Reblogged:Friday Hodgepodge

[Gus Van Horn blog]

Four Things

I'm visiting with family over the holiday, and will probably not post or tweet until next Wednesday. I will sporadically check email.

1. At LeapsMag is an essay by medical researcher Monica Gandhi where she argues that we will likely not need booster shots against Covid. This is among the seven reasons she gives:

Image by Steven Cornfield, via Unsplash, license.

Even after antibody levels wane over time, strong memory B cells were detected in the blood of individuals six and eight months after infection in different studies. Indeed, the half-lives of the memory B cells seen in the study examining patients 8 months after COVID-19 led the authors to conclude that "B cell memory to SARS-CoV-2 was robust and is likely long-lasting."

The rest of the piece elaborates on this and other long-lasting aspects of our immune response to the illness or vaccines against the virus, and the fact that the virus does not mutate to a degree that would necessitate further vaccination in the way that flu viruses do.

2. On the heels of a very successful appearance to testify before the House of Representatives, Alex Epstein reports that:

I've created a 5-minute video, featuring just my testimony, to make it easier to share. [link in original]

The full video, which I listened to and recommend, is here.

Epstein also recently appeared on Chris Williamson's Modern Wisdom podcast:

If you want to introduce an open-minded person to a new way of thinking about energy and environmental issues, try this new interview I did on the popular Modern Wisdom podcast, hosted by Chris Williamson. I think it's my best interview yet.

Here's my favorite YouTube comment so far: "I still can't say I agree with everything Alex is pushing but this interview has certainly broadened my perspective ... there were a lot of arguments here that were wildly unsettling for me -- bravo for that." [links in original]

The fight for plentiful, reliable, and affordable energy has to be won one mind at a time: I urge my readers to view or recommend these to others.

3. If you follow my Twitter account, the below will sound familiar:

Fun fact I learned from [Adam Mossoff] on [the Yaron Brook Show]: Alexander Fleming's refusal to patent penicillin caused it to be LESS available as a medicine for some time. Many of the other facts were more eye-opening than fun.

The episode I refer to regards the Biden Administration's pledge/threat to support waiving intellectual property protections (often shortened to "patents" since it's shorter and easier to demonize) for the manufacture of coronavirus vaccines. Not only are "patents" not a bottleneck, these laws make possible the sharing of knowledge to mutual benefit among the players, large and small, in the pharmaceutical industry.

No intellectual property protection, no innovation -- and no translation of innovation into the effective products that we need.

I highly recommend this episode to anyone who is remotely interested in this idea, which is even worse than I thought it was when I first heard about it, and I called it "horrendous" then.

Ditto for a University of Texas Salem Center discussion on the same topic among philosopher Gregory Salmieri, infectious disease expert Amesh Adalja, and intellectual property law professor Adam Mossoff.

4. If the good news is the bad news, is it really news at all?

Google has a new feed reader out. See also: "Google Channels Lucy" and the related, "Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You." From the first:

Almost every fall during its 50 year lifetime, the Peanuts comic strip would run a variation of the Lucy and Charlie Brown football gag. The basis of the gag is that every year Lucy would talk Charlie Brown into trying to kick a football that she was holding and every year she would yank it away at the last second causing Charlie Brown to land on his butt. [links omitted]

So, umm. Yeah. I don't plan to fool with it any time soon. I did enjoy the Charlie Brown reference, though, so there is that.

-- CAV

Link to Original