Why did it have to be... clots in the brain?

Just a random Friday thought for you:   a large part of the PR problem for the AstraZeneca and now Johnson & Johnson vaccines is (I reckon) that the exceeding rare but very dangerous side effect is one that sounds like a particularly nasty way to die:

In another hiccup [you don't say?] for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, data suggest it is in fact linked to blood clots that have formed in the brains of some vaccinated people, the European Medicines Agency announced April 7....

The EMA had previously concluded that the vaccine, developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, was not linked to blood clots overall (SN: 3/18/21). But experts were uncertain about 18 case reports of blood clots in the sinuses that drain blood from the brain, a rare condition called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis or CVST...

As of March 22, countries had reported 62 cases of CVST out of around 25 million people who got the AstraZeneca vaccine. There were also 24 reported cases of clots in veins that drain blood from the digestive system, called splanchnic vein thrombosis or SVT. Eighteen of the people with CVST or SVT died. 

It's only human to have risk assessment affected by the imagination of what it would be like to die from the particular danger.   I mean, do we really blame people for breaking out in a sweat if they hear someone yell "shark" at the surf beach while their kids are out in the waves, even though they will stand a million times bigger chance of dying in a car accident on the way home? 

And I mean, while I know a stroke is, basically, often just a single blockage in the brain, the idea that could develop several clots at once sounds very dire and, um, icky?

It's also the fact that the clotting problem arises (so it seems) a few days after the injection.   People are, I imagine, now going to be hypersensitive to headaches and stomach cramps post vaccination.   If it were a case of some people dying within, say, an hour due to immediate reaction, you could at least have people hanging around the clinic until the danger period is over. 

This is all very unfortunate, but people really hate the idea of dying accidentally from something meant to prevent death.

I haven't decided what I would do if told the AstraZeneca is available next month:  call me unscientific, if you want, but if I'm not planning on heading overseas soon, I would just as soon wait until the vaccine which does not cause clots in the brain is available.

Update:   speaking of serious blood clotting - I seemed to recall that was the way the outer space  bug in The Andromeda Strain killed people.  I was right:

The Wildfire team, led by Dr. Jeremy Stone, believes the satellite—intentionally designed to capture upper-atmosphere microorganisms for bio-weapon exploitation—returned with a deadly microorganism that kills through nearly instantaneous blood clotting. 

Maybe my unreasonable fear of death by massive blood clot can be put on Michael Crichton.

Musk on the brain

 I hope the Chinese aren't interested in the technology.

Update:   an article at The Conversation explains the technology.   It also goes into the good and bad potential of using a brain link to swap information with another human or an AI.

George makes a case, but not entirely sure if I agree

George Will, who retains at least some credibility as a conservative due to his anti-Trump attitude, makes an interesting comparison between the technological changes that sped up communication in 19th century America (rail and the telegraph) and internet communication today.

I had missed this about Lincoln (my bold):

In the 1850s, the rhythm of Abraham Lincoln’s political career had been quickened to what he called the “eloquent music” of railroads that whisked him around the North and into the West. And as telegraph lines marched six miles a day toward the Pacific, the velocity of news — and fake news about Washington burning, enslaved people rebelling, President James Buchanan resigning, Republicans sharing their wives, Lincoln being a cannibal — increased exponentially.

Will's conclusion:

Today, the Internet and social media enable instantaneous dissemination of stupidity, thereby creating the sense that there is an increasing quantity of stupidity relative to the population’s size. This might be true, but blame it on animate, hence blameworthy, things — blowhards with big megaphones, incompetent educators, etc. — not technologies. Technologies are giving velocity to stupidity, but are not making people stupid. On Jan. 6 the Capitol was stormed by primitives wielding smartphones that, with social media, facilitated the assembling and exciting of the mob. But mobs predate mankind’s mastery of electricity.

Humanity is perpetually belabored by theories that human agency is, if not a chimera, substantially attenuated by the bombardment of individuals by promptings from culture, government propaganda and other forces supposedly capable of conscripting the public’s consciousnesses. A new version of such theorizing is today’s postulate that digital technologies are uniquely autonomous forces in need of supervision or even rearrangement by government because they rewire the brains of their users.

Like railroads and the telegraph, today’s technologies have consequences about how and what we think. They do not relieve anyone of responsibility for either.

Maybe Zuckerberg encouraged him to write this column?

A plausible rumour

 It feels so long since we had a not embarrassing Federal government.   

And what about this Andrew Laming?   Seems you can be a jerk in politics (and life) for years and years before members of the Party will finally act on it.

Not important in the scheme of things...

....but honestly, this really was one of the strangest and silliest ideas someone in Navy/Defence ever came up with:

 

Not to mention "has got tickets on herself"

 Further tweets from her:

 And:

The attitude, well on the rise in aboriginal activism in the capital cities, that the real problem is undoing everyone else's sovereignty that has been in place for more than a century and produced a modern functioning society, just makes me grind my teeth somewhat.  

Update:  and what does this even mean?:

Reliably unreliable

Axios notes:

The Taliban will not attend "any conference that shall make decisions about Afghanistan" until "all foreign forces completely withdraw," a spokesperson for the group tweeted on Tuesday.

Why it matters: That's an explicit rejection of an upcoming peace conference in Istanbul. It also follows President Biden's announcement that the U.S. will withdraw its troops by Sept. 11, but miss a deadline to do so by May 1.

I wonder what exactly the Taliban expects in a post foreign involvement country?  They seem against all modern things except guns, bombs and heroin.   Why does that attitude survive?

Stross explains Spiked

The description/explanation of Spiked that Charlie Stross gives in his tweet amused me:

Prediction confirmed

I posted my prediction of this on Friday evening, within a hour or so of hearing about the Duke's death.

And it came true (not a hard one to predict, but still):

Sometimes the predictions that a narrative around “Meghan and Harry’s Oprah interview contributing to Prince Philip’s untimely death” were uncanny in how they bore out.

It didn’t take long, for example, for the Daily Mail to trot out a piece that emphasized Prince Philip’s “tough final year” and the way the end of his life was marred, in part, by “bitter fallout from ‘his favourite’ grandchild Harry and Meghan’s decision to quit ‘the firm.’”

Notably, however, it was American outlet Fox News that seemed to get there first.

 

Dead or alive?

I can't remember why this came to mind the other day, but of all the people who I haven't heard of for a long time, and wondered whether they had died but I just can't recall the reporting of it with any clarity, prime among them would have to be Burt Bacharach.

I see that he is in fact still alive, aged 92.

I wonder if he still plays?  

Oh, yes, he is still working at song writing, at least.   Nice.

 

A quick review

The White Tiger, which was released on Netflix a month or so ago and seems to be popular there, is really good - an entertaining take on the problems in Indian society, so well directed and acted.   It's one of those very transporting, great sense of place, type films too.   

As I said to my daughter after it - the caste system has to go down as one of the all time great really bad cultural ideas of the world.   

One other minor note - I think I mentioned before, when discussing the Indian series Sacred Games, and even Typewriter, that it seems Indians are very florid with their swearing in their own language.   It's very odd - in all Indian shows, the characters conversationally mix English with their native language, and the really strong swearing only (or mainly?) turns up in translation from the native language.   They don't seem to swear in English much, but some of the swearing in Hindi or whatever other language they are using often seems oddly over the top in the context.  (And did I mention before, but I asked an Indian client about that last year, and he confirmed - most, or a lot, of Indians swear like troopers.)

Anyway, a good film.

An accurate summary

An article at the Washington Post about a new memoir begins:  

John Boehner in a new memoir derides today’s Republican Party as unrecognizable to traditional conservatives like himself, held hostage by both former president Donald Trump and by a conservative media echo chamber that is based on creating “chaos” for its own financial needs. 

Speaking of physicists...

....it's worth reading this review of a new, somewhat critical, biography of Stephen Hawking.   

I would have mentioned before that it had long been obvious that his achievements were over-hyped in the popular press and the public mind.    The review contains further confirmation of that.

 

Good to see physicists excited

Yeah, this muon test stuff seems a genuine indication of some sort of "new physics" lurking in the background. Let Fermilab explain:

 

Update: Oh. I see there is another explanation going around which does not involve new physics, but seemingly leaves the awkward Standard Model secure. I wonder which take on this is going to turn out right.

Has someone in the Murdoch press blamed Meghan yet?

"Broke his heart" or some such.

Yet more intriguing gut microbiome news

In Science:

Food supplements that alter gut bacteria could ‘cure’ malnutrition

To save a starving child, aid workers have long used one obvious treatment: food. But a new study suggests feeding their gut bacteria may be as important—or even more important—than feeding their stomachs. In a head-to-head comparison against a leading treatment for malnutrition, a new supplement designed to promote helpful gut bacteria led to signs of improved growth and more weight gain, despite having 20% fewer calories. The study also highlights how important gut bacteria—the so-called microbiome—can be to human health.....

About 30 million children worldwide are so hungry that their bodies are wasting away. Their growth slows, their immune systems don’t work well, and their nervous systems fail to develop properly. To combat malnutrition, health clinics often administer prepackaged, ready-to-use supplementary food (RUSF), which is easy to store and turns into goo after kneading. But malnourished children’s health improvements are rarely permanent, and many never fully recover, even after they eat enough. “It’s a problem that previously didn’t have an available solution,” says Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunologist at Yale University not involved with the work.

For more than 10 years, Jeffrey Gordon, a microbiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, has studied the role the microbiome plays in malnutrition recovery. He and his colleagues discovered that 15 key bacteria are needed for normal growth in mice, pigs, and to some degree people, and that children whose microbiomes fail to “mature” to include these species do not recover from malnutrition as well as children whose gut bacteria do mature. “Current therapies do not repair this disrupted microbiome,” Gordon explains.

So he and Tahmeed Ahmed, a malnutrition expert scientist who heads the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research in Dhaka, Bangladesh, tried with colleagues to find out which of a half dozen combinations of easy-to-obtain foods most encouraged the growth of these healthy bacteria. In the new study, they tested their best performing candidate: a complex mixture of chickpea, banana, soy, and peanut flours and oils that they call microbiota-directed complementary food No. 2, or MDCF-2.

About 120 malnourished toddlers from a Dhaka slum received either MDCF-2 or the standard RUSF supplement twice a day for 3 months. Every 2 weeks during treatment, and again 1 month after treatment ended, the researchers weighed and measured the children, sampled their blood, and analyzed the bacteria in their feces.

Not only did MDCF-2 boost blood components linked to growth—such as proteins needed for the proper development of bones, the nervous system, and the immune system—but it also resulted in a growth rate twice as high, measured by change in a weight-to-length score, as in those receiving RUSF, the researchers report today in The New England Journal of Medicine. What’s more, 21 types of beneficial bacteria increased in abundance. Enhanced growth in children continued even after the treatment ended. “A small amount of this food supplement can actually cure malnutrition in children,” Ahmed concludes.

What a fascinating area of research, this gut bacteria stuff.

 

 

A feeling of disgust

I have been wanting to note for a while that my assessment of Adam Creighton and his ilk (economist Paul Frijters, for one, who Nicholas Gruen has let overrun his blog with "BUT YOU ARE ALL WRONG AND PANICKING UNNECESSARILY" guff about COVID) has moved from something like "dismissive of such clownishness" to "you absolutely disgust me".   

I mean - it is just so freaking obvious that COVID spread and optimal responses to it are hugely complicated questions with wildly varying effects across wildly varying cultures and populations such that it is going to be years, if ever, that unpicking the evidence is going to provide anything like definitive  answers that are 100% clear.   Yet Creighton, Frijters and other economics types (for the most part) decided a position at the very start and are determined to promote it and attack all others (including, of course, public health officials whose lifetime job has been devoted to these issues) as if the answers are obvious and that those against them are the real ones causing unnecessary trouble.

It's a level of arrogant certainty and pig headedness that just makes me sick to read.   I guess I could say I tend towards the same feeling now towards climate change denial - certainly towards the likes of politically motivated gadflies like Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair who promote stupidity in the media - but with COVID it's the immediacy of the problem that has intensified my anger and disgust with the economists who think they know best and will not change position or admit there is substantial evidence against them.

Update:  just a couple of days after I wrote this, Adam outdid himself:

There are many funny replies rubbishing him.

 

 

Genius at work

I don't post much about Catallaxy any more - the intensity of the stupidity, misogyny, racism and crank conservatism is now so off the charts that talking about it is about as useful as noting that 8Chan is a bunch of obnoxious boys not worth even looking at.  

Not only that, as I mentioned recently, the site doesn't even work property any more, and Sinclair Davidson doesn't seem too perturbed.  I half suspect he thinks it good if the routinely defamatory comments about things like, you know, likely rape victims, are harder to find.   

But I do note the irony of a man who has a run a blog devoted to promoting climate change denialism and clean energy scepticism for years is now also against proposals that scientists start serious research into the possible geo-engineering that may only be needed because of the very positions Davidson has shamelessly promoted.   

I'm not the biggest fan of the concept of geo-engineering myself, as I would prefer aggressive actions to stop the emissions; but for someone effectively pro-emissions to also be against it is just numbskullery. 

Bowie considered, again

Last night, there wasn't much on TV and I found myself watching a repeat of the very interesting BBC documentary David Bowie: Finding Fame, about his struggles in the late 60's which finally paid off in fame in the early 1970's.

He certainly had a rough ride, in terms of false starts and projects that went no where.   You have to admire his dedication to finding a way to break through.

However, I will still, for the life of me, never understand the appeal of the garish looks of the Ziggy Stardust performance character to Bowie, the audience of the time, or any audience since.   As the show makes clear though, he rose to fame on it, but quickly recognized its limitations, and perhaps in a calculated sense, quit the character at its peak.   The aesthetics of 1970's glamour rock will always remain a historical puzzle, I reckon.

There was a producer on the show who I have seen on Youtube explaining how certain later Bowie songs were created.  The one about Heroes was particularly interesting, and showed the surprisingly circuitous and multi-contribution way modern pop music is sometimes created:   

Scepticism well founded

I was sceptical from the start about the EM drive, and it seems it has now been definitely disproved.