Flame retardant found in US breast milk
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
For those unaware, smokers would get drunk and pass out with lit cigarettes that would set their couch on fire and burn their house down. This lead to a push to cover everything in "flame retardants" which are more accurately called "human retardants", as they do little to actually prevent combustion from an effective source and are tied to everything from cancer to developmental issues.
https://fsri.org/research/new-comparison-natural-and-synthet...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_retardant#Fire_safety_st...
With these particular statistics, the benefits of flame retardants vs. poisoning millions of people doesn't seem worth it.
* UK government value of prevented fatality: £2M [0]
* UK government value of a quality-adjusted life-year for a single person: £70k -> ~£192 per day [1]
[0] https://www.lse.ac.uk/PBS/assets/documents/Estimating-the-mo...
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-green-book-ap...
It is true in a very narrow range of conditions a flame retardant can prevent combustion, but it's like an airbag that will only deploy for impacts between 15 and 17 MPH. In real world circumstances with real world combustion sources they don't make a difference.
Turns out, it's usually better to be fast and break things, over trying to be reliable.
"Use our futzel service, you will be able to futz around all day long, and it won't go down!"
In terms of # of correct guesses, sure. In terms of damage from guessing incorrectly over time, usually not.
The trick is to separate processes - A CSS update probably isn't very risky, and an auth or login update probably is. Don't bundle them into "website updates".
Run ahead with the layout changes and spend some time on failure-planning for the auth change.
It is not to be applied to destructive changes to systems users care about, and none of the companies named in the 2017 book by that title use that engineering tactic on their flagship products because real people care now.
or as fight club said
> Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
Probably it was the tobacco companies lobbying for this.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistent_organic_pollutant
This is a good thing right? Nobody wants breasts to catch fire!
me, an intellectual: I have fireproofed the baby.
There is consensus (even by RFK Jr from what I hear in interviews) that vaccines confer good immunity to the population and help control serious diseases that historically killed or maimed millions of people.
There is also an argument RFK Jr. makes which is that the vaccine solutions contain many harmful components other than the actual vaccine and these components are responsible for many harmful outcomes due to their presence. These harmful side effects should not be considered acceptable and there should be work to eliminate these harms because they are not really acceptable.
However, these positions seem to be routinely headlined as being anti-vaccine. They are not. The argument is anti-harm and that seems to be something people would normally support. Only through misrepresentation of his comments do people come to believe he is against vaccines and he should be "rightly maligned".
His interview with Jordan Peterson was very interesting, especially as it did highlight some of RFK Jr's blindspots on politics. Worth taking time to listen to the whole thing even though it is quite long.
I use that phrase because it is an accurate descriptor. He has literally published articles claiming a grand conspiracy to poison Americans, rejecting all data from repeated vaccine trials and studies by the international scientific community.
Vaccine trials use the real vaccine that would go to consumers, all of it. There is robust study of the whole package, not just the component that interacts with the immune system.
RFK is a bogus baseless conspiracy theorist, regardless of his current PR campaign.
(Here by "stupid" I mostly mean "unable to perceive the world accurately, relative to other people with the same resources at their disposal, and unable to differentiate objective reality from false ideas that make them feel good in some way".)
Good thing we don't have any warp speed vaccines that compress this vital process!
Specifically, how many studies, and for what length, would you have been satisfied with? What is your specific epidemiological and medical background that led you to decide on that length of time? What is the specific number of elderly deaths you would have allowed, before giving people the completely optional ability to take those vaccines?
I ask none of those questions in bad faith, but I'm rather tired of the 'no no no no' attitude on the right, where nothing was ever going to be good enough and the real answer you want is that we should've vaccinated no one at all, ever.
"We need to, prior to licensing vaccines, do gold standard safety testing, like every other drug approval requires. We need to do double-blind placebo testing."
- We do mate.
Kennedy also said that he wanted to ensure “that vaccines are subject to the same kind of safety scrutiny and safety testing that other drugs are subject to."
- They are already subjected to more safety scrutiny and more safety testing.
"the hepatitis B vaccines that are currently approved had fewer than five days of safety testing."
- 2 years of human clinical trials is a longer length of time than 5 days.
.. and he started down that path by repeating, without checking, highly bogus discredited "science" about the harmful effects of thimerosal and a deliberate widespread conspiracy regarding its use.
When he jumped on that public bandwagon it had already been out of use for more than a decade after being used for some two decades prior in trace amounts that caused not great issues.
Everything he said was either false, 30 years out of date, or both.
He really hasn't improved much since.
Unfortunately, “science” has done a good job of discrediting itself lately and shown to be susceptible to corruption, influence, and outright fabrication. How can anyone trust a paper discrediting another any more than the original research when the liability associated with those harmful effects would be astronomically damaging to influential organizations?
I don’t have any issues with most traditional, dead virus vaccines, but also have no trust in pharma or even public institutions to do what’s in the public’s best interest when it is not aligned with theirs or causes other harm to them.
We need more pharma sceptics, imho. They hold a considerable amount of power over the population and take in absurd profits in the process. Anyone who challenges that will be misrepresented and maligned publicly, if not removed through more violent means. I’m sure Kennedy’s know that more than most dynasty families.
I remember immediately volunteering to be part of locally run trials to test probably suitable vaccine classes already in the pipeline and I remember being an active part of a trial within months.
I recall the planning and the effort spent to bring modern critical path JIT approaches to traditional vaccine development that ran multiple variations of every traditional stage as much in parallel as possible thereby shortening the entire runway without compressing the neccesary time for each critical stage.
I recall having discussions with a world renowned epidemiologist from here in my home state who I worked with as a young student in mathematics some 40 years ago about the quality of the science and the diligence being taken.
History is littered with easily disproven junk science claims by political entities that play to feelings of the masses by saying whatever plays to their base.
he called for long-term safety studies for vaccine use, which is just tracking long-term effects, both positive and negative, to populations after getting vaccinated. he rightly points out a lack of this in the US, and rightly points out the concept of tradeoffs. Yes, vaccines can cause other negative long-term effects that aren't as bad as what you're being vaccinated against, in this case they're pulling a net-good. The case is also up for grabs that when this is a net-good or a net-bad, the information is simply not being shared the way it should, and is instead obfuscated by bureaucracy.
even the latest "anti-semetic" jabs at him are from him entertaining a hypothetical in conversation where he said nothing about jewish people being a cause of anything, its just so tiresome. afaik he spoke correctly on the ace-receptor binding affinities, but the binding affinities don't cause the disease to take root more or less. do i care if he gets this detail wrong? not really, it doesn't make him a super space nazi either. to steel man what he said is to admit there's potential for ethnic targeting of bio-weapons, and since its pretty much widely understood that covid did in fact come from joint US/China idiocy, and that China's financial records show that they're preparing for war in every way possible, I wouldn't put it past a regime who's actions seem to be rhyming with a lot of other regimes from history to try to come up with a bioweapon that could potentially have that effect. The west has, after all, basically been pushing venture capital all over the insane nonsense Xi could end up using against them for the last 20+ years.
The right's is pushing this guy hard as someone the left is conspiring against to silence.
I've heard him compared to Bernie...by those on the right.
They clearly do not understand what they are saying but it is clear they are using him to 'concern' the left that the left is up to it's tricks by suppressing this clearly "intelligent" man with a (D) after his name.
But the intelligence they see is because he believes the same anti-vax nonsense that aligns with their politicization of covid including that covid itself is a conspiracy.
television forces the worst out of people, especially with the constant interruptions made by professional interrupters aka newcasters who's job it is to make people look bad whenever necessary.
i simply don't believe what you have to say because i know the nature of the media business, they're against him so they'll do anything they can to throw him off kilter in a conversation, change the topic, or interrupt him to make it look like he's saying something different. he talks on really complicated topics that can't be compressed through interruptions, the media has only shown itself incapable of hosting such conversations.
and did he say vaccine research created aids? or was he saying it's been spread through needles? there's so many details missing in this story
The latest anti-semitic accusation is also more serious than you make it out to be. He explicitly claims that Covid-19 affected Jewish people ("Ashkenazi Jews") and Chinese people less than others, and talks about that as "targeting". His exact words are that "there is an argument that Covid-19 was ethnically targeted", repeating that it is "targeted to affect Caucasian and Black individuals". He softens it a bit by saying that we don't know if it was deliberately targeted, but he then goes on to talk about how both the USA and the Chinese are working on ethnically-targeted bio weapons, so the implication is more than clear.
I will say that it's not necessarily clear that he is being anti-semitic here, but he is clearly being sinophobic and very very clearly implying that Covid-19 was an ethnically-targeted Chinese bio-weapon, a preposterous claim.
If he doesn't want to imply Covid-19 was a bio-weapon, why does he bring it up out of nowhere in the middle of some musings on bio-weapons? Why does he keep using the words "ethnically targeted" if he doesn't want to imply it was, well, ethnically targeted?
The poster attempts to present evidence that credence should be high that China is able to, and would, make bioweapons that are ethnically targeted. At no point does he suggest they have already done so.
That this is insufficient evidence for China's capabilities is likely the more reasonable discussion to have. I don't think they're there yet, and the lab leak from Wuhan shows they're still a bit sloppy in how they handle these things.
1. RFK Jr claims he has been doing research on bio weapons and he claims that the advancements in this area are mind-blowing
2. He then starts talking about how Covid-19 allegedly targeted certain groups less (Jewish and Chinese people), and certain others more (Caucasian and Black people).
3. He then says we don't know if it was intentionally targeted
4. He then goes back to talking about how both the USA and China supposedly have research programs into ethnically-targeted bio-weapons.
The best possible interpretation of this is that he uses the Covid-19 example to only to show that a virus can affect certain populations more than others. However, he uses the word "targeted" for this, and explicitly mentions that it's possible that it was intentionally targeted [by someone]. So, the more plausible read is that he is implying Covid-19 may well be an example of such a bioweapon created by the Chinese to attack Caucasian and Black people.
I will note that I am highly skeptical of his base claim that Covid-19 had some genetic preference for Caucasian and Black people. Any such claim is highly suspect, since it typically conflates ethnicity with genetics without actually doing any actual genetic testing to check. While it is of course true that there are certain genetic differences between ethnic groups, there are also huge social and behavioral and wealth differences between all such groups, which can also explain differences in disease outcomes.
Also, especially when looking at these groups inside of multi-ethnic countries like the USA, the exact genetics of any specific individual may or may not match the general group genetics, since they have different heritability, and inter-group marriages are common. Just because someone has inherited darker skin tones (and would thus be part of the ethnic group "Black people") doesn't mean they also inherited a predisposition to sickle-cell anemia, for example.
As for any ethnic preference of SARS-CoV-2, I've not seen any evidence for that either. We do know that it affects men worse than women, which is explained by XY instead of XX chromosomes (women are better at fighting it off as their immune systems begin the work sooner). The comorbidities in the US just happen to be because we have higher tendencies toward type II diabetes (poor diet, lack of exercise). That's not anything special about the virus, though.
regarding the anti-semetic bit, not only did you completely avoid the main point of what was being said by both RFK and me, which is the potential for ethnic targeting, you've quoted his statement yourself with "there is an argument...", its not "i support the idea that...". its like people can't even speak hypotheticals without baseless accusations coming around every corner, what's the point of dialogue if we act like this? let's just settle presidential elections in a wrestling ring.
When anxiety-producing questions keep getting "asked" by a politician when they already have rigorous, data-backed answers, they are being used as a political tool, disguised as skepticism or genuine scientific inquiry.
as a human being, you're allowed to have discussion on topics in order to flesh them out.
The same sort of thing happens with hypotheticals. Sure, they are important and not every hypothetical should be read as an affirmation. But then there are cases like OJ Simpsons "If I had done it" - where the hypothetical framing is such an obvious fig leaf that it's ridiculous to pretend. And saying "there's an argument that" in the middle of a discussion about bio weapons, bringing up highly disputable facts like the supposed ethnic differences in Covid-19 effects, and then not spending even another second to acknowledge that there is 0 evidence for this supposed hypothetical - that all brings it to a level where it's comical not to recognize what was actually being said.
Clearly there is _some_ need for nuance there since the Earth isn't exactly a sphere. Even calling it an oblate ellipsoid isn't a perfect model. There is nuance everywhere, and clearly some models are more wrong than others; modeling the Earth as flat is much less accurate than a sphere, which in turn is less accurate than the somewhat flattened spheres common today, which in turn is less accurate than whatever the true shape of the Earth is.
But the takeaway from that shouldn't be creating a dogma that "the Earth is round" and moving on, just to own the guys that claim its flat (who are by and large just trolling you).
can you explain what i've detracted from this conversation? the nuance is appropriate. the complexity belongs as a natural part of the conversation.
your oversimplifications are more dangerous than the so called "detractions" that you haven't given a proper example of.
Vaccines, by and large, have proven to be some of the safest medicine we take. Will the mRNA vaccines prove different? I hope not, but it is of course relatively early in their existence. But thing like the MMR vaccines and the polio vaccine have been administered on a huge scale for decades, and all the possible data has been collected - they are effective and safe.
and you keep framing things as if i'm saying all vaccines are terrible, that's insane, i've not said that once. and you also want to argue this laser-focussed agenda on whether ALL vaccines are good or bad, but we're literally MAKING them bad by going after the livelihoods of people who don't want to get it. and there are vaccines, much like other drugs, that have been recalled before. you have every right to be skeptical. otherwise we're not living in a free society.
there's literally people being denied life-saving surgeries because they haven't gotten a covid vaccine. it should be your choice whether you get vaccinated or not. someone in canada needed a kidney transplant, and had multiple brothers as compatible donors willing to give one to him, but he was denied the right to a surgery all over a covid vaccine.
is this what vaccines are supposed to be? something you hang over other people's heads in order to passive aggressively kill them for their beliefs? getting covid and gaining immunity offers all the same herd immunity (better, even) than you would get from a vaccine. there's no moral high-ground for denying someone life-saving surgery anymore and we're still playing this stupid game.
literally 8 years ago i would be arguing every point you're trying to make, but after being in the pharmaceutical industry for longer than that, after watching clinical trials of drugs i've contributed to myself, i know the flaws of this system. i'm not a moron and i'm not a lunatic. there is a lot to be worried about and if RFK wants to raise these issues in the federal political arena, i'm willing to believe it will bring benefit to the flaws i've become familiar with.
The Indian government asked them for local clinical trials first.
This should have been an easy win, prove the vaccine is safe and effective in a controlled trial and you can sell it into a market of 1.38 billion people.
Pfizer declined. Why do you think that is?
Let me give you a hint, here is the CEO of Pfizer admitting that he never took his own COVID vaccine. Isn’t that odd? [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/wolsned/status/1678719867975761920?s=46&...
No I don’t have any evidence he still hasn’t taken it. Do you have any evidence he has?
I agree with your recall of the initial recommendation, but I also know how much pressure was put on me and many others outside that group to take the vaccine. I would have been prevented from flying to my home country or working for many companies had I not taken two doses of an experimental vaccine approved under emergency use authorization.
I learned only recently that the CEO of the leading vaccine developer chose not to take it himself at the time. As a result, I feel I was mislead.
When I read about the significant increase in all cause mortality among the vaccinated and learn that no trials were conducted related to fertility or pregnancy related side effects and consider that my wife and I were trying for a baby at that time, if I am being honest - I do feel like I was deceived.
And let's consider you were right, the Pfizer CEO doesn't trust the vaccine and still hasn't taken it. Why the hell would he ever admit he didn't take it? Why wouldn't he say "yeah, I took the first dose"?
What does concern me, is the reason why Pfizer would be willing to give up on a market of 1.38 billion people. That single local trial could have doubled their potential global market.
I don’t understand the logic of foregoing so much profit. Why do you think they would do that? Any explanations?
Do you agree it is fishy that a for profit Pharma company would choose to forego a market of 1.38 billion customers simply because they would have been required to do local clinical trials? I find that troubling. Why don’t you?
You posted the video as proof the Pfizer CEO hasn't taken the video, without mentioning when it was taken, and without mentioning that he followed public health recommendations. You made it seem like the CEO decided not to take it because he doesn't trust it, but he didn't take it as to not be selfish. Do you now admit that you posted this in a highly misleading way?
Do you admit it is highly suspicious for a for profit Pharma company to forego the profits on a single market that is larger than both the US and the EU combined?
Can you explain your hypothesis for why they would do that?
If you didn’t agree that this decision by the CEO was suspicious, you would have said so and explained your justification by now.
Prove me wrong.
Now, back to my question: Then we are in agreement that the Pfizer CEO acted fully correctly and you shouldn't take this video as any evidence he hasn't taken the vaccine yet?
On what basis do you disagree? What is your explanation?
> Then we are in agreement that the Pfizer CEO acted fully correctly
No, the CEO did not act fully correctly. In fact he lied to the world when he implied that the vaccine prevented infection.
He knew at the time that it had not been tested for its ability to prevent infection but he implied we should take it to protect our loved ones. [0]
> and you shouldn't take this video as any evidence he hasn't taken the vaccine yet?
Yes, I already agreed several comments back that I hadn’t checked the date of the video when I first posted it. I also agreed that it isn’t evidence he hasn’t taken the vaccine since the video was taken.
[0] https://twitter.com/rubiconcapital_/status/15808948848187269...
You are willfully misinterpreting my words. We are done here. Have a good day.
I’m genuinely sorry this argument got so heated. I just get frustrated when people who accuse me of being dishonest behave in a dishonest way.
Yeah but we need to innovate !!!
Ah ok, it's a compromise then.
Cool, I have plenty of money and the state where I operate is weak so I can buy the compromise !
Frustrating ? yes but there are millions around you who just don't know/care. So you're the only one to be frustrated.
Besides, that's democracy. Sleep well.
Of course people with large amounts of money and influence can influence ostensibly democratic processes, in order to take more of the money for themselves.
(and no, I had no problem with being "forced" inside to stop people from dying - if you did, you might want to look in the mirror and consider your moral framework)
On the one hand - that would only push the problem one turtle down, to "who is testing the food testing supplies & equipment?".
OTOH - since the libertarians have a "zero out of N and counting" record of ever creating even a micro-scale functioning libertarian society...is it worth the electrons to bother refuting libertarian arguments?
What we have isn't a democracy. It's a gerontocracy that saw political gain in putting hundreds of thousands at risk while simultaneously sticking it to the religious (possibly) right. For whatever reason, mentioning this turns things inflammatory when it's the reality of the situation. You could protest shoulder to shoulder with or without a mask but congregating for church was made temporarily illegal. What kind of logic is that?
There's no different legal rights. Practicing a religion is a form of speech. The same form of speech protesters were using. It was entirely political. By and large the protesters agreed with the dominant political party, and people practicing religion generally didn't. There was no constitutional basis for their restriction. Unfortunately, a case like this has to be resolved at the higher courts and we know that those work on geologic time.