‘Like raccoons’
“The Swimming Hole’’ (1885), by Thomas Eakins
“Remember the way we bore our bodies to the pond
like raccoons with food to wash? Onto the blue,
smooth foil of the gift-wrapped water I slid….’’
— From “Puberty,’’ by William Matthews (1942-1997), an on-and-off New Englander
Off season
“At Noon,’’ by Niva Shrestha, in her show “Place,’’ at Galatea Fine Art, Boston, July 2-Aug. 1
She tells the gallery:
"Architecture has been the main subject in my work for the last nine years. From windows to rooftops, stairs to poles; every line and shape are intertwined creating movements and stillness. Thus, I paint with the inspiration from these places where wonderful and playful compositions are naturally formed. ‘‘
Don’t leave the corridor
“Gateways” (oil on canvas), by Dave Martsolf, in his show “Through the Eyes of a Child,’’ at the Art League of Lowell’s Greenwald Gallery, June 23-July 18. Mr. Martsolf (born 1949) lives and works in Windham, N.H.
Searles Castle in Windham
19th Century textile mill (now a museum) and canal in Lowell
A book stopped DDT spraying
Cover of the first edition of Silent Spring
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I read Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring on our back porch in the summer of 1962 as it was first published, in The New Yorker magazine. I already liked her stuff, especially The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea (but then, my family lived on Massachusetts Bay).
Silent Spring told of the devastating effects of pesticide use, and especially of DDT, on ecology. The book’s title comes from the fact that the stuff was killing songbirds and other creatures in vast numbers. Despite pushback from chemical companies, the U.S. banned DDT in 1972, for which we can thank Rachel Carson.
We were so blithe about pesticide use back then. I remember small planes swooping down to spray fields, golf courses, woods, marshes and even suburban subdivisions. (For that matter, people were still pretty relaxed about cigarettes, despite the mounting evidence of their lethal effects.)
We’re still too blithe about herbicide use – e.g., Roundup – which causes short-and-long-term damage to the environment. There’s been no book out yet about their use and misuse with the impact of Silent Spring. Anyway, thanks to Ms. Carson, at least we aren’t being drizzled with poisons from planes flying a couple of hundred feet over the ground on nice summer days. I remember adults warning “Don’t look up!’’
Too bad that so many people hate weeds. Some are beautiful and most of what we eat is in effect cultivated weeds.
An airplane spraying DDT over Baker County, Ore., as part of a spruce budworm control project in 1955
'Green oracle'
“A Day in June” (1913), by George Bellows
“You are the green oracle
cursed to remember
the seasons that circle
like the buzzards in
the dead heat.’’
— Ian Mathes, from “A Day in June’’
“Flaming June’’ (1895), by Lord Leighton
Biscuits and kittens in Vt.
Main Street in Bristol, Vt., at the western edge of the Green Mountains
“Even my children, though born here, would not be called Vermonters by most members of long-time Bristol {Vt.} families. (My neighbors might well respond, if I put the question to them, with the old Vermont joke: If the cat has kittens in the oven, does that make them biscuits?)’’
—- John Elder, in Reading the Mountains of Home (1971)
Lord’s Prayer Rock in Bristol
David Warsh: Article seems to have prompted Biden to order probe into idea that engineered COVID leaked from lab
Did COVID-19 escape from this complex?
SOMERVILLE, Mass.
There are few better-known brands in public service journalism than the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Founded in 1945 by University of Chicago physicists who helped produce the atom bomb, the organization adopted its famous clock logo two years later, with an original setting of seven minutes to midnight. Since then it has expanded the coverage of its monthly magazine and Web page to include climate change, biotech and other disruptive technologies.
In May, it published “The origin of COVID: Did people or nature open Pandora’s box at Wuhan?,” by veteran science journalist Nicholas Wade. Its appearance apparently prompted President Biden to ask U.S. intelligence agencies to reassess the possibility that a virus genetically engineered to become more dangerous had inadvertently escaped from a partly U.S.-funded laboratory in Wuhan, China, the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So when the Bulletin last week produced publisher Rachel Bronson, editor-in-chief John Mecklin and Wade for a one-hour q&a podcast, I tuned in.
Wade, too, has a substantial reputation. He served for many years as a staff writer and editor for Nature, Science and the science section of The New York Times. He is the author of many books as well, including The Nobel Duel: Two Scientists’ Twenty-one Year Race to Win the World’s Most Coveted Research Prize (1980), Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors (2006), and The Faith Instinct (2009).
True, Wade took a bruising the last time out, with Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History (2014), which argued that human races are a biological reality and that recent natural selection has led to genetic difference responsible for disparities in political and economic development around the world. Some 140 senior human-population geneticists around the world signed a letter to The New York Times Book Review complaining that Wade had misinterpreted their work. But the editors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists would have taken that controversy into consideration.
The broadcast was what I expected. Publisher Bronson was proud of the magazine’s consistent attention to issues of lab safety; investigative journalist Wade, pugnacious and gracious by turns; editor-in-chief Mecklin, cautious and even-handed. When they were done, I re-read Wade’s article. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the details. He is a most lucid writer.
What comes through is connection between the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Wuhan lab, one of several, in which NIH was funding a dangerous but essentially precautionary vaccine-development enterprise known as “gain-of-function” research (see Wade’s piece for a lucid explanation). Experts have known since the beginning that the virus was not a bioweapon. The only question was how it got loose in the world. What I find lacking in Wade’s account is context.
From the beginning, the Trump, administration sought a Chinese scapegoat to distract from the president’s failure to comprehend the emergency his government was facing. Wade complains that “The political agendas of governments and scientists” had generated “thick clouds of obfuscation that the mainstream media seem helpless to dispel.”
What he fails to recognize is the degree to which the obfuscation may have been deliberate, foam on the runway, designed to prevent an apocalyptic political explosion until vaccines were developed and the contagion contained. In the process, a few whoppers about the likelihood that the virus had evolved by itself in nature were devised by members of the world’s virology establishment. Wade’s generosity in his acknowledgments at the end of his article make it clear there was ample reason to want to know more about the lab-leak explanation long before Biden commissioned a review.
Wade is a journalist of a very high order, but to me he seems tone-deaf to the overtones of his assertions. I was reminded of a conversation that Emerson recorded in his journal in 1841. “I told [William Lloyd] Garrison that I thought he must be a very young man, or his time hang very heavy on his hands, who can afford to think much, and talk much, about the foible of his neighbors, or ‘denounce’ and ‘play the son of thunder,’ as he called it.” Wade, in contrast, likes to quote Francis Bacon: “Truth is the daughter, not of authority, but time.”
But remember too that time, as the saying goes, is God’s way of keeping everything from happening at once. The news Friday that The New York Times has been recognized with the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage of the pandemic was not surprising. There are six months of developments yet to go in 2021, but my hunch is that, when preparations begin for the award next year, a leading nominee will be the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
David Warsh, an economic historian and a veteran columnist, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column first appeared.
Under the brown water
— Photo by Bernd Schade
“What I grew up seeing as a wall of green
is really a thousand species of the rare
and seldom seen. The average swamp
is a death of stumps and snakes
the eye teases from the submerged vegetation,
hardly knowing what’s imagined
from what the brown water covers….’’
— From “The Faithful,’’ by Cleopatra Mathis (born 1947), New Hampshire based poet and professor
The bumpy road to less speeding
— Photo by Alex Sims
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
I have complained about the high bumps (which the city quaintly calls “humps’’) on the road coming off the Henderson Bridge and heading to Providence’s Wayland Square neighborhood. I suggested that they be “adjusted’’ – lowered – to avoid damaging vehicles and to discourage swerving. Driving there last week, I saw that the bumps had been removed. But modest bumps there would be good, discouraging drivers from speeding into Wayland Square, with its many walkers.
In general, speed bumps, with, on some roads, indentations so that fire trucks can speed through, are a very good idea. They needn’t be quite as high as those above were to make drivers slow down. An important factor in their effectiveness is adequate warning. Two warning signs well spaced instead of one would lead to more slowing well before the bumps. Those electronic signs that flash your speed can be very useful, too.
Traffic calming is needed to improve safety and the quality of life in the city. Bumps and electronic warnings can be important parts of that, freeing up police officers to spend more time preventing and responding to serious crime. And cars going very fast are often driven by criminals. If they hit a speed bump at, say, 80 miles an hour, it could stop them very quickly, indeed perhaps ruin the vehicle they’re in – making it easier for the cops to arrest them. It’s hard to escape in a car with a broken axle.
And if the city fines a lot of people of people for speeding (as they have me a couple of times), well, the city can use the money, and the threat of fines may save some lives.
'Creation and destruction'
“Glory in the Celestial Flower’’ (mixed media and acrylic on plaster panel) by Isabel Riley, in her joint show with Lynne Harlow entitled “GLOW,” at Drive-by-Projects, Watertown, Mass., through Aug. 14.
The gallery says: “Riley's painting … are equal parts creation and destruction as she alternates between building surfaces up and scrubbing them down. She does this in the pursuit of imagined, subconscious spaces and dynamic color.”
‘Most important fish in the sea’
Atlantic menhaden
From ecoRI News (ecori.org)
Even though menhaden are eaten by few people, more pounds of the oily fish, often called “pogies” or “bunkers” by New Englanders, are harvested each year than any other in the United States except Alaska pollock.
The Atlantic menhaden fishery is largely dominated by industrial interests that remove the nutrient-rich species in bulk by trawlers to make fertilizer and cosmetics and to feed livestock and farmed fish. Commercial bait companies fish for menhaden to provide bait for both recreational fishing and for the lobster fishery. Recreational fishermen also access schools of menhaden directly and use them as bait for catching larger sport fish such as striped bass and bluefish.
This demand puts a lot of pressure on a species that plays a vital role in the marine ecosystem. For instance, juvenile menhaden, as they filter water, help remove nitrogen.
Conservationists often refer to menhaden as “the most important fish in the sea” — after the title of a 2007 book by H. Bruce Franklin. They believe that menhaden deserve special attention and protection because so many other species, such as bluefish, dolphins, eagles, humpback whales, osprey, sharks, striped bass and weakfish, depend on them for food.
This year’s spring migration of menhaden has brought a large influx of the forage fish into Narragansett Bay. As a result, there has been a marked increase in the number of fishing vessels and fishing activity there, according to the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM).
Agency officials said members of its Law Enforcement and Marine Fisheries divisions are closely monitoring this fishing activity.
“Rhode Island relies on Atlantic menhaden in various capacities, such as supporting commercial harvesters, recreational fisheries and the Narragansett Bay ecosystem,” said Conor McManus, chief of the DEM’s Division of Marine Fisheries. “Through our Atlantic menhaden management program, which represents one of the most comprehensive plans for the species in the region, we have constructed a science-based program that strives for sustainable harvest.”
To prevent local depletion of menhaden and to ensure a healthy population of the fish remains in Narragansett Bay’s menhaden management area for ecological services and for use by the recreational community, the DEM administers an annual menhaden-monitoring program. From May through November, a contracted spotter pilot surveys the management area twice weekly to estimate the number of schools and total biomass of menhaden present.
Biomass estimates, fishery landings information, computer modeling and biological sampling information are used to open, track and close the commercial menhaden fishery as necessary. DEM regulations require at least 2 million pounds of menhaden be in the management area before it’s opened to the commercial fishery. If at any time the biomass estimates drop below 1.5 million pounds, or when 50 percent of the estimated biomass above the minimum threshold of 1.5 million pounds is harvested, the commercial fishery is closed.
Commercial vessels engaged in the Rhode Island menhaden fishery are required to abide by a number of regulations, including net size restrictions, call-in requirements to DEM, daily possession limits and closure of the management area on weekends and holidays.
Taking in city life
“City Hall Picket Line” (pencil and gouache), by Joseph Delaney (1936), in the show “Joseph Delaney: Taking Notice,’’ at the Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine.
The museum says:
“African American artist Joseph Delaney (1904-1991) took notice of life around him. He was drawn to figurative art and lively scenes of urban life, and his work focused primarily on the people and environment of New York City, the place where he lived much of his adult life. Delaney was an acute observer of people and their activities, and he recorded them, sometimes in paintings, but more often in works on paper—drawings, pen and ink washes, watercolors, and in the notebooks that he carried and drew in everywhere he went.
“Delaney, who created thousands of works in a life spanning every decade of the twentieth century, was recognized but never celebrated during his life. Since that time, institutions and collectors have increasingly taken notice of his work, which is now in collections including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“Taking Notice’’ is the first exhibition in New England devoted to the work of Joseph Delaney. Drawn primarily from the extensive holdings of the University of Tennessee and complemented with several works from private collections and the Bates Museum of Art, it features paintings and many works on paper, representing a breadth of subjects about life in the city that fascinated Delaney during his prolific life, including parades and protests, figure drawings and portraits, and monuments and parks in Manhattan.’’
Llewellyn King: A very tricky recovery coming up; beware Western drought effects
Folsom Lake reservoir during the California drought of 2015
WEST WARWICK, R.I.
After the long, dark night of the pandemic, many are predicting a rosy dawn, followed by a bright summer day. The feeling is that we, the people, have borne the battle and can now celebrate the victory.
But recoveries are tricky, and this recovery will be trickier than most because we are coming out of hibernation into a place changed radically from the one where we began our COVID-19-avoidance slumber. We isolated in one world and are reconnecting in another.
Enthusiasm flows from a sense of accumulated demand and already evident brisk economic activity.
There is a labor shortage despite unemployment at 5.8 percent. I have been following job offerings across the country (I review dozens at a time) and this would appear to be a good time to get a new job or change up. Employers are sounding desperate; they are paying more and being accommodating.
Unfortunately, tight labor markets and rising house prices are often a harbinger of inflation.
Yet there are some wondrous possibilities. On the plus side, we are awakening into a new world of technology-driven change.
In transportation, the surge in electric vehicles is here to stay. Ford’s announcement that next year it will offer an all-electric F-150 pickup truck is significant. It breaks down technical barriers and, significantly, it also breaks down social ones.
Working men and farmers who have been dubious about electric vehicles, regarding them as being only for effete liberals, now can embrace the electric vehicle revolution. The electric F-150 will be a milepost in the electrification of transportation and socially changing attitudes.
New materials, such as graphene nanotubes and new ways of production using additive manufacturing, known commonly as 3D printing, will change the factory floor as well as add to the possibility of on-site production and the deployment of new, small factories.
Interconnectivity, sped by 5G, and the massive deployment of sensors will have its impact from the checkout at the grocery store to medical diagnosis, much of it done remotely as part of the swing to telemedicine.
Already, Domino’s Pizza is testing autonomous delivery vehicles in Houston. Like those ubiquitous scooters in cities, this will spread on the ground -- and in the air, as drones get into the game.
COVID-19 has stimulated not just medical research but also a general interest in research which will in turn promote more public funding. The COVID -19 vaccine successes reestablished a certain level of confidence in medical science.
But there are old-economy realities ahead.
Real estate is in boom and bust simultaneously. The future of office towers is uncertain, and the future of big shopping centers is precarious. The possibility of home buyers finding affordable houses is remote. Want to start married life living in a tent pitched in an abandoned department store?
A surge of homelessness is expected to follow the ending of the moratorium on evictions. Tens of thousands may be evicted as they haven’t paid rent for a year and won’t be able to do so. An equal number will be sitting in the dark as utilities finally start disconnecting for unpaid bills. One utility, CPS Energy, in San Antonio, has $105 million in uncollected bills. Multiply that across the country.
The federal government has, as it were, shot its wad, in stimulus and can’t be expected to step in and help renters with their back rent or electricity customers with their accumulated bills.
There is another disrupter on the horizon. It is drought, the worst recorded, which is drying up California and much of the rest of the West.
Expect reduced food production, affecting the whole country with higher prices, a terrible wildfire season, and even a shortage of electricity as dams across the West (including Grand Coulee on the Columbia River and Hoover on the Colorado River) will cut electricity output because of low water.
The mighty Colorado -- the life force for so much in the West, including farming and electricity production -- is running seriously low and will continue to decline as summer progresses. Hardship in the West will be felt in the North, South and East.
A new Dust Bowl? Technology hasn’t yet learned to make rain.
Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS and his email is llewellynking1@gmail.com.
--
Co-host and Producer
"White House Chronicle" on PBS
Mobile: (202) 441-2703
Website: whchronicle.com
Robert Whitcomb <rwhitcomb51@gmail.com>
11:49 AM (3 hours ago)
to White, InsideSources, Llewellyn, Michael
Fine column!!
Llewellyn King
11:50 AM (3 hours ago)
to me
Thank you so much, Bob.
--
Executive Producer and Host
"White House Chronicle" on PBS;Columnist, InsideSources Syndicate;Contributor, Forbes; Energy CentralCommentator, SiriusXM Radio
Mobile: (202) 441-2702Website: whchronicle.com
Lost in the fungi
“Centennial,’’ by Riitta Ikonen, in the group photographic show “Foragers,’’ at Dedee Shattuck Gallery, Westport, Mass., through June 7.
The gallery explains:
”The work of these artists considers how we glean from the landscape— for food, inspiration, contemplation, and sources of beauty. Foraging is an act of engaging with wilderness to bring something home, an indistinct border crossed by the curious and observant.’’
'Sea of summer air'
Walnut Hill Park, in New Britain, Conn.
“All that is left of landscape lies at the bottom
of a sea of summer air; the town is drowned
under that sky, remote above the building
that in the picture scarcely clear the ground.’’
— From “The Prospect Before Us,’’ by Constance Carrier (1908-1991), Connecticut-based poet and high school teacher, most notably of Latin. This poem is based on the view from Walnut Hill Park, in New Britain, Conn., the old manufacturing city where she taught for years.
‘Hallowed ground’
The Bunker Hill Monument, in Boston Charlestown section
“It is with profound respect that I tread upon this hallowed ground, where the blood of American patriots, the blood of {General and Dr. Joseph Warren} and his companions, gloriously spilled, revived the force of three million and secured the happiness of ten million who live now, and of so many others to be born. This blood has summoned the American continents to republican independence, and has awakened in the nations of Europe the necessity of, and assured for the future, I hope, the exercise of their rights."
— The Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834) in his speech at the Bunker Hill Monument in 1825 to mark the start of construction of the Bunker Hill Monument, on the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Bunker Hill, the first big battle of the Revolutionary War. He is buried under dirt from Bunker Hill in the Picpus Cemetery, in Paris.
In the universe of the edible
Migratory locusts as food.
— Photo by Wilhelm Thomas Fiege
Still Scary to some. See: maineoysterbook.com
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
“He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.’’
-- Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, poet and Anglican cleric
My friend Dr. Ed Iannuccilli’s recent funny column about postage stamps and insects (what a combo!) reminded me of how food fashions develop after initial revulsion. The arrival of the 17-year cicadas has restarted a modest American conversation about eating insects, which they do in parts of the Developing World. Cicadas, locusts and some other insects are edible and apparently healthy eating – high in protein, minerals and vitamins. And the supply seems bottomless….
Insects are said to taste like nuts or popcorn. Fire up the grill!
The idea of crunching into them revolts many. But why should it be more revolting than consuming our fellow mammals, who are a lot more sentient than bugs? For some reason this reminds me of being served whale meat when I was around 10 in a Scandinavian restaurant in Boston called Ola. It was oily and fishy. Back then, I thought of whales as a sort of glorified big fish. Shortly thereafter, I became very aware that they were highly intelligent and social and mammals like us.
Think of how gross certain things might appear as food, such as lobsters, eggs and shellfish. Nasty aesthetics! But we gobble them up. And there are mammal organs that, for example, the French and Asians enthusiastically consume that Americans wouldn’t touch. Try some brains and intestines? Kidneys? There are a lot of bugs out there to harvest, which would be better for us and the world than eating ever more mammals and birds.
Oh yes, and snake meat can be tasty, too. The old Massachusetts grocery company S.S. Pierce used to sell it in cans. And alligator is delicious and of course tastes like chicken….
To read Dr. Iannuccilli’s column, please hit this link.
Harris Meyer: Amidst intense controversy, FDA approves Biogen’s Alzheimer's drug
Drawing comparing a normal aged brain (left) and the brain of a person with Alzheimer's (right). Characteristics that separate the two are pointed out.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, a drug developed by Biogen, which is based in Cambridge’s Kendall Square neighborhood. But the approval highlights a deep division over the drug’s benefits as well as criticism about the integrity of the FDA approval process.
The approval of aducanumab came despite a near-unanimous rejection of the product by an FDA advisory committee of outside experts in November. Doubts were raised when, in 2019, Biogen halted two large clinical trials of the drug after determining it wouldn’t reach its targets for efficacy. But the drugmaker later revised that assessment, stating that one trial showed that the drug reduced the decline in patients’ cognitive and functional ability by 22 percent.
Some FDA scientists in November joined with the company to present a document praising the intravenous drug. But other FDA officials and many outside experts say the evidence for the drug is shaky at best and that another large clinical trial is needed. A consumer advocacy group has called for a federal investigation into the FDA’s handling of the approval process for the product.
A lot is riding on the drug for Biogen. It is projected to carry a $50,000-a-year price tag and would be worth billions of dollars in revenue to the Cambridge company.
The FDA is under pressure because an estimated 6 million Americans are diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, a debilitating and ultimately fatal form of dementia, and there are no drugs on the market to treat the underlying disease. Although some drugs slightly mitigate symptoms, patients and their families are desperate for a medication that even modestly slows its progression.
Aducanumab helps the body produce antibodies that remove amyloid plaques from the brain, which has been associated with Alzheimer’s. It’s designed for patients with mild-to-moderate cognitive decline from Alzheimer’s, of which there are an estimated 2 million Americans. But it’s not clear whether eliminating the plaque improves brain function in Alzheimer’s patients. So far, nearly two dozen drugs based on the so-called amyloid hypothesis have failed in clinical trials.
Besides questions about whether the drug works, there also are safety issues. More than one-third of patients in one of the trials experienced brain swelling and nearly 20 percenty had brain bleeding, though those symptoms generally were mild and controllable. Because of those risks, patients receiving aducanumab have to undergo regular brain monitoring through expensive PET scans and MRI tests.
Some physicians who treat Alzheimer’s patients say they won’t prescribe the drug even if it’s approved.
“There’s a lot of hope among my patients that this is going to be a game changer,” said Dr. Matthew Schrag, an assistant professor of neurology at Vanderbilt University. “But the cognitive benefits of this drug are quite small, we don’t know the long-term safety risks, and there will be a lot of practical issues in deploying this therapy. We have to wait until we’re certain we’re doing the right thing for patients.”
Many aspects of aducanumab’s journey through the FDA approval process have been unusual. It’s “vanishingly rare” for a drug to continue on toward approval after its clinical trial was halted because unfavorable results showed that further testing was futile, said Dr. Peter Lurie, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a former FDA associate commissioner. And it’s “mind-boggling,” he added, for the FDA to collaborate with a drugmaker in presenting a joint briefing document to an FDA advisory committee.
“A joint briefing document strikes me as completely inappropriate and an abdication of the FDA’s claim to being the best regulatory agency in the world,” Lurie said.
Three FDA advisory committee members who voted in November against approving the drug wrote in a recent JAMA commentary that the FDA’s “unusual degree of collaboration” with Biogen led to criticism that it “potentially compromised the FDA’s objectivity.” They cast doubt on both the drug’s safety and the revised efficacy data.
The FDA and Biogen declined to comment for this article.
Despite the uncertainties, the Alzheimer’s Association, the nation’s largest Alzheimer’s patient advocacy group, has pushed hard for FDA approval of aducanumab, mounting a major print and online ad campaign last month. The “More Time” campaign featured personal stories from patients and family members. In one ad, actor Samuel L. Jackson posted on Twitter, “If a drug could slow Alzheimer’s, giving me more time with my mom, I would have read to her more.”
But the association has drawn criticism for having its representatives testify before the FDA in support of the drug without disclosing that it received $525,000 in contributions last year from Biogen and its partner company, Eisai, and hundreds of thousands of dollars more in previous years. Other people who testified stated upfront whether or not they had financial conflicts.
Dr. Leslie Norins, founder of a group called Alzheimer’s Germ Quest that supports research, said the lack of disclosure hurts the Alzheimer’s Association’s credibility. “When the association asks the FDA to approve a drug, shouldn’t it have to reveal that it received millions of dollars from the drug company?” he asked.
But Joanne Pike, the Alzheimer’s Association’s chief strategy officer, who testified before the FDA advisory committee about aducanumab without disclosing the contributions, denied that the association was hiding anything or that it supported the drug’s approval because of the drugmakers’ money. Anyone can search the association’s website to find all corporate contributions, she said in an interview.
Pike said her association backs the drug’s approval because its potential to slow patients’ cognitive and functional decline offers substantial benefits to patients and their caregivers, its side effects are “manageable,” and it will spur the development of other, more effective Alzheimer’s treatments.
“History has shown that approvals of first drugs in a category benefit people because they invigorate the pipeline,” she said. “The first drug is a start, and the second and third and fourth treatment could do even better.”
Lurie disputed that. He said lowering the FDA’s standards and approving an ineffective or marginally effective drug merely encourages other manufacturers to develop similar, “me too” drugs that also don’t work well.
Anne Saint says she wouldn’t have risked putting her husband, Mike Saint, on the new Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab because of safety issues. Mike died in September at age 71. (MOLLY SAINT)
The Public Citizen Health Research Group, which opposes approval of aducanumab, has called for an investigation of the FDA’s “unprecedented and inappropriate close collaboration” with Biogen. It asked the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services to probe the approval process, which that office said it would consider.
The group also urged the acting FDA commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock, to remove Dr. Billy Dunn, an aducanumab advocate who testified about it to the advisory committee, from his position as director of the FDA’s Office of Neuroscience and hand over review of the drug to staffers who weren’t involved in the Biogen collaboration.
Woodcock refused, saying in a letter that FDA “interactions” with drugmakers make drug development “more efficient and more effective” and “do not interfere with the FDA’s independent perspective.”
Although it would be unusual for the FDA to approve a drug after rejection by an FDA advisory committee, it’s not unprecedented, Lurie said. Alternatively, the agency could approve it on a restricted basis, limiting it to a segment of the Alzheimer’s patient population and/or requiring Biogen to monitor patients.
“That will be tempting but shouldn’t be the way the problem is solved,” he said. “If the product doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. Once it’s on the market, it’s very difficult to get it off.”
If the drug is approved, Alzheimer’s patients and their families will have to make a difficult calculation, balancing the limited potential benefits with proven safety issues.
Anne Saint, whose husband, Mike, had Alzheimer’s for a decade and died in September at age 71, said that based on what she’s read about aducanumab, she wouldn’t have put him on the drug.
“Mike was having brain bleeds anyway, and I wouldn’t have risked him having any more side effects, with no sure positive outcome,” said Saint, who lives in Franklin, Tenn. “It sounds like maybe that drug’s not going to work, for a lot of money.”
Their adult daughter, Sarah Riley Saint, feels differently. “If this is the only hope, why not try it and see if it helps?” she said.
Harris Meyer is a Kaiser Health News reporter.
Turbine installation vessel to be used for 2 wind farms south of New England
A turbine installation vessel
From The New England Council (newenglandcouncil.com)
“Eversource and Ørsted reached an agreement to charter the first American-made turbine installation vessel, for two adjacent wind farms that the two companies are developing between Long Island, N.Y., and Martha’s Vineyard.
The $500 million vessel, being built by a consortium led by Dominion Energy in a Texas shipyard, will enable Eversource and Ørsted to be the first wind farm developers to use a ship that is qualified under the Jones Act to install offshore turbines. The ship, which can carry up to six turbines at one time, is expected to be ready by the end of 2023.
“Our competitors will be forced to use a feeder barge,” Eversource CEO Joe Nolan said. “That’s why this is a game-changer for us.”
The New England Council applauds both Eversource and Ørsted for this innovative initiative. Read more from the Boston Globe.
Chris Powell: There’s too much ‘cultural humility’
MANCHESTER, Conn.
While the Connecticut General Assembly has never been known for political courage, the racial obsession that lately has been taking over there should have prompted some legislators to talk back to it by now.
For it has gotten ridiculous -- and dangerous.
The much-touted legislation declaring racism rather than poverty to be a "public health crisis” contains new racial jargon that has caused some legislators to wonder what is going on, but most are going along with it anyway. The bill requires state government's higher education programs to include "cultural humility education” so as to increase retention of people of color.
The bill explains "cultural humility” as "a continuing commitment to self-evaluation and critique of one's own worldview with regard to differences in cultural traditions and belief systems, and awareness of, and active mitigation of, power imbalances between cultures.”
That's not much of explanation, but it implies that one culture is as good as another and that, accordingly, power should be balanced among cultures.
Try telling that to the young women of Afghanistan, who, thanks to the 20-year intervention of the U.S. military, for a few years have gotten a look at a culture that exalts democracy, equal opportunity and freedom of conscience. Upon the imminent departure of the U.S. military, those young women will be cast back into the sexual slavery of the Taliban's theocratic fascism.
Advocating "cultural humility education” during debate on the legislation last week, Sen. Marilyn Moore (D.-Bridgeport) said: "When I see a white woman, I see a white woman. ... I want you to see me as a Black woman and understand my journey and what I've been through.”
But of course that is the very definition, history, and danger of racism -- seeing people first according to race and making presumptions about them. What Moore wants is exactly what the country has been striving to get away from since the modern civil rights movement began 70 years ago.
What Moore proposes is rank stereotyping, the refusal to see people first as individuals, to judge them, as Martin Luther King Jr. urged, by "the content of their character.” For simply by race one cannot know what people have been through and who they are.
If Moore's arrogant presumption can be made, so can the Ku Klux Klan's. Racism isn't any more tolerable when Black people promote it, even though white people then are too scared to dispute it.
Indeed, the country's problem today is too much "cultural humility," the growing fear of standing up for values that make a civilization great and keep it improving -- values like parenting, education, self-sufficiency, and color blindness. What will the country be like when Moore's "cultural humility” overthrows that culture?
The unfortunate disparities among the races in Connecticut will not be closed by "cultural humility education” any more than they will be closed by the silly propagandizing over the supposed nooses that keep getting found at the Amazon warehouse under construction in Windsor. That propagandizing seems meant mainly to publicize certain Black politicians by virtue of their bellowing about it.
At their May 26 press conference Windsor Town Council member Nuchette Black-Burke complained that the nooses have "disrupted our quality of life.” But no one's quality of life has changed on account of the cat-and-mouse game in Windsor, even as the quality of life in predominantly minority neighborhoods in Connecticut is being diminished every day by worsening crime, which few notice.
Just hours after that press conference on the nooses, a man was fatally beaten in Hartford. No one has been arrested for it. It was Hartford's 14th murder of the year. New Haven has had at least 13, Bridgeport six. Do the nooses merit more attention than these murders just because they are unusual or politically useful even though they are meaningless?
The people bemoaning the nooses pretend not to realize that not one murder in the minority neighborhoods has yet involved a noose.
The surest way to make the nooses go away is to stop giving them the publicity their maker craves and knows that he can get from opportunistic politicians who will do anything for publicity as long as it's irrelevant.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester.