Favorites May 23rd 2022

İstanbul, Turkey, August 2019

U.S. FDA @US_FDA

Today, we are updating some meeting dates of our vaccine advisory committee based on new information from vaccine manufacturers and expected EUA requests. The new dates for our pediatric COVID-19 vaccine meetings will now be June 14 and June 15. fda.gov/news-events/pr…

Far too late. Moderna turned in data weeks ago, and their press release with topline numbers was 3 monthsa go, and the FDA said they couldn't even confirm what day they'd meet to discuss it. Now that Pfizer has topline numbers, the FDA announces dates for both vaccines. Not a great look. Also, after all this time, Pfizer's study had a tiny number of positive cases. In the meantime, we have results of a German study of kids who got the vaccines off label, no difference from kids getting it on-label.

Jennifer Jacobs @JenniferJJacobs

BREAKING: Biden says the U.S. would intervene to defend Taiwan in any attack from China. Asked during press conference in Tokyo whether he'd be willing to get involved militarily, Biden said: “Yes.” "My expectation is it will not happen, it will not be attempted," he said.

Previous statements like this have gotten walked back, and the White House's official line is that this isn't a change in policy. My only worry is that statements from the president are necessarily less reliable as a way for other powers to make long term decisions, ideally an actual announcement of a change in policy would be from the legislature rather than an off the cuff remark.

Robin Brooks @RobinBrooksIIF

Russia's economy is imploding. We forecast a GDP collapse of -30% by end-2022. Russia has stopped publishing data, but our tracking of exports from 20 countries to Russia give a clue. Those exports are down over -50% in April 2022 from a year ago (blue). With @JonathanPingle

Hitting Russia's GDP isn't the goal, stopping their ability to wage war is.

Matthew Yglesias @mattyglesias

The stilted artifice of the “trolley problem” vs an actual policy question about rail transit safety. slowboring.com/p/understandin…

Andrew Prokop comments on this new column, saying Yglesias' most controversial articles are "attempts to apply consequentialist reasoning in a way that offends people’s moral intuitions or social norms"

John Siracusa @siracusa

Ahem… fxrant.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-de…

Paul Franklin @paul_franklin_

Short but good obit about Colin Cantwell, designer of the X-Wing for Star Wars, and much more. The story about the Death Star trench is perfect - exactly the kind of thing which happens as you're figuring things out. https://t.co/WItA0GZMe8

I love this little tidbit that the Death Star trench, a significant plot point, came about because of a mistake in the process of constructing the model.

Alec Stapp @AlecStapp

Really shocking to see how much more dangerous motorcycles are than every other mode of transportation

Since I was wondering, I looked up private planes, they're a bit over one death per billion passenger miles. For bikes (in the US) it's 79 deaths per billion passenger miles, in the Netherlands, it's 18 per billion passenger miles. Hopefully the exercise adds

Threads

• Thread regarding the similarities between vaccine approvals and formula shortages: institutional mismatch. The agency responsibilities don't quite match the societal needs.

• A long thread considering the pros and cons of Biden's statement that the US would defend Taiwan.

• While Russia's GDP is getting hit hard, they actually made some progress against Ukraine in the last week.