If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
Manufacturing matters, and six years ago, I said that one side effect from the pandemic is that mRNA technology, which had been lab-scale stuff, suddenly had dump-trucks full of money appearing to help them scale their manufacturing.
They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
Serious question in good faith: what was the deal with the “calamari” (clots?) the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?
> Now an international team, led by Flinders University, have found that in a small number of people, the immune system can accidentally confuse a normal adenovirus protein with a human blood protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4).
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.
Dismissing people like this is part of what fuels the antivax movement. Vaccines are generally effective, but they're not perfect and have side effects, and failing to acknowledge that when someone is asking in in good faith polarizes people and makes it look like someone's trying to hide something.
It was a nothingburger. It wasn't even a side effect of the mRNA vaccines.
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
I'm not sure this information will sway very many people. I have relatives who are all getting tested for t-cell counts related to mRNA because they are convinced they are the cause of any and all health problems they are facing. It seems like the medical professionals who are administering the tests are at least somewhat responsible for their misapplication.
It's not about swaying individuals. Let people believe their stupid stuff.
It's about swaying investors and regulators. And yeah, we need to make sure we excise our regulators of crazy people, but that's cyclic. And next cycle, we'll get vaccines for a lot more.
Two things can be true: Big Pharma can be evil, and their products are much better vetted for safety and efficacy than random peptides sourced form mystery factories.
and do you really think a significant percentage of forced vaccination detractors are taking mystery peptides? have there been studies, or are you vibing this guess off snarky reddit comments?
Anecdotally I know several people who would fall in the camp of anti vax but openly use peptides.
And intuitively it makes sense we’re talking about groups of people who are skeptical of main stream institutional health recommendations but trust specific personal sources for medical advice.
I’m vibing but it feels like there is a pretty clear intersection of peptides and the fringe science health community no?
Nobody's used state power to mandate peptides and social media censorship to reports of adverse effects.
As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.
The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.
I don't have access to the full article unfortunately, but I have doubts on the claims.
Even during the pandemic response it was eventually acknowledged that early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials. Trials were only done to study how many participants sought medical attention for symptomatic infection and had no data related to spread or asymptomatic carriers (or even those who just didn't seek care, though hopefully that was negligible).
The overview of this article seems to lean heavily on existing studies, modeling, and observational studies. Modeling and observational studies can only indicate correlation rather than causation, and I'm not aware of controlled studies for mRNA vaccines that tested for protection against infection or spread.
> Even during the pandemic response it was eventually acknowledged that early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
To the very best of my knowledge this is just misinformation. If you have a citation here, please provide it.
Is your concern with what the studies tested or whether it was acknowledged?
I can find you links, though it will be directly to the original studies done for the covid vaccines. The studies were well written and clearly called out their methodology. The problem was with how the studies were interpreted and explained to the public, not with the studies themselves.
Here's one of the studies [1]. I don't have time to read the whole thing again at the moment so I'm going mostly off of memory here, but they had a subset of the population prompted via a digital diary for part of the study to ask about adverse events. The rest of the population was only tracked via unsolicited notifications (the participants notified of issues unprompted).
The studies only ran for 3-4 weeks each, at which point they were unblinded. Though they did continue tracking reported adverse events for a while if I'm not mistaken, the study was no longer blind or controlled at that point though so I don't put any weight behind that data (I'm sure there's plenty that disagree with me disregarding data collected after the unblinding).
The link in the article does not show the study, just a list of references, a summary and the researchers who published it. How many of the researchers who published this study have conflicts of interest? Where is the full study for review?
Yes, I've been very excited about that for more than 10 years. It may not pan out, it's far more speculative than infectious disease prevention, but when combined with checkpoint inhibitors, and I fear they may not do the bold thing and do fully personalized therapeutic vaccines, but it does provide a great deal of hope.
> The researchers emphasize that, like all vaccines, mRNA vaccines can have side effects. They found that serious adverse events—such as myocarditis, which occurs more frequently in younger males—are rare and consistently outweighed by the vaccines’ protection
reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!) for whatever the vaccine did, it would apply to a broader population due to covid exposure
> reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
I want to empathize with you, plenty of medical professionals used really reductive and inaccurate language that should be rightfully criticized. stopping people from getting covid being one of those things
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
You mean the stuff the whole world got injected with in 2020? Good to know!
Seriously though, I am very pro-vax, but the fact that studies like these come out now is just confirmation that people had the right to doubt the safety of mRNA back then. Many people shamed others for being anti vax but everyone has the right to be careful.
Why would repeating a study now and getting the same result as when it was first measured in 2020 be a reason to doubt the safety?
I’m also pro-vax, so I don’t think it is correct to equate ignoring the preponderance of current evidence (in 2021 or 2026) for vaccine protection as being careful. That just seems the logical fallacy sold by “vax hesitant” and social media influencers to make people feel smart to ignore statistics and “make their own choice based on intuition”
That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?
People have rights but they also have the responsibility to be scientifically literate enough to know that analyzing data about the vaccine was prudent regardless of anything and does not suggest their prostration to antivax demagogues was smart.
In the end, do facts even matter in politically charged discussions?
This sounds a bit like providing evidence for global warming, gun control or evolution. The "skeptics" just want to remain ignorant. No amount of evidence will change them.
The silver lining about vaccine skeptics, though, is the Herman Cain award[1]. What this means is that conservatives die more than liberals from preventable diseases [2].
This administration literally fast-tracked the original covid vaccines for approval.
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
My understanding is that vaccine research and production is almost never profitable and depends on government support. Either grants, guaranteed purchases, or both.
Yeah that's called survivorship bias. The ones that make it to market can be wildly profitable to manufacture. Doing all the work to sift through what does and doesn't work to discover new vaccines wouldn't happen without public funding.
No, that’s called pharmaceutical development. That’s the business.
We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:
> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.
We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.
No. Pharmaceutical companies love vaccines. They’re relatively easy to make, they’re indemnified against harms, they cannot be generic, and they are wildly profitable. And on top of all of that, they often get mandated by schools, ensuring a captive market.
If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.
Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.
Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.
The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!
The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.
It's not dissimilar to oil & gas (energy) and mineral resources ... the outgoings on exploration are a cash bloodletting that often has no return.
The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.
> Trump one had a sane cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This is absurdly revisionist. The first administration’s cabinet/staff was a reality show and a merry go round of people like Anthony Scaramucci and Ryan Zinke. If anything “controlled” it, it was just the chaos of incompetence.
As far as loyalty goes, I suppose it’s worth reminding you that Kennedy was a Democrat, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary, and routinely criticized Trump.
OP is saying Trump has demanded loyalty as a condition of serving in his administration. As HHS Secretary, RFK caved on Roundup, something he famously won a case against as a lawyer[1]. That even lost RFK support from some of his MAHA fans.
Relatively speaking Trump 1.0 had a sane cabinet. Yes, there were some crazies, sure, but relative to the people he has around him now, they seem sane.
It's literally not the same administration. Also yeah he wants private companies to stop "wild" profits while he grifts the nation with crypto, hosting UFC on white house? You have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to think the current administration gives a single f about unchecked profits or the people's general wellbeing.
Not many people know that Trump had a hand in starting the pandemic.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
Not sure what is partisan about this. Some facts were presented. Not opinions, facts. If you dispute any of the above is factual please back up your assertion with citations.
If the President hires someone who then restarted research that previous admin stopped for being too dangerous, does the President get no part of the blame? The buck stops with the President. If he hired the wrong person--and he has hired plenty of wrong people this time around--he gets the blame for the disasters they cause.
No that was a conspiracy theory fueled by Russian disinformation, the scientists and experts testified that there was no gain of function work being done and debunked it.
You really believe some billionaire oligarchs propaganda corporation over foremost self-proclaimed expert Anthony "I am the science" Fauci? Something an agent of Putin would say.
Right now, we'd be better off if we even had politicians who could manage an actual debate. Seems like we can't get anything other than mudslinging and strongarming right now.
Both economies have massive drug industries and China in particular has advanced manufacturing processes for decades. I suspect they made an economic/risk decision and will be reviewing it in the light of mRNA production lead time.
We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.
Really glad they confirmed this, about 5 years after I was forced to take one at threat of job loss despite 1) already having had natural Covid and 2) working a fully remote job.
They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized. And as part of every drug, there's continual, ongoing, review of the data to ensure that safety is maintained, and that nothing has changed about the drug and its manufacturing. This is the "phase 4" of a drug, continual ongoing monitoring.
If these mRNA vaccines had not been pushed or mandated, more people would probably think they are safe: there will be no need for any of these reviews.
But because they were pushed by the government, many people do not trust them. Sure, they were pushed and mandated for good reasons, but the problem is that a lot of people have already lost trust in the government.
That trust was not lost because of one big decision. It was lost through many small, unrelated government decisions that may not seem noticeable or measurable on their own, but over time, they build up.
I do not know how this trust can be rebuilt but definitely not by publishing more reviews.
Manufacturing matters, and six years ago, I said that one side effect from the pandemic is that mRNA technology, which had been lab-scale stuff, suddenly had dump-trucks full of money appearing to help them scale their manufacturing.
They apparently settled on the the sequences for the original covid vacs in a weekend. Going from that design to billions of doses is one of the hardest things to do, but once done, will persist. And it is ready to be deployed for the next hundred applications that we find for this.
Flu vaccines is an obvious application, since the prior egg-based manufacturing required about six months lead time and millions of eggs, but nobody wanted to invest in anything better.
Serious question in good faith: what was the deal with the “calamari” (clots?) the anti-vax crowd kept talking about being found in the veins/arteries of folks who took the Covid vaccine?
> Now an international team, led by Flinders University, have found that in a small number of people, the immune system can accidentally confuse a normal adenovirus protein with a human blood protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4).
Seems to have been a legitimate, very rare, side effect
https://www.flinders.edu.au/research/articles/covid-vaccine-...
It's worth clarifying that the adenovirus-based (viral vector) vaccines that article is discussing were a completely different technology from the mRNA vaccines.
Nothingburger like pretty much everything that antivaxers talk about
Dismissing people like this is part of what fuels the antivax movement. Vaccines are generally effective, but they're not perfect and have side effects, and failing to acknowledge that when someone is asking in in good faith polarizes people and makes it look like someone's trying to hide something.
It was a nothingburger. It wasn't even a side effect of the mRNA vaccines.
You don't have to care about the people who aren't interested in science. Sure, you have to protect immunocompromised people from those people, and we can do that.
I'm not sure this information will sway very many people. I have relatives who are all getting tested for t-cell counts related to mRNA because they are convinced they are the cause of any and all health problems they are facing. It seems like the medical professionals who are administering the tests are at least somewhat responsible for their misapplication.
Information won’t sway someone who’s views aren’t based on information.
What’s the saying?
You cannot reason a person out of a position they did not reason themself into in the first place.
It's not about swaying individuals. Let people believe their stupid stuff.
It's about swaying investors and regulators. And yeah, we need to make sure we excise our regulators of crazy people, but that's cyclic. And next cycle, we'll get vaccines for a lot more.
It matters over time. The old kooks die off and are replaced with people who are relatively sane until they find new things to be old kooks about.
It's so funny how there's this irrational mRNA skepticism combined with irrational peptide trust.
Grifters like RFK Jr and the supplement charlatans are cashing in on the lies they perpetuate.
I think you'll find there's a rational distrust in big pharma
Two things can be true: Big Pharma can be evil, and their products are much better vetted for safety and efficacy than random peptides sourced form mystery factories.
and do you really think a significant percentage of forced vaccination detractors are taking mystery peptides? have there been studies, or are you vibing this guess off snarky reddit comments?
Anecdotally I know several people who would fall in the camp of anti vax but openly use peptides.
And intuitively it makes sense we’re talking about groups of people who are skeptical of main stream institutional health recommendations but trust specific personal sources for medical advice.
I’m vibing but it feels like there is a pretty clear intersection of peptides and the fringe science health community no?
I don't think I'll find that, after investigating the claims I have heard.
Nobody's used state power to mandate peptides and social media censorship to reports of adverse effects.
As many of us said at the time, the mandates weren't worth the destruction of public trust, especially because the vaccine wasn't even sterilizing.
The next time there's a crisis, resist the urge to use the government to achieve outcomes by brute force. It doesn't work and has generational adverse consequences.
I can't even have this argument again. It's exhausting.
“I won’t put chemicals from big pharma in my body!”
Proceeds to raw dog a bunch of “research chemicals” cause some roided up bro talked about it on a podcast…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U7gbFMWZWlo
They’re not vaccines though.
“Science-schmiance”
Shorter lead times in the face of viral mutations will be helpful.
Tailored vaccines for things like cancer are a game changer.
I live in hope of a semi-universal flu+related vaccine.
I live in fear of the measles induced "immune amnesia" effect.
I don't have access to the full article unfortunately, but I have doubts on the claims.
Even during the pandemic response it was eventually acknowledged that early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials. Trials were only done to study how many participants sought medical attention for symptomatic infection and had no data related to spread or asymptomatic carriers (or even those who just didn't seek care, though hopefully that was negligible).
The overview of this article seems to lean heavily on existing studies, modeling, and observational studies. Modeling and observational studies can only indicate correlation rather than causation, and I'm not aware of controlled studies for mRNA vaccines that tested for protection against infection or spread.
> Even during the pandemic response it was eventually acknowledged that early claims of vaccines preventing infection or even spread weren't supported by the trials.
To the very best of my knowledge this is just misinformation. If you have a citation here, please provide it.
Is your concern with what the studies tested or whether it was acknowledged?
I can find you links, though it will be directly to the original studies done for the covid vaccines. The studies were well written and clearly called out their methodology. The problem was with how the studies were interpreted and explained to the public, not with the studies themselves.
Here's one of the studies [1]. I don't have time to read the whole thing again at the moment so I'm going mostly off of memory here, but they had a subset of the population prompted via a digital diary for part of the study to ask about adverse events. The rest of the population was only tracked via unsolicited notifications (the participants notified of issues unprompted).
The studies only ran for 3-4 weeks each, at which point they were unblinded. Though they did continue tracking reported adverse events for a while if I'm not mistaken, the study was no longer blind or controlled at that point though so I don't put any weight behind that data (I'm sure there's plenty that disagree with me disregarding data collected after the unblinding).
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2034577
Where are the citations supporting your view that the vaccines were effective at preventing infection?
The link in the article does not show the study, just a list of references, a summary and the researchers who published it. How many of the researchers who published this study have conflicts of interest? Where is the full study for review?
The potential for the technology in cancer treatment is what I find most exciting.
Yes, I've been very excited about that for more than 10 years. It may not pan out, it's far more speculative than infectious disease prevention, but when combined with checkpoint inhibitors, and I fear they may not do the bold thing and do fully personalized therapeutic vaccines, but it does provide a great deal of hope.
Safe for Bit Pharma's profits!
> The researchers emphasize that, like all vaccines, mRNA vaccines can have side effects. They found that serious adverse events—such as myocarditis, which occurs more frequently in younger males—are rare and consistently outweighed by the vaccines’ protection
reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!) for whatever the vaccine did, it would apply to a broader population due to covid exposure
> reminder to the myocarditis-maxxies, the actual virus causes that too and the 2020-2021 variants caused it worse
Do you know if the vaccine prevented the virus-induced myocarditis? Cause the vaccine didn't do much to stop people from getting covid, multiple times even.
So many people frame this as either/or, you either had the risk of covid induced myocarditis or you had the (supposed) lesser risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. But if you got the vaccine (x times) and then covid (y times), isn't your risk roughly x + y?
I want to empathize with you, plenty of medical professionals used really reductive and inaccurate language that should be rightfully criticized. stopping people from getting covid being one of those things
none of those were goals of the vaccine, so its a fruitless exercise to build on top of
they communicated poorly at all levels the one time society needed them to communicate effectively, and lost the public trust
The goal was to reduce the spread overall, lessen the symptoms for individuals, have your own body fight it faster instead of becoming a factory for it, de-risking cytokine storms
> if we were all going to drop dead (I think 2 years ago now, I’m waaaaiting!)
Channeling Monty Python:
... I got better
the winter of severe illness and death we were promised hadn't happened either.
You mean the stuff the whole world got injected with in 2020? Good to know!
Seriously though, I am very pro-vax, but the fact that studies like these come out now is just confirmation that people had the right to doubt the safety of mRNA back then. Many people shamed others for being anti vax but everyone has the right to be careful.
Why would repeating a study now and getting the same result as when it was first measured in 2020 be a reason to doubt the safety?
I’m also pro-vax, so I don’t think it is correct to equate ignoring the preponderance of current evidence (in 2021 or 2026) for vaccine protection as being careful. That just seems the logical fallacy sold by “vax hesitant” and social media influencers to make people feel smart to ignore statistics and “make their own choice based on intuition”
What does being "pro-vax" mean?
That you believe in any claims of vaccine efficacy made by the manufacturers or the FDA and are more then willing to have them injected into your body?
People have rights but they also have the responsibility to be scientifically literate enough to know that analyzing data about the vaccine was prudent regardless of anything and does not suggest their prostration to antivax demagogues was smart.
In the end, do facts even matter in politically charged discussions?
This sounds a bit like providing evidence for global warming, gun control or evolution. The "skeptics" just want to remain ignorant. No amount of evidence will change them.
The silver lining about vaccine skeptics, though, is the Herman Cain award[1]. What this means is that conservatives die more than liberals from preventable diseases [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Cain_Award
[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-026-02474-9
The science doesn't matter to this administration unfortunately: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c74dzdddvmjo
This administration literally fast-tracked the original covid vaccines for approval.
Say what you will about the Covid vaccine or Kennedy’s specific motivations (which I disagree with), but choosing to cut government funding for development of wildly profitable pharmaceutical products is a reasonable choice.
My understanding is that vaccine research and production is almost never profitable and depends on government support. Either grants, guaranteed purchases, or both.
Your understanding is incorrect. All research is unprofitable, by definition. Vaccines are wildly profitable.
Yeah that's called survivorship bias. The ones that make it to market can be wildly profitable to manufacture. Doing all the work to sift through what does and doesn't work to discover new vaccines wouldn't happen without public funding.
No, that’s called pharmaceutical development. That’s the business.
We don’t generally fund Merck’s R&D with federal money. You’ll note the following critical detail from the article:
> That will impact 22 projects being led by major pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and Moderna, for vaccines against bird flu and other viruses, HHS said.
We’ve gone so far round the bend with partisanship that straight-up corporate welfare has become a left-wing cause.
Certainly not _all_ of it, but a few billion at least.
for the curious:
https://www.usaspending.gov/search?hash=5ec35bf87ec1fd63d28d...
Yeah, there would be none without government support.
Remember when everyone was contributing spare dimes to fund a vaccine?
No. Pharmaceutical companies love vaccines. They’re relatively easy to make, they’re indemnified against harms, they cannot be generic, and they are wildly profitable. And on top of all of that, they often get mandated by schools, ensuring a captive market.
If the government never funded another study for vaccines, ever, pharma companies would continue to pump them out.
The mandate is the government support, it’s a purchase guarantee.
…Which hasn’t changed.
Also, for the record: very few (no?) vaccines are “mandated” by the federal government. Recommendations are made, and state and local governments do this, mainly through school districts.
Various agencies and the military will, of course, mandate things for their own staff.
> All research is unprofitable, by definition.
The game to compensate for that is to be to convince gullible investors that your commercially viable fusion plant, or quantum computer, or unrealistic space ambitions are just 5 years away! Invest now or miss out!
The line between research and scamming in an ultracapitalist economy becomes very blurry.
It's not dissimilar to oil & gas (energy) and mineral resources ... the outgoings on exploration are a cash bloodletting that often has no return.
The "win" is occasionally getting a steadily profitable field or lode for multiple decades after the costs of proving and the fun of raising forward capital loans for extraction and processing plant capital.
Nope. Not this administration at all.
Trump 1 was a very different administration.
And Trump himself has publicly backed off what was probably his one major achievement after receiving pushback from his supporters.
You’re splitting hairs.
No, he really isn’t.
Trump one had a sane (terrible, but sane) cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This time he went for loyalty above all else.
> Trump one had a sane cabinet that largely controlled his wilder impulses.
This is absurdly revisionist. The first administration’s cabinet/staff was a reality show and a merry go round of people like Anthony Scaramucci and Ryan Zinke. If anything “controlled” it, it was just the chaos of incompetence.
As far as loyalty goes, I suppose it’s worth reminding you that Kennedy was a Democrat, who ran in the Democratic presidential primary, and routinely criticized Trump.
OP is saying Trump has demanded loyalty as a condition of serving in his administration. As HHS Secretary, RFK caved on Roundup, something he famously won a case against as a lawyer[1]. That even lost RFK support from some of his MAHA fans.
1: https://apnews.com/article/maha-glyphosate-rfk-kennedy-trump...
Relatively speaking Trump 1.0 had a sane cabinet. Yes, there were some crazies, sure, but relative to the people he has around him now, they seem sane.
Where’s the Kelly and Mattis in the second term?
Kennedy was a Democrat as a spoiler.
The biggest single success from Trump’s first term is the thing his base hates to the point that they booed him over it.
It's literally not the same administration. Also yeah he wants private companies to stop "wild" profits while he grifts the nation with crypto, hosting UFC on white house? You have to be stupid or willfully ignorant to think the current administration gives a single f about unchecked profits or the people's general wellbeing.
Not many people know that Trump had a hand in starting the pandemic.
Here's what we know: In 2014, Obama administration halted the so called "gain of function" research because of risk of laboratory accidents. In 2017, the Trump administration restarted this dangerous research. See links below.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/18/us/white-house-to-cut-fun...
Excerpt: [Obama administration] White House announced Friday that it would temporarily halt all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous. The White House said the moratorium decision had been made “following recent biosafety incidents at federal research facilities.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/health/lethal-viruses-nih...
Excerpt: [Trump administration] on Tuesday ended a moratorium imposed three years ago on funding research that alters germs to make them more lethal. Critics say these researchers risk creating a monster germ that could escape the lab and seed a pandemic.
So, Trump restarted the dangerous research that Obama had shut down. You may be thinking, what does that have to do with Covid? Covid started in Wuhan, China, right?
It turns out that the Trump administration, through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provided funding to the EcoHealth Alliance, an American non-profit organization focused on studying emerging diseases. The EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, provided funding to the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China for researching bat coronaviruses. The rest is history.
And then Trump also disbanded the pandemic preparedness team in 2018 just in time for the pandemic. See link below.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/nsc-pandemic-office-t...
Well, I have to say that this is the most innovative leap of partisan politics I’ve seen so far this year!
Most left-wing critics are still struggling with admitting that Anthony Fauci really did provide funding to EcoHealth, despite ample documentation.
Not sure what is partisan about this. Some facts were presented. Not opinions, facts. If you dispute any of the above is factual please back up your assertion with citations.
The facts are true. Blaming Trump is the innovation.
For the record, I don’t care who gets blamed. I just think it’s a hilarious twist of partisan rhetoric.
If the President hires someone who then restarted research that previous admin stopped for being too dangerous, does the President get no part of the blame? The buck stops with the President. If he hired the wrong person--and he has hired plenty of wrong people this time around--he gets the blame for the disasters they cause.
No that was a conspiracy theory fueled by Russian disinformation, the scientists and experts testified that there was no gain of function work being done and debunked it.
Citation needed. If you are going to say NYT article is wrong we need more than just your words.
You really believe some billionaire oligarchs propaganda corporation over foremost self-proclaimed expert Anthony "I am the science" Fauci? Something an agent of Putin would say.
Wow, they literally put an antivaccer in charge of the health department.
I'm honestly surprised they didn't put a flat-earther in charge of NASA.
It's a lot harder to claim success with no evidence in the space race than healthcare policy.
There's a minimum level of actual competence needed for that job to not embarrass the Trump admin.
This is a thread about the world, not American hubris about its relevance in it
Thanks for the new toll in Hormuz though
What toll?
If we want to solve that we need to stop enabling career politicians whose only life experience is debating
Right now, we'd be better off if we even had politicians who could manage an actual debate. Seems like we can't get anything other than mudslinging and strongarming right now.
We would be a hell of a lot better off with career politicians than the current batch of grifters and ex-Fox News chuckleheads.
Two most populous countries, China and India, seem to have mainly relied on inactivated vaccines.
Which makes sense as they had less access to new technologies, and scaling issues were very hard in the early days.
But I'm not quite sure how that's relevant to the article...
Both economies have massive drug industries and China in particular has advanced manufacturing processes for decades. I suspect they made an economic/risk decision and will be reviewing it in the light of mRNA production lead time.
We're way beyond lysenko. China has no intellectual or political baggage in vaccine theory or bio engineering.
Good thing we got [rest of world] to do the hard science work, and America can just benefit from it instead!
Really glad they confirmed this, about 5 years after I was forced to take one at threat of job loss despite 1) already having had natural Covid and 2) working a fully remote job.
But better late than never I suppose.
They confirmed this when the vaccines were authorized. And as part of every drug, there's continual, ongoing, review of the data to ensure that safety is maintained, and that nothing has changed about the drug and its manufacturing. This is the "phase 4" of a drug, continual ongoing monitoring.