Tag Archives: Drug

The Tea Party Is Still Doing Fine in Texas, Thankyouverymuch

by AugustinaRutled Posted on March 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Did the tea party lose big in yesterday’s primary elections in Texas? Abby Rapoport says that national media accounts suggesting the resurgence of moderate Republicans in the Lone Star state are off base:

From these write-ups, you would never guess the significance of incumbent Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst’s poor showing. Dewhurst, whose U.S. Senate dreams were toppled by Ted Cruz in 2012, managed only 28 percent, while his challenger, the pro-life, pro-Tea Party state Senator Dan Patrick, hit 44 percent.

….Results shook out similarly in the attorney general’s race, where Tea Party-backed state Senator Ken Paxton got the most votes and will run off against state Representative Dan Branch. You’d also have no idea that veteran state Senator John Carona, one of only a few moderates left in the Texas senate, had fallen to a Tea Party challenger, as did a handful of state representatives.

Tea party darling Steve Stockman, who ran a bizarro non-race against Sen. John Cornyn, got most of the national attention but was never likely to win. In the races that mattered—and keep in mind that in Texas, the lieutenant governor is one of the most powerful statewide offices—tea party candidates did fine. The Texification of Texas is still alive and well. Dave Weigel has more details here.

Excerpt from: 

The Tea Party Is Still Doing Fine in Texas, Thankyouverymuch

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Please Don’t Confuse Me With Facts, Vaccine Edition

by SamanthaTerry Posted on March 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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A couple of days ago I watched Othello for the first time.1 By chance, I had never seen or read it before. But that Shakespeare. He sure had us humans figured out, didn’t he? Here is Emilia, responding to Desdemona’s plea that she had never given Othello cause to doubt her fidelity:

But jealous souls will not be answer’d so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they are jealous: ’tis a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself.

Why do I mention this? Because of Aaron Carroll’s tidy little summary of some Brendan Nyhan research on how to persuade people that the MMR vaccine is safe:

When they gave evidence that vaccines aren’t linked to autism, that actually made parents who were already skittish about vaccines less likely to get their child one in the future. When they showed images of sick children to parents it increased their belief that vaccines caused autism. When they told a dramatic story about an infant in danger because he wasn’t immunized, it increased parents’ beliefs that vaccines had serious side effects.

Basically, it was all depressing. Nothing was effective.

So that’s that. They believe not for cause, but believe just to believe. ‘Tis a monster begot on itself, born on itself. Of course, it’s possible that Nyhan simply didn’t find the right intervention. Or that an intervention from a researcher has no effect, but the same intervention from a family doctor might. Still, Carroll is right: it’s all kind of discouraging. It’s nothing new, but still discouraging.

1It was the 1965 movie version with Laurence Olivier in blackface. Kind of disconcerting. But Frank Finlay was great as Iago.

UPDATE: More here from Dan Kahan, including a reminder that (a) vaccination rates in the US actually haven’t declined over the past decade and (b) freaking out about a nonexistent problem is genuinely unhelpful. Also this:

The NR et al. study is superbly well done and very important. But the lesson it teaches is not that it is “futile” to try to communicate with concerned parents. It’s that it is a bad idea to flood public discourse in a blunderbuss fashion with communications that state or imply that there is a “growing crisis of confidence” in vaccines that is “eroding” immunization rates.

It’s a good idea instead to use valid empirical means to formulate targeted and effective vaccine-safety communication strategies.

Much more at the link.

View the original here:

Please Don’t Confuse Me With Facts, Vaccine Edition

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Chart of the Day: We Are Deliberately Destroying Our Medical Future

by Jeff Howard Posted on December 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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Over at Pacific Standard—a pretty good magazine that you should check out—Michael White shows us what’s happened to the National Insitutes of Health ever since 1998, when Congress decided on a bipartisan basis to double its research budget over five years. The budget was indeed doubled, but when the five years was up its funding was immediately put back on its old path. Then, when the recession hit, it was cut even further:

The tighter competition for funding has put the squeeze on younger scientists with fledgling labs; the proportion of young scientists with NIH grants is half of what was in 1998, while the proportion of funded scientists over 65 has doubled. Because scientific training typically takes over 10 years, students who decided to enter graduate school in the boom days of the mid-Aughts are now entering a job market that looks nothing like what they expected.

Keith Humphreys adds more:

On the ground in my daily work in both a university medical school and a public hospital, it’s a rare month that some bright young person doesn’t tell me they are quitting science because it’s too hard to get funded. These are usually not reversible decisions. Even a well-trained young physician who leaves research for 5 years to treat patients full-time is very hard to tempt back into science if the funding picture improves (and is even harder to bring back up to speed on the cutting-edge scientific questions and methods of the day).

….A decade or two from now, when an antibiotic resistant bacteria or new strain of bird flu is ravaging humanity, that generation will no longer be around to lead the scientific charge on humanity’s behalf. That’s why we constantly need a new stream of young people committing to health science careers. That seed corn is currently being consumed at an alarming rate, and if we don’t act immediately to rectify the situation we will suffer for many years to come from the loss of a generation of health researchers.

Because NIH grants typically last a long time—five to ten years or more—budget reductions have an oversized effect on new research proposals. When funding goes down thanks to austerity-obsessed politicians, existing grants have to keep getting funded, which means that virtually no new money opens up for new projects. And this is coming at the same time that the drug pipeline is slowing down, antibiotic-resistant superbugs are surging, and we’re still struggling to figure out how make use of the genomic revolution.

We are insane.

Link:

Chart of the Day: We Are Deliberately Destroying Our Medical Future

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