Welcome to Sunday, November 30, 2025, Sabbath for goyische cats and National Mousse Day. In its chocolate form, mousse would be a good breakfast with coffee:
It’s also National Methamphetamine Awareness Day, National Mason Jar Day, and Small Brewery Sunday (I remember when Goose Island was a small brewery in Chicago. No more!)
The snow has abated in Chicago, but it was a long slog to work; nobody has shoveled their sidewalks. Yesterday more than 1400 flights were canceled at O’Hare and Midway Airports here, and people are going to have a tough time getting back to Chicago after the holidays.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the November 30 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*Obituaries first. Playwright Tom Stoppard died at 88.
Tom Stoppard, the Czech-born English playwright who entwined erudition with imagination, verbal pyrotechnics with arch cleverness, and philosophical probing with heartache and lust in stage works that won accolades and awards on both sides of the Atlantic, earning critical comparisons to Shakespeare and Shaw, has died at his home in Dorset, England. He was 88.
The death was announced in a statement from United Agents, which represented him. No other details were provided.
Few writers for the stage — or the page, for that matter — have exhibited the rhetorical dazzle of Mr. Stoppard, or been as dauntless in plumbing the depths of intellect for conflict and drama. Beginning in 1966 with his witty twist on “Hamlet” — “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” — he soon earned a reputation as the most cerebral of contemporary English-language playwrights, venturing into vast fields of scholarly inquiry — theology, political theory, the relationship of mind and body, the nature of creativity, the purpose of art — and spreading his work across the centuries and continents.
I not only met Stoppard in 2010 at the Hay Festival in Wales, but was on a panel with him and then, as I described here, argued with him on and off for a day and a half about why people rejected evolution. As I wrote then:
At the gala, I talked for about 12 minutes on evolution, science, rationality, and atheism; it seemed to go down well. After the talk Stoppard detained me and noted that I had been unfair to claim, as I had in my talk, that religion was the major reason why many people opposed evolution. Another important reason, he argued, was that evolution simply could not explain some phenomena. When I asked him which ones, he said, “Consciousness.”
Over the next day and a half we continued this conversation, with me trying to persuade The Great Man that while evolutionary biologists had not yet provided a definitive natural-selection scenario for the evolution of consciousness, scientists were busily and successfully showing that consciousness was a material phenomenon, and that this was the first step in understanding its evolution.
I’m not at all sure that TGM had a real beef with evolution (after all, Stoppard is our most science-friendly playwright), and in the end I suppose that he regarded as the big mystery not consciousness itself, but the ability of the consciousness to crank out things like Arcadia or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.
Here are Stoppard and I (yes, it’s a vanity photo) in a break from our argument, which began right after the panel. It continue until the afternoon, when we shared his cigarettes and a beer at a table outside. The roses we’re holding were a gift from the Festival:
*Trump has announced that he’ll cancel all executive orders signed by Joe Biden using an autopen. That could include pardons—if Trump gets away with this.
President Trump said Friday he was revoking all executive orders former President Joe Biden signed with an autopen, escalating his battle with his predecessor over the use of the signature proxy device.
“I am hereby canceling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally,” Trump wrote on social media on Friday. “Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury,” Trump added without providing evidence of his claim.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
A Biden spokesperson declined to comment. Biden has previously denied that his aides used an autopen to sign pardons and commutations without his approval.
Both Democratic and Republican presidents have used autopens, devices that replicate signatures. Trump has said autopens shouldn’t be used on important documents. He said earlier this year that he has used an autopen for unimportant papers.
Presidents are legally allowed to undo executive orders signed by their predecessors. Trump could potentially revoke Biden’s legislation or the dozens of pardons he issued, including to family members. Biden also gave thousands of commutations at the end of his presidency. Still, legal scholars say there is no mechanism to undo clemency after it is granted.
Since the election, Republicans have scrutinized Biden’s use of the autopen and cast doubt on his mental fitness to authorize its use.
In an interview with the New York Times in July, Biden said he orally granted all of the pardons and commutations at the end of his presidency. In that interview, the former president called Trump and other Republicans “liars” for asserting that he was incapacitated and that his aides abused the autopen to sign pardons and commutations without his approval.
. . .The Republican-led House Oversight Committee last month recommended that the Justice Department investigate all of Biden’s executive actions and determine whether he authorized them. The committee said Biden aides failed to document that Biden had approved decisions before they used an autopen.
Trump earlier this year replaced Biden’s portrait in the White House with a picture of an autopen.
Trump signed an executive order earlier this year ordering the White House counsel and attorney general to investigate Biden’s mental state in office and to determine whether the former president’s aides had illegally used the autopen.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said last month that her team was “reviewing the Biden administration’s reported use of autopen for pardons.”
If Trump can “potentially revoke” Biden’s pardons, he’s doing that against both what legal scholars say (“no mechanism to undo clemency after it is granted”). Further the Justice Department decided years ago that as long as the President made the decision, it could be signed with an autopen and remain valid. So the only question that remains is whether Biden okayed the decision to issue pardons. Was he compos mentis when he signed, or allowed to be signed, any decision and law? If not, then all hell would break loose.
*The WaPo reports that Vinay Prasad, the person in charge of regulating vaccines under Trump, has changed the FDA’s policies towards vaccines:
Prasad also wrote that the new approach means the agency will have strict requirements for authorizing new vaccines for pregnant women. He concluded his lengthy email by maintaining that he was open-minded about next steps.“I remain open to vigorous discussions and debate,” Prasad wrote to his team, adding that staff who did not agree withthe core principles of his new approach should submit their resignations.
Collectively, Prasad’s plans would transform the FDA’s decades-old process of approving vaccines by compelling pharmaceutical companies to run far larger studies, probably slowing them down,said current and former agency staff and outside public health experts, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal FDA operations or comment on a developing situation. The approach could also have a chilling effect on the development of novel vaccines, because manufacturers will need to undertake sweeping new studies when seeking most new approvals — even for expanding the population who can get the shot, they said. They also cautioned that the full implications are difficult to understand based on a single email that did not offer a detailed accounting of how the changes would be enacted.
. . .Prasad’s continued questions about the value of administering multiple vaccines at the same time also represent a potential reversal of years of federal guidance. His team’s findings could have implicationsmoving forward for vaccines that are placed on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s recommended schedule for childhood vaccines, which calls for administering multiple vaccines at key milestones, such as a child’s birthday. Health officials also encourage Americans to receive multiple vaccines for respiratory illnesses, including flu, covid and RSV, in the same visit for convenience.
Jesse Goodman, one of Prasad’s predecessors leading the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said that he believes current vaccine guidelines are “quite strict.” He added it was difficult to assess the new requirements from an email and that in cases where vaccines are approved based on an immune response, further studies are typically required.
“It’s not like these things are being approved without strong scientific evidence,” he said.
Well, I’d like to know the evidence (not that I believe Prasad, as my default view on any pronouncement about vaccines from the Trump administration is strong doubt). How many kids would have died if they haven’t given any of them the coronavirus shots? The NBC News last night said that over 2,000 children died from covid, and added that the ten reported deaths have not been supported by details of any sort, nor have they been published. Were the children who died immunocompromised? And have they done studies showing if there’s any downside to giving multiple vaccines at once, rather than spacing them out (I presume there are such data)? This smells to me like a political rather than a scientific decision.
*How can you overlook an article in the NYT that has this headline?: “Rebel nuns can stay in abbey, if they give up social media” (article archived here).
When three octogenarian nuns escaped their senior center in September, their unlikely quest for freedom set off a bitter standoff with the abbot who leads their Roman Catholic order.
The three rebel nuns forced their way back into the Austrian abbey where they had lived for decades, before the senior center. That put them at odds with the abbot, who had wanted to keep them out, while capturing the global imagination with their lively social media feed and even prompting the involvement of Catholic leaders in Rome.
Now, after a monthslong standoff in which the nuns refused to return to the care home, the standoff seems to have a winner.
Abbot Markus Grasl appeared to admit defeat on Friday, announcing in a statement that, after talks with Rome and the local archdiocese, he would finally allow the sisters to continue to live in the abbey at Castle Goldenstein, close to Austria’s border with Germany.
In another concession, Abbot Grasl said that the nuns — Sister Rita, 82, Sister Regina, 86, and Sister Bernadette, 88, who are all known only by their religious names — would be provided with round-the-clock care, an on-call doctor and a priest to hold weekly services in the abbey’s chapel.
In return, the abbot listed several conditions: The women must stop letting laypeople into their cloisters, and — most likely much more important — they must end their social media feed.
. . . The sisters did not immediately accept those conditions, perhaps wary of relinquishing an important source of leverage over the abbot; their Instagram feed has nearly 100,000 followers. Reinhard Bruzek, their lawyer, told Austrian public television that the deal offered by the abbot reminded him of a “gagging contract” worthy of North Korea and that he would advise his clients against accepting.
Don’t forget to read the first link explaining why the nuns successfully plotted to leave the senior center. They wanted to be with each other in their old abbey, and they were not used to eating with men. An NBC article says this:
Ever since, they have documented daily life at the former convent on Instagram, with videos capturing a few of their favorite things, from candlemaking to boxing lessons.
And yes, I found their instagram page, which is here. Here’s a post of Sister Ritas taking boxing lessons.
Kudos to the Church for letting them stay and giving them in-abbey care, medical services, and a priest. But raspberries for trying to ban from from social media. Don’t the authorities know what good publicity this is for the Catholics?
*After the Cass Review was published, Britain’s NHS service is proposing a trial of puberty blockers. But, as recounted in a post by Andy Lewis on Colin Wright’s site Reality’s Last Stand, the test, which hasn’t even begun, is deeply flawed in design.
I said in February that this trial risked harming more than it helped, and I asked in the previous July what an ethical trial would even look like. Nothing I have seen since has shifted that view. In fact, the more one digs, the clearer it becomes that PATHWAYS is less a scientific endeavor than an expensive piece of theater designed to keep puberty blockers on the table while performing a pantomime of clinical trials.
Start with the Tavistock scandal that now appears to be forgotten. We already have outcomes for at least 9,000 children referred to the Tavistock GIDS clinic and several hundred who actually received blockers. That data sits in NHS desk drawers. Cass repeatedly asked for adult clinic data linkage between child and adult service so detransition and long-term health could be tracked. The clinics refused, citing spurious answers like “data-protection concerns” that have never withstood scrutiny. PATHWAYS is therefore £10.7 million spent to partially re-create some of that data we already possess but have deliberately chosen not to examine. We are putting more children at risk to avoid confronting activist therapists. The evidence that does exist is in papers that were systematically reviewed and found to be so flawed, under-powered, and selectively reported that the Cass Review found no high quality results.
Next, the diagnosis itself. Ethical trials require a clear intent to answer a scientific and clinical question that can inform future treatment decisions. It is hard to see what that question is. The trial is formally to test a treatment for “gender incongruence.” But this is not a clinical diagnosis. Activists insist this means the child is “trans,” that they possess an internal gender essence incompatible with their body, and that the only “remedy” is to alter the body to somehow match this ineffable feeling. There is no scientific evidence that such an intrinsic thing called a “gender” exists. This is postmodernist claptrap: the reification of abstract ideas about the sexes in society
. . .The trial’s design guarantees we will learn almost nothing useful about puberty blockers themselves. Every single child (treatment arm and delayed arm) receives the same new package of psychosocial support: therapy, family work, psycho-education, regular clinic visits, the full comforting apparatus of being “in the system.” The only variable that changes is whether a child receives triptorelin injections now or in twelve months’ time.
That single difference in treatment timing is the sole thread we have to pull on if we want to isolate the specific effect of the drug. Yet the thread is buried under a dozen powerful confounders: the therapeutic alliance, the placebo effect of finally being believed, the nocebo effect in the delayed group who feel cruelly denied, the natural maturation that happens to every teenager over two years, regression to the mean, and the simple passage of time away from whatever acute crisis brought them to clinic in the first place.
Because the psychosocial support is constant and the drug is the only thing that moves, any observed change in mood, self-harm, or quality-of-life scores can be attributed to the counseling just as plausibly as to the hormone suppression. The trial has no mechanism for disentangling the two. It is rather like testing a new analgesic by giving every patient in the study the drugs and a daily massage and then wondering if the massage or the pills reduce the pain. The protocol may produce reams of numbers, but it is structurally incapable of telling us what the blockers actually do.
Any improvement in quality-of-life scores can therefore be attributed to the counseling, to placebo effects, to regression to the mean, or simply to the relief of finally being taken seriously. We will never know which. The delayed arm, meanwhile, starts the study believing they have been denied life-saving treatment. Nocebo effects and off-protocol self-sourcing of blockers are inevitable. The trial cannot separate these confounders any more than a non-blinded homeopathy trial can separate the effects of sugar pills from the therapist’s reassuring smile. Puberty blockers are a dramatic intervention that is bound to create a psychological response in those who wish them to improve their lives. A chiropractor’s crack is also dramatic, but drama is not the same as effectiveness and prudence.
The follow-up in the trial is just two years. Yet, the major questions are about what happens to children as they mature into young adults and further. Peak bone mass is not reached until the late twenties. Fertility outcomes, late cognitive effects, and long-term cancer risks will remain unknown. The promise of “registry linkage pending further funding” is not a plan; it is an admission that the most important clinical questions have been postponed indefinitely.
. . . A majority of the children in such clinics arrive with autism, histories of trauma, depression, or eating disorders. Almost all cannot yet imagine adult sexual relationships or parenthood. To ask them to consent to a pathway that carries a substantial risk of permanent infertility and anorgasmia is to ask them to consent to something they cannot meaningfully understand. The consent forms may be legally watertight; they are ethically threadbare.
. . . .So what sort of results can we expect? Allow me to take a punt. The children who receive blockers immediately will, on the whole, report being “happy.” The children forced to wait a year for the treatment they have been told is life-saving will, on the whole, report being “sad.” The headline conclusion will be that puberty blockers must be offered as early as possible because they improve wellbeing. The two-year follow-up is conveniently too short for the serious skeletal, sexual, and fertility harms to become undeniable, so the treatment will be declared “safe and well-tolerated.” Critics who point out the blindingly obvious methodological flaws will be dismissed as bigoted, hateful, or “anti-trans.” This trial could not have been better designed if the brief had been: “Produce the most quack-friendly trial methodology possible while retaining a veneer of scientific respectability.”
This is a dreadful design, aimed at showing that blockers are useful, for the placebo effects will be highly possible. Is any design possible? I first thought of having both groups get “affirmative therapy”, and then give the control group a placebo and the experimental group puberty blockers, looking for “better” outcomes in the experimental group. But that itself has problems, as blockers have definite physical effects that the control group wouldn’t experience: the cessation of puberty as well as other side effects, like inability to have an orgasm. It’s not like testing polio vaccine, in which the placebo is not distinguishable from the vaccine itself (indeed, that’s how Salk tested the vaccine). To me it seems best to just hold off on the blockers (in the meantime following those who have taken them for side effects), and allow hormone treatment and surgery only after a person arrives at the age of consent. Here’s Emma’s critique (read the whole thing):
U.K. Puberty blocker trial.
The researchers argue that RCTs (randomised, controlled trials) produce ‘gold standard’ data.
They fail to mention they are not doing an RCT for the question everyone thinks they are asking.
The question Wes Streeting @wesstreeting seems to think…
— Emma Hilton (@FondOfBeetles) November 28, 2025
*From the European Space Agency, we have some stunning new views of the Butterfly Nebula taken with the Webb Space Telescope:
The Butterfly Nebula, located about 3400 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius, is one of the best-studied planetary nebulas in our galaxy. This stunning nebula was previously imaged by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Now, Webb has captured a new view of this nebula.
Planetary nebulas are among the most beautiful and most elusive creatures in the cosmic zoo. These nebulas form when stars with masses between about 0.8 and 8 times the mass of the Sun shed most of their mass at the end of their lives. The planetary nebula phase is fleeting, lasting only about 20 000 years.
Contrary to the name, planetary nebulas have nothing to do with planets: the naming confusion began several hundred years ago, when astronomers reported that these nebulas appeared round, like planets. The name stuck, even though many planetary nebulas aren’t round at all – and the Butterfly Nebula is a prime example of the fantastic shapes that these nebulas can take.
The Butterfly Nebula is a bipolar nebula, meaning that it has two lobes that spread in opposite directions, forming the ‘wings’ of the butterfly. A dark band of dusty gas poses as the butterfly’s ‘body’. This band is actually a doughnut-shaped torus that we see from the side, hiding the nebula’s central star – the ancient core of a Sun-like star that energises the nebula and causes it to glow. The dusty doughnut may be responsible for the nebula’s insectoid shape by preventing gas from flowing outward from the star equally in all directions.
This new Webb image zooms in on the centre of the Butterfly Nebula and its dusty torus, providing an unprecedented view of its complex structure. The image uses data from Webb’s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI) working in integral field unit mode. This mode combines a camera and a spectrograph to take images at many different wavelengths simultaneously, revealing how an object’s appearance changes with wavelength. The research team supplemented the Webb observations with data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), a powerful network of radio dishes.
Here are two views of the butterfly followed by another photo that shows something I don’t know. Photo credits: Butterfly Nebula NGC 6302 (Hubble, Webb, ALMA)
This is labeled “optical”:
This is “Near-IR”:
This is labeled “Near-IR and sub-mm”, whatever that means (readers?)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili suspects that Andrzej is upset:
Hili: Mad again, are you?
Andrzej: How do you know?
Hili: You’re pounding the keyboard.
In Polish:
Hili: Znowu jesteś wściekły.
Ja: Skąd wiesz?
Hili: Szybko i mocno uderzasz w klawisze.
*******************
From Silly Signs, Funny Signs Dumb Signs and Stupid Signs:
From The English Language Police:
From David Jorling, who notes, “I saw this in a Mexican restaurant in Mesa, Arizona today. Makes total sense with a touch of humor.
This tweet by Masih has two videos, the one on the right apparently showing the aftereffects of violence:
On the International Day/Week for the Elimination of Violence against Women, this is how the Pakistan Police have chosen to honor Afghan women who sought refuge in Pakistan, escaping the threat that Pakistan itself created and unleashed upon their/our people . pic.twitter.com/8ro2t1ZFrn
— Nilofar Ayoubi 🇦🇫 (@NilofarAyoubi) November 24, 2025
From Luana; nun habits vs. burqas again:
“What’s the difference between me wearing this and what a nun wears?”pic.twitter.com/FLoktY3Ldw
— Defiant L’s (@DefiantLs) November 28, 2025
From Malcolm, a gorgeous sunset:
A stunning sunset over Norway’s Lofoten Islandspic.twitter.com/t83wTJtY4E
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 21, 2025
From Larry the Cat, who still has life:
One from my X feed; a woman who is a total jerk:
Iman Masoud, a NY based licensed esthetician and owner of Pure with Nature, posted a video recounting her joy in humiliating a Jewish couple who asked her for help. pic.twitter.com/oGzEClhIJg
— StopAntisemitism (@StopAntisemites) November 29, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed to death upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was eight years old. Had she lived, she’d be ninety today. https://t.co/onCpiEQvPd
— Jerry Coyne (@Evolutionistrue) November 30, 2025
Two from Dr. Cobb, who, as we see in the first “tweet,” is in Suffolk:
Southwold beach by moonlight
— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb.bsky.social) 2025-11-28T22:18:30.431Z
Seal music! (Click on screenshot and then sound up.)
“sub-mm” means wavelengths shorter than a millimeter but I think that’s not the question.
Why those two categories together v. the other two IDK.
Beautiful!
Do not really know about the “near-ir and sub-mm” caption, but if it gets you any closer to an answer, I think I remember near-ir being in the 0.7 to 1 mm wavelength range. So what they may mean is simply sub-mm. May be a term of the art that an expert reader can explain and/or correct me on.
Near IR is just longer than we can see (> 780 nm) to about 2.5 um, or 2,500nm. Sub mm is much longer wavelength, but really useful for seeing through dust clouds. The photo is likely a combination of images taken in the two ranges.
A nice way to think of it is near IR corresponds to the peak blackbody radiation for things in the realm of1000K to 3000K (bout 1 micron for 3000K). 60W incandescent light bulbs, for example, are in that temperature realm, so mosy of the light they emit is IR. This is also where IR emmitting semiconductors operate.
Sub-mm corresponds to lower temperatures, with 0.01mm (10 micron) corresponding to the peak for about 300K (room temperature-ish). This is in the realm of common IR cameras. 0.1mm corresponds to roughly 30K (Brrrr. Hello Chicago….) and 1mm to roughly 3K (cosmic background).
The longer wavelengths of necessity use larger sensor elements than shorter, and different types, so for a given sensor size, the resolution is lower.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into. -Jonathan Swift, satirist (30 Nov 1667-1745)
AHHHH!
Yes! That quote!
Thank you!
It was running in my mind lately!
Oh, here’s a thought about evolution and consciousness (😁) :
I was recently reading The Mismeasure of Man by S. J. Gould (1981) and there’s an amazing story of how Broca and someone else .. Spitzka?.. kept Gauss’ brain and compared it to other brains.
The drawings of the brains are on pp.90-91 etc.
I looked this up, and rel. recently they saw that Gauss’ brain was mistakenly labeled as another person’s brain! They did MRIs to correct the mistake…
Check it out!
🧠
If we quit arguing with these antivax folks, how long would it take to reduce the number of stupid people in the government?
Probably a long time, because not enough people die of vaccine-preventable diseases for their deaths to have any impact on the number of unvaccinated people surviving childhood to be elected or appointed to office. You’re attributing more impact to vaccination than it actually delivers. Our society is just not at all dependent on vaccination for its survival, now that smallpox is gone, and we don’t vaccinate against plague or tuberculosis*. Now if there was a faction gaining traction calling for getting rid of the largely invisible infrastructure that keeps human and animal feces out of the food, milk, and drinking water, then you’d have to imprison them for the sake of the public’s health. Just letting them die off themselves from typhoid wouldn’t be selective enough. Too much collateral damage.
(* Except in aboriginal children)
Prasad’s claims are disingenuous at best. Out right lie is closer. Of course double’blind placebo-controlled studies have been done on influenza vaccines. In the elderly, in pregnant women, in children with asthma, there have been many such studies. A cursory search of literature will show that. The people the Orange Toddler selects to do his admins work really do think Americans are idiots. They not wrong, sadly.
What Prasad is saying that each new flu vaccine has to go through a double-blind placebo-controlled study. New influenza vaccines are needed every year , sometimes more than one. They need to be developed and tested (yes, they ARE tested in humans) in the span of a couple months to prepare.
This is the way anti-vaccine fools get what they want; if they make it impossible to comply, they can kill the vax and stick it to all those evil pharmaceutical companies and the demons they employ.
Not sure about this….
Director Prasad’s e-mail doesn’t mention influenza vaccination at all. I have to trust that he knows that each year’s influenza vaccine has to be manufactured based on an educated guess (plus some early warning info from the Southern Hemisphere winter which precedes ours) about which influenza viruses will be circulating during our upcoming winter. I also have to assume he knows there is no way to do any kind of RCT for efficacy before launching the annual flu vaccine campaign because influenza has to be circulating to test efficacy. All we do every year is vaccinate the high-risk patients and hope for the best. If we guess right we get maybe 60% efficacy, which can be very important in frail elderly. If we guess wrong, we might as well have not vaccinated at all. To accuse Prasad of thwarting this process by demanding impossible RCTs for each year’s choice of antigens is deeply unfair, unless you know this from other sources. I’m pretty sure therefore that he’s not even thinking about influenza vaccine in this directive.
This is not unreasonable. Pneumococcal vaccines prevent pneumococcal pneumonia in the elderly with about 45% efficacy (2015, below) when analyzed for the vaccine strains. No RCTs for efficacy have been reported since, to the best of my knowledge. Since humoral antibodies play a crucial role in preventing the rapidly fatal bacteremic form of infection, it might be reasonable to be satisfied with demonstrating that a newly developed vaccine antigen type (there are at least 83, of which 23 are in the current vaccine) merely generates antibody titres in volunteers. But only a small proportion of elderly people diagnosed with pneumonia have bloodstream infections, and the bacteriologic cause of pneumonia is never demonstrated in most patients, except in research settings such as in the report below. It is reasonable to ask if a new pneumonia vaccine is more effective in preventing over-all pneumonia cases, or even deaths, to justify licensing the new product which will always be more expensive than the one it replaces, and not settle just for detecting antibodies to the new antigen in healthy volunteers and assuming it will work in the target population. Prasad indicates that licensing based on antibody titres could be provisional pending post-marketing evidence of clinical efficacy.
A more realistic pragmatic trial of preventing pneumonia is here:
This trial showed a reduction in deaths due to diagnosed pneumococcal pneumonia but no effect on overall deaths due to pneumonia of all types, or on all-cause mortality. (In nursing homes, a lot of residents just die without any specific diagnosis of the terminal event.)
Efficacy of pneumococcal vaccine in elderly people has been controversial for many decades. I can’t do justice to it here.
Being a resident of a country that never made an effort to vaccinate children against Covid, neither to prevent their dying nor to prevent them spreading it to their vaccinated elderly grandparents, I’ll stay out of the Covid contretemps altogether. But I don’t see anything to take objection to in the rest of his e-mail.
And he does say this:
From Prasad’s email:
“We will revise the annual flu vaccine framework, which is an evidence-based catastrophe of low quality evidence, poor surrogate assays, and uncertain vaccine effectiveness measured in case-control studies with poor methods. We will re-appraise safety and be honest in vaccine labels. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on how to do this better.”
It immediately follows the passage about the pneumonia vaccine.
Right you are. Thanks. I was looking for “influenza”, didn’t see “flu”. I confess I don’t know what this means exactly. But Director Prasad definitely did not say that each year’s version of influenza vaccine will have to go through its own randomized trial before being released.
Novel types of influenza vaccine, as for example an mRNA vaccine just developed, would need RCTs to demonstrate efficacy as compared with standard vaccine, as here:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2416779 (Nov 2025.)
It is true that we don’t know how effective influenza vaccine is in real-world practice — it is a mess — because the match between the vaccine manufactured each summer and the epitopes on the virus that circulates that winter is a matter of luck. And the population at greatest risk, frail elderly, mount poor immune responses and don’t get as much protection against fatal influenza as a healthy elderly person gets against mild disease. Randomized trails typically exclude nursing-home residents as subjects because they have high risk of dying from causes other than influenza, which makes the statistics hard to interpret. This can seriously skew results. (Neither trial of the first two Covid vaccines included nursing home residents, and neither trial clocked any deaths at all in vaccine and control arms totaling ~50,000 subjects (only a small fraction of whom got Covid during the lockdowns in force at the time.))
The evaluation establishment is probably doing as well as can be expected given the nature of influenza. It is the only infectious disease still in the top ten causes of death and it is the last persistingly uncontrolled epidemic disease in developed countries. I can see a lot of Director-induced “churn” and Brownian movement in influenza vaccine policy without much progress being made.
Leslie, I can’t respond to you below, so I’ll post this here:
Ah, yes, the Pfizer mRNA influenza study that the media reported with much fanfare. That NEJM article is only a piece of a far larger study. Have you seen the rest? Curiously, Pfizer chose not to publish the results for those aged 65 and older despite promising its shareholders two years ago that it would release the Phase 3 cohort results in 2023. You can find it below. Pfizer tucked it away on clinicaltrials.gov earlier this year. I think you’ll soon discover why it wasn’t published to talking points and media fanfare.
https://www.clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT05540522?tab=results
Note the RVE of -5.8%. As to side effects, I’m not terribly concerned about the significantly higher incidence of local reactions, but I do wonder why one would endure them given the poor relative efficacy.
There does seem to be a potentially interesting safety signal when you look at kidney function: incidence of acute kidney injury, chronic kidney disease, and end-stage renal failure was 22 versus 9 (mRNA vs licensed vaccine, respectively.) Similarly, acute respiratory failure of 17 vs 6 (mRNA vs licensed). I wonder whether the combination of lower efficacy, much higher local reactions, and possibly bigger problems had anything to do with releasing the results of the smaller 18-64 cohort and quietly going back to Phase 2 for the more important cohort.
Doug. You really gave me some homework. 🙂
I grabbed that NEJM study just to illustrate how new vaccine designs, such as an mRNA delivery vehicle, would indeed need new RCTs but that the Prasad directive wasn’t going to be requiring them, absurdly, for every year’s egg vaccine. Not to belabour this but on reading the data in the clinicaltrials.gov repository you linked to I went back to the protocol published as a supplement to the trial. It seems that the trial started out as planning to enroll subjects 65 and over, then expanded to enrol subjects 18 to 85, and then settled on stratifying the trial as one group 18-64 and another group 65 and over. As you note, the more important cohort is the 65 and over which we have only the data deposited in the repository, not prepared as a manuscript or, of course, peer reviewed.
Protocol variations are OK as long as they are registered with the clinicaltrials.gov site and fixed in place before the trial starts to accrue. Obviously you can’t change the design from one large trial to two smaller sub-trials after looking at the results and choosing the version which gives the most encouraging results. By documenting all protocol changes with the government in real time, the authors protect themselves from being accused of doing this.
But the authors should have told us that this published trial is a sub-trial within a larger trial the results of which will be reported later. (The protocol, which few people will read all 454 pages, identifies this second trial, duh. Presumably they intended to publish it, to submit to FDA.) That they didn’t say to all the usual readers that there is a whole trove of data on 65 and over not yet submitted for publication suggests they were disappointed with the results.
And it seems they have every reason to be.
Who among us will prove 100% compliance with vaccines, and what would that prove?
If there exists one vaccine any individual did not take – how is that different from any individual not taking any vaccine?
Vaccines are not for creating the conditions for the friend/enemy distinction, nor for proving a superior intelligence.
The sixth paragraph in Andy Lewis’s criticism of the UK puberty-blocker trial is incorrect. If psychological support is offered to all subjects in both groups, any differences in outcome between the groups can’t be attributed to the psychological support. Changes in the mental health in any one subject might of course be due to that psychotherapy he received but the whole point of a controlled trial is to see what changes if any, good or bad, are due to the experimental treatment, which the control group by definition won’t get (in the first year.) Because, as Lewis admits, the only thing that moves is the drug, any differences between the groups really can be ascribed to the drug. (Only in the first year, though, because everyone gets puberty blockers in the second year.)
Now, Lewis’s other criticisms of this terrible, mendacious trial are fully valid, as are Jerry’s own, which is why I think I didn’t notice this error when I first read Lewis’s piece on Wright’s Substack. (I find I read things more closely when I read them here, perhaps because I feel intimidated by PCC(E), in an entire beneficent and beneficial way, as if this was a journal club meeting or seminar I had to prepare for and get evaluated on.). I’ll make a comment on the original.
The other weakness of the trial which I haven’t seen made elsewhere is that two years of GnRH agonists and no follow-on treatment isn’t how adolescents with gender dysphoria are treated. Nearly all patients switch to a lifetime of wrong-sex hormones without ever withdrawing puberty blockers after their bogus “time to think” and allowing normal puberty to resume. This “usual clinical management” would take place outside the trial and not be captured as data points. So this is really a trial of life-long irrational medical treatment started now or merely delayed a year, with evaluation made only one, after two years, before hormone Rx has even started, which in the case of boys will just make them resentful because they’ll have a harder time passing. There is no control group where only talk therapy and no medical intervention at all is proposed.
The UK Government needs to step in to halt this trial in the public interest. A trial that can’t answer its intended question is unethical on its face when human or animal subjects are involved, or if public money is being spent on it.
Very true, Leslie, esp about the fraudulence of “time to think” or “a pause”. The entire trans edifice is one big, damaging fraud.
On the trial – (which will never actually happen, for it is a just an underhanded way of continuing to dole out hormones, and the tide in England seems to have turned against this neo-lobotomy madness… )
I agree with your double blind problems.
I remember with amusement – that you can’t blind a psychedelics trial, say, b/c… people know when they’re tripping. hehehe
best,
D.A.
NYC
“Oh wow, the placebos….”
The whole thing is such a sad enterprise. The primary outcomes are answers to a 10-point questionnaire called KIDSCREEN-10 that basically measures teen angst. Only in the secondary outcomes are there measures of distress about the child’s sexual development (the “gender incongruence” traits that form the main inclusion criteria).
And it’s all questionnaires. No observations of the children’s behaviour or social interactions. Just self-reported questionnaire responses plus a handful of physical traits (height, weight, BMI, BP). It’s extraordinarily lazy research that can be conducted from a small office in a hospital, without ever observing how Triptorelin affects the life of the child. Instead of a sea of questionnaires, the researchers should be sending observers to the homes and schools of the kids to study their behaviour.
They are not going to step in. From what I hear, even Hilary Cass has no objections to this trial.
Dr. Cass has said she can’t even take the subway (or s/t called a toobe they have there I understand…) b/c Trans Rights Activists harass her.
They’ve busted her entire life. That she has no dog in this latest fight is no surprise.
D.A.
NYC
The Economist reports that gender-critical opponents (that’s us, the good guys) may seek judicial review to enjoin the trial.
A landmark trial of puberty blockers could end up in court
https://archive.md/PmQVn
Nuns need boxing lessons? When I attended Catholic school, the nuns were pretty good at b eating little boys. And please, no jokes about rulers. I was never hit with a ruler, not even once. But i was pushed, punched, and kicked on a regular basis.
I’d much rather talk with a woman in a hijab than a nun in a habit any day of the week.
It was reported in the Austrian media on Friday. The three nuns have categorically rejected the provost’s proposal.
Almost three months after the three sisters Rita, Regina, and Bernadette moved back to the Goldenstein convent on their own initiative, there is still no solution in sight in the debate. “We will certainly not agree to this. I cannot do this to my fellow sisters, and my fellow sisters would not do this to me,” said Sister Bernadette in an interview with ORF. “All three sisters have unanimously decided not to sign this agreement for legal reasons,” said Christina Wirtenberger, spokesperson for the nuns.
[…]
In addition, the three women, aged 82, 86, and 88, will have nursing staff at their side 24 hours a day and a doctor to take care of their medical needs. “As soon as the sisters require such a high level of care that it is no longer possible to look after them in the convent,” the elderly nuns will have to move into a nursing home, according to Provost Grasl. The nuns were appalled by Grasl’s proposal: “We have only just been told that, according to the proposal, they can throw us out again the very next day.”
https://salzburg.orf.at/stories/3331968/
Well you may have a different opinion if you were taught by mean women in hijabs.
The key difference is if a nun takes off her habit she is not killed for it but plenty of women all over the world are murdered for removing their hijab.
What happens to women in foreign countries who remove their hijab is not my concern. I don’t even think about it. That’s up to them to rectify if they want to. I’ve kind of given up on regime change in the Islamosphere.
More important from my perspective is that a nun in a habit in my town is unlikely to wish me dead, nor to be hiding underneath it the means to bring that about.
I was constantly told that I was a child of the Devil, etc, and how I would burn in Hell for all Eternity. I was also told that all Protestants would burn in Hell. I see women in Hijabs on a daily basis. I am a friendly basis with one of them. None of ever said any such things to me. None of them ever “wished me dead”
A nun may be unlikely to wish you dead now, but if you had attended Catholic School in the 70s, and questioned doctrines of the Catholic religion, you would indeed have been physically abused, told you were going to Hell , etc. No woman in a hijab has ever said such things to me. Kinda like I have clients who love Trump, but are also the nicest people in the world to me.
A better way to compare might be to see what happens to children in Islamic schools and madrasas when they question Islam – particularly in a culture which is primarily Muslim.
They believe in Hell for nonbelievers and the penalty for apostasy is supposed to be death. Catholics dropped that last one hundreds of years ago.
Every woman I know in a hijab has been nice to me, or at worst, indifferent. Never heard about Muslim women routinely abusing little boys. Please correct me if I am incorrect.
Stoppard wrote a play about consciousness in 2015–“The Hard Problem.” Highly recommended!
Happy Sunday. Cool story about you and Stoppard. I have little doubt that evolution will explain consciousness, not directly but through the way the neurons function in the brain.
And, President Trump. Yet again. One of the methods that Trump uses—whether purposeful or not—is surprise. He surprises us with a radical proclamation—such that all of Biden’s auto pen-signed documents are hereby null and void—which then leads a tidal wave of press, politicos, and pundits to shift to the locus of attention to that proclamation. His surprise acts, tweets, and remarks are part of the secret sauce that makes him the most activist President perhaps since Theodore Roosevelt. I’m not saying that I like what he’s doing. But I am saying that he is frenetically activist.
And Iman Masoud is apparently an activist, too. Her behavior was disgusting.
Totally disgusting.
And the irony of her complaining of the Jewish couple’s “audacity”!
That selfie will not likely bring her whatever she thinks she’s getting from showcasing her intolerance and spite in a public video. Righteous jerks are still percieved as jerks.
If all autopen signatures by a President are null and void, what does this mean for the J6 pardons? Did Trump sign all 1600 by hand? Perhaps this has been addressed or answered before.
A bit more about the Iman Masoud interaction with the Jewish couple. The way that Masoud responds with such indignity that Jews might ask her for help is truly disturbing. It indicates that here, even in the United States, whether one engages with another or not is contingent on identity. Masoud was indignant that Jews would ask a Muslim for help. She learned her lessons well—that the U.S. is no longer a society where everyone is part of the same community. Rather, it’s become a society where identity comes first. That’s the most disturbing part of all.
Trump should deport her.
😀
The Butterfly Nebula and the beach by moonlight are beautiful!
Re the autopen: Wondering if Trump, on 1/20/25, signed by hand >1500 pardons for the J6 insurrectionists. No autopen???
Yeah. I think such a tRUMP signing marathon would remind me of the scene from Blazing Saddles with the Gov signing paper after paper…”Work, work, work….”
Very true, Leslie, esp about the fraudulence of “time to think” or “a pause”. The entire trans edifice is one big, damaging fraud.
On the trial – (which will never actually happen, for it is a just an underhanded way of continuing to dole out hormones, and the tide in England seems to have turned against this neo-lobotomy madness… )
I agree with your double blind problems.
I remember with amusement – that you can’t blind a psychedelics trial, say, b/c… people know when they’re tripping. hehehe
best,
D.A.
NYC
It is really sad that this woman feels that her ethnic and/or religious identity and that of the Jewish couple prevent them from cooperating with each other, especially on such a little thing as paying for parking. I’m shaking my head. I bet the Jewish couple would have helped her if she had asked for help with something. The woman in the video does not understand the values that most Americans hold.
Good argument for a “Muslim ban”.
Absolutely agree. The Jewish couple would have helped her if she needed it.
With today’s toxic identitarian atmosphere—apparently taught in colleges nationwide—we may be witnessing a harbinger of the future. When we encounter a person on the street, at a place of business, or at a social event, in the future we will first try to evaluate which identity group that person represents. Then we will act “accordingly,” as this woman believed she did. You’ll notice that she took great pride in documenting her interaction, confident that her identity group members would heartily approve. There’s a dark cultural phenomenon at play here. Here in the United States, we are no longer Americans; we are a collection of isolated identity groups.
David A has brought up the vital importance of social trust, and that the lack of it is a major cause of much of our current social dysfunction. That was the first I’d read about it, and I’ve found it a widely applicable notion. It clearly applies here.
Vinay Prasad is a long-time critic of the pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory system, especially within his oncology specialty, so his skepticism is nothing new or RFK Jr.-driven.
Jerry asks good questions: “How many kids would have died if they haven’t given any of them the coronavirus shots? . . . Were the children who died immunocompromised?” These are the types of questions we should be asking about all claims. For instance, how many of the children who were coded as having died of COVID were immunocompromised? How many lacked any other attributable illness? When we are told how many “would have” died, do we assess the models and the modelers with the same rigor as when they tell us things we don’t want to hear? Do we see confounding in observational studies only when we don’t like the conclusions?
“I presume there are such data.” I could laundry-list COVID-era topics on which people assumed data existed when it did not, but I am not interested in diving down COVID rabbit holes. (The fact that it still generates such heated feelings suggests we aren’t ready for an unbiased scientific and policy assessment.) But I have been thinking about this mindset for some time: I assume there are such data. As many assumed there was robust safety data on puberty blockers for children. As many assumed that data undergirded the emotional blackmail of “Do you want a live daughter or a dead son?” As many assumed that data demonstrated systemic racism across our institutions. We could go on. Experts claimed—therefore, the data must show.
In an age of specialized expertise, many experts have an understandable reluctance to critique comparably-intelligent experts in fields outside of their own. Everyone knows what fools that people can make of themselves when they venture into disciplines they don’t fully understand. A certain amount of trust is required for the system to function. (The peasants and the priests weren’t the only ones wrapped up in a system of deference to others—despite our modern pretensions to “think for ourselves.”) But what happens when trust is no longer warranted? When the standards and rigor of a discipline have declined and one remains unaware? When ideology has captured a field? When groupthink has overtaken a social class or political party? When honest scientific assessment will get you branded “controversial” with your peers and “right-wing” by your liberal neighbors? When money has distorted the “data” and regulatory systems are plagued by self-dealing and politics? How much are we safe to assume?
I just came here to say that I love that “glove” in German is Handschuh “hand shoe”
If Mr Stoppard doubted all of evolution because it couldn’t explain consciousness, what explanation for consciousness did he favour (if he was saying his objection was non-religious?)?
Cool you got to meet Mr. Stoppard and even had a brew and a ciggie with him!
You get to meet lots of intellectual celebs. I’m very jelly about it all!
D.A.
NYC
Re. 10 suspect deaths, meanwhile, per TWiV 1274, in the first 8min or so, we now have 7 pertussis deaths this year in the US so far, where vaccination rates have dropped a few % down to 92%. Three in KY, where the last one recorded was 2018, and two in TX. Of course, none of those seven had been vaccinated. Prior to the vaccine, we were losing ~9K kids annually.
Response from Junior Kennedy’s cabal: Cricket Serenade.
And AIUI, whooping cough, aka “100-day cough, is a terrible experience even when non-fatal. The knee-jerk “Vax? Bad!” crowd have no f-ing clue what they’re messing with.
And as far as consciousness, my first thought was that it’s outside the purview of evolution, like abiogenic origins, but thinking further I’d suspect that it began as a sort of “irratability of protoplasm” sort of thing, which reflected a hydrophobic/hydrophilic reaction of membranes (which have been shown to spontaneously form, to get that out of the way). Further refinement came with randomly encoded membrane proteins, an occasional one of which had some function which enabled its retention, with other such proteins in other primordial cells that occasionally chanced to interact with protein(s) in the other primordial cell.
Then some small molecules, proto-neurotransmitters, arose that could bind to one and be handed off to another, and off we went.
IMO the evolutionary usefulness of consciousness (and awareness in general) is not the issue here. The Hard Problem is that the undeniable phenomenon of conscious experience is/appears/feels qualitatively different from other phenomena we encounter. IMO that’s where notions of an immaterial soul / spirit / essence come from.
Yep, probably. Seems to me those could be spandrels. No telling where the arrant neuron connection may lead, and does anyone seriously think that all can be mapped? They don’t all HAVE to be under evolutionary pressure, and some that aren’t might find their way to finding some evolutionary pressure.
Just ruminating off the top of my head, but seems to me that there’s plenty of room for discussion based on what we know already, without having to invoke some deity.
You might¹ find Dennett’s 1993 book Consciousness Explained helpful.
. . . . .
¹ I expect not, since in my experience few people do. It’s far outside the box. It is quite readable, just not easily believable.
While some folk might doubt whether natural selection could be the whole explanation for evolution, the historic structure of evolutionary development seems beyond reasonable doubt.
I was reading about coprolit, which is fossilized feces.
In 1842 John Bennet Lawes set up a factory treating the coprolites with sulphuric acid to make superphosphate fertilizer. Amazingly there were enough coprolites to keep the industry going for over 40 years and there is an estimate that the total amount dug up was 2 million tonnes from the Cambridge greensand, Gault and Pleistocene Red Craig sequence of SE of England on the edge of chalk deposits. They thought perhaps after the dinosaur dung was fossilized the coprolites were washed out of bedrock and into depressions in the sea bed or riverbed, becoming concentrated enough to be worth mining.
There is a good pdf about it. ” A Vanished Industry: Coprolite Mining
Trevor. D. Ford and Bernard O’Connor
Abstract: Phosphatic nodules, generally known as coprolites, occur mainly in the Cretaceous clay
formations which outcrop in a SW-NE belt from Norfolk to Oxfordshire with outlying patches in
Yorkshire and Kent and in the early Pleistocene of Suffolk. They were exploited commercially in
Victorian times as source of phosphate for what was then called “chemical manure”. Working this
resource of fertilizer made a substantial contribution to British agriculture in the 19th century. “