Friday: Hili dialogue

46 thoughts on “Friday: Hili dialogue”

1. When I first I saw the keffiyeh scene I figured it was fake or not what it seemed – crazy!

2. “Don’t they remember the polio epidemic of the 1940s and 1950s, stopped in its tracks with Sabin and Salk’s vaccines? Are these people INSANE?”

   Many of them don’t remember. They are too young. I grew up in the US and there was only one polio case in my cohort. He was in a chair through much of grammar school, and braces and crutches after.

   As to whether they are insane: I would opine that they are, and that many of them are self serving, sociopathic narcissists, as well.

   1. I think the anti-vax position on polio is that it was going away on its own and would have gone away even if there was no vaccine. So the vaccine had nothing to do with polio going away, and thus we can get rid of the vaccine.

      1. Oh. Ferchristsake!

      2. It was NOT going away. I remember as a child in the 50s there was a place not far from where we lived with kids in iron lungs.

   2. My mother has a baby picture of me, clearly unhappy after just being stabbed with the Salk vaccine. My maternal grandfather—the medical doctor who administered the shot—stands next to the table beaming. He treated dozens of polio patients during his 50 years of practicing rural medicine, observing in horror as some were paralyzed for life as a result. His big smile reflected his joy over being able to prevent one of the worst communicable diseases of the era, one that cut multitudes down just as they were entering the prime of life.

      1. Who used it as an injectable? I remember mine was a sweet liquid administered orally. Around 1970 it was. I still remember youth my age walking with crutches in Poland. I think anti-vaxxers are victims of an educational system that found it too difficult to actually convey knowledge, especially of scientific subjects. When a majority of social icons are know-nothings, no wonder.

         1. My bet was that you got three injections of Salk when you were a tiny infant and don’t remember it. Oral Sabin by 1970 was coming to be recognized as unsafe to give to people whose family contacts had not been Salk-immunized because the live virus rarely but catastrophically reverts to wild virus and causes paralytic disease in those fecal-oral contacts. Since then the hunt has been on to make an attenuated virus that can’t revert. Live virus vaccines are a great idea because, like natural infection, they confer multidimensional immunity and can induce immunity in unvaccinated contacts — Sabin was sure his was therefore better than Salk’s. But the peculiar transmission of polio in the stool without symptoms demands great caution about reversion to virulence, especially given the catastrophe of iatrogenic polio.

            That said, RFK Jr’s lawyer is a hired gun, paid to argue whatever his clients pay him to say. There is no reason to believe he will influence Kennedy to rescind licensure of polio vaccines just because in 2022 he took money to lobby the FDA. I am right now reading the 1954 controlled trial to try to discern what caused Mr. Siri’s client, a friend of Mr. Kennedy’s, to claim then that the vaccine’s approval had not been based on an adequately powered statistically valid trial. It’s true that most of the controls in that trial were observed, not placeboed, by design, and Sabin was furious at this, arguing that a “killed” — you believe that scoundrel Salk can promise that?! — poliovirus vaccine given to hundreds of thousands of children would be more dangerous to more children than polio was to the few who would get it without vaccine.

            A placebo control is necessary when either the subject or the experimenter is likely to bias his expression of symptoms or assessment of outcome based on his knowing whether the subject got the test substance or not. Because paralytic polio is a highly characteristic disease easily diagnosed even by laypeople, it seems unlikely that a doctor could use that knowledge to unconsciously misdiagnose polio in subjects according to his own belief in the vaccine’s effectiveness. The rationale for the two types of control in the one study is discussed in the write-up.

         2. All else being equal, it is easier to convey knowledge to young human primates who want to learn than it is to those who not only don’t want to learn but also actively create a disruptive and chaotic environment to the detriment of those who want to learn.

3. I wish Titania McGrath were satire: in Romania last week the people voted for the “wrong” person, so the courts decided to cancel the election.

   1. Crazy things happen when people try to hold elections and pretend to have democracy as usual while an aggressor is gobbling up their neighbors and can attack any day. In my Bulgaria, which is next to Romania, we have had 4 parliamentary elections since the start of the full-scale war, almost no periods of regular government, and a prospect of 5th elections in early spring.

4. The timescales in cell biology chart is excellent and should be a poster to be understood by all students in all high school biology classes in the U.S. (IMHO). Just before Covid hit, I audited a college biochem class (“From Atoms to Cells”) and these scaling issues just knocked me over…I am a retired flight control engineer accustomed to working with much bigger and slower things…and fewer of them. In addition to the scaling shown on the poster for single events, I think that there are like 10^23 of these things going on continuously in just my hand or arm (Hempenstein can correct me on that please) at any time all the time. I thought that what would be a dynamic version of this poster showing the density of molecules in the cell and allowing for seeing the motion at real speed and to slow it to any fraction of that speed for viewing would be an excellent teaching tool. But, alas, the shut-down hit and I never got to it…it would have taken consultation with several other skillsets to accomplish. Maybe it exists somewhere on the interweb already.

   1. Excellent indeed! I wish there was a similar poster for geology, primarily to put actual numbers on vague words like “slow” vs. “fast”, or “viscous” vs. “liquid”, which is usually how mantle convection or the earth’s core(s) are described.

      The only widely shared value from that field seems to be that continental drift speeds are of order cm/year, a.k.a. the speed of finger nail growth. Are mantle and core convection speeds on the same or “similar” scales, and, given Earth’s size, would so be sufficient to generate its magnetic field?

   2. Once you go a few orders of magnitude in either direction, time and distance scales rapidly become humanly incomprehensible.

      1. My prof just reminded me that milo and phillips, two authors of this figure, published a similar book, “Cell Biology by the Numbers”, freely available online, and Milo does a lecture series available at

         1. Then there’s the estimation that there are 10^31 bacteriophages on the planet, which works out to a trillion per estimated grain of sand.

5. The highway sign from Washington triggered me in multiple ways. Not least of which was the use of the word “less” in place of “fewer”.

   1. That’s shocking to see. And given the location mentioned, that sign is in the middle of the city, just north of downtown, in a heavy traffic area. When they find out who is responsible, some heads need to roll (not literally!) over this.

   2. Bell’s First Law strikes again….

6. Protege Nos Ab Anti-Inoculatoribus!

   It’s a pity that doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as Sic Semper Tyrannis.

   1. “Protege Nos…”: which means?..

      1. My tiny bit of Latin, scraped together from scientific vocabulary and the likes of “The Life of Brian”, leads me to believe this fine phrase to translate as “Protect us from the Anti-Vaxxers”.

         1. Yes, very good! (There are English to Latin online translators, which is how I came up with it.)

7. Revoking approval for the polio vaccine seems crazy to me. Maybe there’s more to the story.

   And, Hamas needs to release ALL of the hostages. Retaining hostages by definition means that Hamas retains power, and Israel must remove Hamas from power in order to achieve its most important war aim. Even if Israel accepts a partial hostage release—and it may, as every moment that passes brings the hostages closer to their deaths—the war will need to go on until Hamas is eliminated definitively.

   1. Plus Israel should not release a big load of terrorists from prison.

8. Funny how the pro-Trumpers are quiet when they want to get rid of the polio vaccine.

   And it’s only going to get worse.

9. PZ Meyers and the Horde are all fiddling with themselves over that road sign.

   I do find it amusing that they try to act edgy, but then remember they cried like babies when the old Slime Pit mocked them.

10. Sources on the proposal to “revoke the polio vaccine” story appear scant, but what I see says the motivation behind it is to detect the use of aluminum. That has, I believe, been RFK’s biggest issue with vaccines—the additives. Just as he wants certain additives, dyes, etc removed from packaged foods. This is what I’ve read. You all are the experts. I’m only throwing in a little context.

    1. I think it is mercury, but paul offit makes quick work of this on his beyond the noise substack and/or in his entertaining recent video with zdogmd at url

    2. Erm, why does he want to remove aluminium (salts)? It is used as an adjuvant that makes the immune response of the vaccine more efficient.

       Also, when RFK, Jr. appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast in 2023, he made a number of false claims about the polio vaccine. So I don’t buy for a minute he is sincere about the safety of vaccines.

    3. Did you read the NYT article?

       This from Dr Paul Offit is worth reading:

       https://pauloffit.substack.com/p/my-conversation-with-robert-f-kennedy

    4. This is the paper Mr. Siri cites in his petition to the FDA about aluminum in vaccines. The petition is linked in the NYT archive that Frau Katze kindly supplied.
       https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0946672X21000523#bib0110

       Aluminum salts (less than 1 mg aluminum per dose) are used as adjuvants in vaccines, have been since the 1930s, to allow the use of smaller doses of antigens to stimulate a protective immune response. Mr. Siri hints darkly at the risk of aluminum in brain disease (as it is in people with kidney failure receiving dialysis especially if they need large doses of medicines that contain aluminum like some antiacids for metabolic problems.) But quantitatively this is a complete red herring in the context of vaccine safety. Aluminum in the quantities found in vaccines is safe.

       Nonetheless Mr. Siri is claiming that this shrill activist paper demonstrates that the FDA has been remiss in regulating adequately the aluminum content of vaccines, and that the use of the vaccines should be halted until manufacturing control is tightened up. The author measured the aluminum content of samples of several commercially available vaccines and found that the average amount was often a little higher or a little lower than the amount stated on the label. This is akin to publishing a recipe that calls for a pinch of hot chili flakes. If someone asked, you would say a pinch is less than 1/8 teaspoon. Does it matter if the actual pinch in a particular dish delivered closer to 1/16 or just a tad over 1/8? No. Because if it mattered to be that precise, you would weigh out the flakes on an analytical lab balance. It’s only important that there be enough but not too much. More precise than a “dash” but less precise than your steel measuring spoons, which are less precise than laboratory glassware or scales.

       Same with adjuvant aluminum in vaccines. The author never indicates how much error and variance in manufacturing should be acceptable. (The manufacturer would know but there are legitimate trade secrets around industrial processes.) Neither will never be zero. All she’s demonstrated is that a nitpicking metals scientist can measure aluminum in a few samples with more point accuracy than a manufacturer can deliver aluminum into hundreds of thousands of vials in a batch process. Who cares? She gives no reason why we should think the manufacturers should devote effort to this, or why the FDA should suspend their licences to sell the vaccines until they “fix” it.

       The goal is clearly to disrupt the confidence in several commonly used vaccines over a totally invented “problem” with aluminum. If it has some broader place in the Kennedy Ways of Knowing attack on “additives”, fine. I hope that’ll keep him busy stamping out chronic disease but leave those vaccines alone.

       1. Thanks for explaining the practical chemistry behind this, Leslie. It’s a shame because they really have succeeded in undermining the confidence of a sizable percentage of the lay public (in routine vaccines). I don’t know what got RFK going on all this in the first place. I’ve been very curious about his original motivation, but can’t get past all the headlines related to this current fiasco.

11. Siri intends to respond later to the NYT piece on vaccines: “Typical NYT hit piece plainly written by those lacking basic reading and thinking skills. Will tweet a series of responses soon. Stay tuned.”

    Yesterday he posted on X about his chief concern regarding childhood vaccines: “The real story regarding the halt of the clinical trial for the RSV infant vaccine (b/c more harm occurred in the vaccinated versus placebo group) is that it had a placebo group! This is unlike trials for existing childhood vaccines and shows exactly why a placebo group is critical. Had all other childhood vaccines been trialed against a placebo, would their trials have been halted?”

    I can’t access the NYT story, having ended my subscription with cause long ago, but I’m curious whether they simply characterized or, perhaps, caricatured Siri’s position, or did they link to any court filings or other formal documents submitted by Siri?

    1. Here’s an archived copy of the NYT article:

       https://archive.is/QNNQJ

       1. Much obliged for the link.

          For those interested, Aaron Siri responded to the NYT article with a 10-part post on X. He includes substantive links to relevant data, filings, and depositions (in full). https://x.com/AaronSiriSG

          One can argue with him, applaud him, whatever one would like to do. Or we can accept the “anti-vaxxer” narrative and other ad hominem attacks and go about our ways. (How did that turn out for those caring souls who accepted the “gender-affirming care” stories for years?)

          Setting aside the science debates, I’ll address one point that Siri let’s slide while focused on bigger issues. The NYT article notes—as though this is a bad thing—that Siri ”sued federal agencies for the disclosure of records related to vaccine approvals . . . and pushed to eliminate secrecy around government decision making.” It then cites a public health expert saying that “This is a way to hobble a public health agency like the F.D.A. — you can just drown them in paperwork so they can’t do their work.”

          Yes, one simply wants to hobble the good folk at FDA. Anyone interested in what data he requested on behalf of 30 academics in the US and Europe? They asked the FDA to disclose all the data and information it relied upon to license Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA refused. (Are we opposed to independent academic review of this data?) When sued, the FDA then petitioned the court to allow it to withhold the data from the public for 55 years, and then doubling down, requested a 75-year delay.

          Yes, that is not a typo. It took the FDA 108 days from the day they started receiving data from Pfizer until they licensed the vaccine. But they wanted 75 years before fully releasing those closely-guarded state secrets to mere academics at UCLA, Yale, Maryland, and elsewhere. The judge rightly ruled against the FDA.

          Now, one could wonder why it took a lawsuit to release records of public interest. I don’t know what is in that material. But when we are talking about a product that was issued—and is still issued—under emergency use authorization, a product for which Pfizer has been granted by the US government full immunity from liability, a product that Pfizer has refused to sell to any country that does not grant it similar immunity, then one should pause. A person does not have to be an anti-vaxxer, a conspiracy theorist, a right-wing nut job, to say that this is not a proper way for government agencies to build trust. Time was when people on the left prized government transparency and despised the mere appearance of corporate-government collusion. As with much else, we now live in different times.

          1. I’m not aware that there are a pile of problems related to vaccines, as he’s saying on his X account.

             Except for Covid all the vaccines were thoroughly tested.

             Many of these vaccines are decades old.

          2. That immunity clause is creepy. I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t find it troubling. I am also amused by the left suddenly rushing to defend all the three lettered agencies we were taught to be suspicious of. It’s simply bizarre.

             1. Without immunity from alleged liability that could run into scores of billions of dollars for a jury verdict of vaccine-“injury” that a firm contested vigorously and lost acrimoniously, companies simply won’t invest in vaccine development. The government has to use its legislative power to coat the companies in legal Teflon if it wants to have vaccines, in the current climate of, “It’s gotta be someone’s fault that my kid isn’t right, and I’m going after the guy with the deep pockets who invented the damn thing.” Yes, it means privatizing the profits and socializing the costs, but how badly do you want the new vaccine? Those are the terms. Take it or leave it, three-letter agencies.

12. Trump’s people are insane, but even more insane are the ones that voted them. This is science fiction

    1. The problem being that Trump was running against people who cannot define what a woman is, believe children should be mutilated when confused about their fictitious “gender,” think that our daughters need to compete against men on the athletic field and then shower with them afterward, and zealously seek to stifle the free speech of anyone who disagrees. We could extend the list. It sort of diminishes the appeal of “Vote for us; we’re the sane party!”

       1. +1

       2. ” . . . zealously seek to stifle the free speech of anyone who disagrees.”

          Additionally, sic surveilling Quiet Skies air marshals on them (Tulsi Gabbard), and seize their passport from them while already seated on an international flight and eject them from the airport, and thereafter instigate an FBI raid on their home (Scott Ritter), for the effrontery and blasphemy of publicly disagreeing with U.S. foreign policy.

13. How can the “SON of god” be a Jew or a Palestinian when from a virgin birth… from god DNA I assume and what does that look like?
    I demand a sample to send to 23& me.
    Anyhow I’ll give them this. A body that can die, wake up, walk around and then ascend while floating in clouds cannot be from around here.

14. I hope Mr. Siri confines himself to tilting at Covid vaccine windmills which in the grand scheme of things is pretty small potatoes now. Going by his Court filings which I followed through Frau Katz’s NYT archive — I can’t access X — his attempts to derail the entire paediatric vaccination program with spurious claims of unproven safety show reckless bad faith and profound scientific ignorance. (I can elaborate in too many words — I counted.) He’s like a patient you propose to give an antibiotic for a diagnosed infection who wants to know why you’re so dumb you believe the germ theory anyway when it’s really aluminum in the water making us sick and then tries to recruit all the patients in the Emergency Dept. to refuse antibiotics from their doctors, too.

15. Cell timescales…

Comments are closed.