WTF-Beta

Wow. Yes he is missed that’s for sure.

I’ve met with him several times. He doesn’t just oversee vaccines but all ‘biologics’ which include blood products, vaccines, and gene and rna therapies. He was really bullish on the next generation of gene therapy treatments.

Even if vaccines weren’t part of his remit, this would be bad news for America.

The main fear for society though is how Kennedy is likely to replace him with some antivaxx crank. I would imagine anti-vaxx and anti-genetic modification attitudes correlate.

It’s going to be a cruel four years.

Though my personally favorite is ‘DUI Hire’.

These always cheer me up since standard tables are much more favorable than reality for a lung transplant patient.

@Piano-Dad said in Biomedical research takes a hit:

BTW, Columbia needs to grow a pair and fight back. Georgetown offers an example. These targeted budget cuts are illegal.

I think you'll see something if their current genuflection isn't viewed as sufficient. I can't say I blame them for capitulating thus far, even if they won a specific suit the administration could fuck with them in myriad ways, renegotiate their indirects, award far fewer grants, crawl up their ass over title VI stuff (which they're doing anyway).

https://x.com/howidyhamza/status/1902065122660773946?s=46

Remember ‘she has a plan for everything’?

Zoom out just a bit. What’s the practical difference between saying ‘she has a plan for everything’ and ‘there’s nothing she doesn’t want to control’?

I would argue they are simple Russell conjugates.

Her attempt, somewhat successful, to isolate her org from democratic accountability was a horrible idea and one she tried to port elsewhere.

She’s has authoritarian instincts.

It’s a joke. So far.

Something new to try.

https://x.com/interesting_ail/status/1901219929598423272?s=46

I disagree completely. I think any proposal to vastly increase the power of the executive branch has to be evaluated with an understanding that roughly half the time that branch will be led by someone who doesn't remotely share your policy goals. People on both sides tend to be oblivious to that. Right now the GOP is trying really hard to increase the power of the executive without thinking what President AOC might do with that power some day (or if not her, someone similar). Democrats with such proposals would do well to imagine what a President Vance or President Don Jr* might use it for.

*I threw up in my mouth a little just typing that

Remember when she wanted all companies over $1B to require certification from the department of commerce? With annual recertification to ensure they were looking after all stakeholder interest?

Imagine what Trump and Secretary Nutlick would be using that for right now.

That’s going to be the response at Columbia too. They were told if they sue they’ll cancel student aid dollars next. So they’re going to cooperate.

I talked to someone in leadership there today who is concerned that it’s going to get worse before it gets better because the students are going to misbehave even more. (My words not hers)

My post on this next door:

We are co-funding a project with the NHLBI (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, one of the Institutes within NIH).

The NIH funding is a "U grant", which is a multi-center grant. NIH is funding 6 centers and we're funding 2 more, plus an overseas validation cohort (in Ireland). We're also funding some liver analyses in the original 6, as NHLBI doesn't fund liver stuff.

The project is the Alpha-1 Biomarkers Consortium. Biomarkers are just biological markers of a disease, useful ones can be predictive of prognosis or indicative of disease progression. Our main goal is to find more sensitive and less invasive clinical trial endpoints that will facilitate bringing new treatments to market.

[Quick aside on endpoints - the endpoint(s) of a trial are what you're trying to measure to prove efficacy. It might be mortality in an oncology trial - what's the median survival of the subjects in the treatment arm vs the control arm? In most disease conditions (thankfully) it's something else. Maybe lung function, liver enzymes, fibrosis scores, cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels, A1C, etc., depending on the disease. There are also 'patient reported outcomes' such as pain, shortness of breath, scores on standardized questionnaires, etc. In AATD we have shitty endpoints - spirometry for lungs and usually fibrosis/cirrhosis staging for liver. The former is very noisy and requires a large number of subjects over a long time for statistical significance (bad for a rare disease, it makes the trials unrecruitable). The latter is very invasive (liver biopsies suck) and limits trials to people with pretty advanced liver disease.]

So this project is following 270 alphas over three years (ultimately longer, but current funding is for three years). We're testing them periodically for every conceivable biomarker including some really specific stuff like obscure biological byproducts of elastin breakdown or cell death in the liver, etc. The idea is to find something sensitive so we can measure disease progression faster, and with fewer patients. We would need to show that our biomarker correlates sufficiently well with disease progression, and then convince the FDA of that.

So why am I posting this? Today the administration announced the "initial cancellation" (not sure what that means, suspension?) of all federal grants to Columbia University. $400MM in total. Part of that, we believe, is our little grant.

Columbia is just one site, we have 6 NIH funded sites. BUT, Columbia is the primary site and collects all the money and then gives it to the others. The other sites are BU, UAB, Nat'l Jewish, UNC, U of Utah. We fund Chicago and UCLA and Ireland.

This all happened hours ago so there aren't a lot of details out. I'll see our Columbia PI tomorrow at a fundraiser in Boston if she can get away. At the very least her sidekick (also MD/PhD) will be there so I can get more info.

Our foundation won't let the project die, we're two thirds through. But we may need to raise some money and fund it ourselves.

https://www.gsa.gov/about-us/newsroom/news-releases/doj-hhs-ed-and-gsa-announce-initial-cancellation-of-grants-and-contracts-03072025

Yeah for me it would be about the novelty.

@Steve-Miller said in Greetings from SFO!:

We took a Waymo back to the hotel. Wild!

https://share.icloud.com/photos/088Ics-616490lnM3nCZ7knBw

I was in SF in August and wanted to take a Waymo but my son vetoed it.

I’ll be back in May without him and will surely try it out.

@Bernard said in Greetings from SFO!:

Cool! (Although I was expecting a thread about the San Francisco Opera!)

I was expecting an update about the airport!

Excerpts from Matt Yglesia’s substack.

Kennedy, in a way that I find completely perverse, has received credit that he doesn’t even remotely deserve for making the banal observation that lifestyle determinants of health are probably a bigger deal than official medical care.

This has been retconned by people experiencing a weird conjunction of credulousness and paranoia as some kind of deep, dark, forbidden truth about America that “they” don’t want you to know.

In truth, the Clinton administration promulgated “a comprehensive plan to promote physical activity and decrease obesity in the nation's young people.” George W. Bush announced a “HealthierUS initiative designed to help Americans, especially children, live longer, better, and healthier lives.” Michelle Obama had “Let’s Move” and an initiative to improve childhood nutrition. The Biden administration just last year promulgated new school nutrition guidelines offering less sugar and more “protein-rich breakfast foods such as yogurt, tofu, eggs, nuts, and seeds.”

The idea that, conceptually, it would be good for Americans in general and children in particular to exercise more and eat less junk food is genuinely the least controversial idea in American politics. It’s driving me insane to see banal, vaguely lib-coded platitudes about health care and public health now be coded as daring red pill insights that we need to give credit to a crank for articulating.

This is especially true because the whole difficulty here isn’t that it’s brave to say that people should eat healthier and work out more. It’s hard to actually get people to do that. The same country that doesn’t want to make Covid vaccines mandatory also isn’t going to want to ban packaged snacks and sodas. You could obtain giant public health gains by raising the alcohol tax, but people don’t want to pay higher taxes.

The only actual intersection between any of RFK’s stated views and anything acceptable to a business-friendly anti-regulatory Republican Party is discouraging vaccination. Of course, like any human being, Kennedy has some ideas that are correct. But those ideas are either banal or unrelated to his actual authority in office. What he is doing as HHS chief is sowing doubt about longstanding vaccination programs.