investment made at risk—shaped the evolution of these supply chains and the speed at which they were formed. But more information is needed—on the inputs that went in and the outputs that came out—from the dozens of production facilities in the supply chains behind those brand names…
LINK: <https://www.piie.com/sites/default/files/documents/wp21-12.pdf>
Michael Pettis: ‘Rogoff posits a China that has little to do with China…. He notes that a minimum requirement for the global use of the RMB is that “you have to have some kind of very clear rules of law, which [Chinese leaders] don’t have right now.” He’s right…. To be more specific, to get the rest of Asia or the world to hold its excess savings in RMB, China would have to enshrine the rights of private property (especially foreign-owned private property) and would have to accept the rule of law above the rule of the party. That is why most excess savings are held in countries like the US and the UK, but as Beijing has made clear, placing private property rights beyond government interference and forcing the party to submit to the rule of law are not even aspirations… against China’s best interests…. Whether one agrees or disagrees, the fact is that China and the Chinese government have no plans to move in that direction…. If foreigners ever do decide to hold… savings in China, by definition… China must run persistent capital account surpluses… transform… from an economy with structural demand deficiencies and the highest savings rate in history into one with structural savings deficiencies…. Rogoff is really arguing… that the minimum requirement for the RMB to play a major international role is that the Chinese economy and the Chinese political system become something completely different…. The role the US and similar countries like the UK play in absorbing global savings, and their obvious reluctance to allow unemployment to rise, requires that monetary and fiscal authorities respond to That means the role the US and similar countries like the UK play in absorbing global savings, and their obvious reluctance to allow unemployment to rise, requires that monetary and fiscal authorities respond to capital inflows by encouraging debt…
LINK:
Paul Krugman: ‘This applies across multiple aspects of the partisan divide. The GOP is basically a party of con men who have become prisoners of their own con:
David Frum: “Republican anti-vaxxism offers a fascinating study of relationship between right-wing elites vs. rank-and-file. Elites first fomented anti-vax feeling for partisan purposes. They succeeded so well that they cannot/dare not now reverse. Elite leads; rank-and-file then constrain…”
DeSantis isn’t stupid; he probably realizes what a disaster he’s presiding over. But he staked his political fortunes on pro-Covid policies; if he were to back down now, even an inch, he’d have to find a new career. People who bought into the Big Lie about the stolen election similarly can’t step back. And it goes further back. Climate deniers won’t be moved even as much of America and Europe burns, because they’re professionalclimate deniers; they have nothing else to do with their lives. On economics, why does the right stick with creatures like Kudlow and Moore? Precisely because they have no professional reputation, so they can’t be tempted to change their views in the face of evidence. So it’s not just that one side of most important debates is arguing in bad faith; it’s trapped in lies—as I said, con men imprisoned by their own con…
LINK:
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Many decades ago when I was in the pharmaceutical industry, I was told that you never deny pain killers to someone in pain, or make them expensive.
Then a decade later I found myself in excruciating pain, but the emergency room refused to treat me until they had tested my blood for opiates to make sure I wasn't a drug addict faking the pain.
The particular story about the use of an AI algorithm strikes me as deeply unethical, relegating treatment on the basis of an [flawed] algorithm. We have seen so many instances of such flawed technology that humans defer to algorithms rather than use real judgment based on specific cases. Some of this is in law enforcement and the flaws are finally coming to light.
It is time to emphasize Paul Ehrlich's comment: "To err is human; to really foul things up requires a computer". [I think we would replace the "foul" with another f-word today]. Or the older "Garbage In, garbage out." Humans ignorant about technology have become bamboozled by claims of machine infallibility, It is the modern snake oil.