Thursday Throughput: Vaccines Vs Cancer Edition
This image of the dusty debris disk surrounding the young star Fomalhaut is from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). It reveals three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star. The inner belts – which had never been seen before – were revealed by Webb for the first time.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Gáspár (University of Arizona). Image processing: A. Pagan (STScI)
[ThTh1] For a couple of years, I’ve been saying that mRNA vaccines could revolutionize medicine. How’s this one for you: a vaccine against pancreatic cancer.
Five years ago, a small group of cancer scientists meeting at a restaurant in a deconsecrated church hospital in Mainz, Germany, drew up an audacious plan: They would test their novel cancer vaccine against one of the most virulent forms of the disease, a cancer notorious for roaring back even in patients whose tumors had been removed.
The vaccine might not stop those relapses, some of the scientists figured. But patients were desperate. And the speed with which the disease, pancreatic cancer, often recurred could work to the scientists’ advantage: For better or worse, they would find out soon whether the vaccine helped.
On Wednesday, the scientists reported results that defied the long odds. The vaccine provoked an immune response in half of the patients treated, and those people showed no relapse of their cancer during the course of the study, a finding that outside experts described as extremely promising.
This one is personal for me: my grandmother died of pancreatic cancer. It’s a vicious beast that kills 88% within five years and painfully at that. What makes it particularly deadly is its habit of coming back even after the tumor has been removed.
It’s the latter point that the vaccine is addressing. It is tailored for each patient from their excised cancer cells. But it seems to be working, slashing the recurrence rate.
I should emphasize the study is very small and narrow: only 16 patients who were also getting chemotherapy. And it’s expensive — $100,000 a dose. But if we can start doing this consistently, it’ll be a powerful weapon for doctors. And possibly a harbinger of what’s to come.
I am sometimes asked if I think there will ever be a cure for cancer. My answer is invariably no; I think there will be cures for a cancer: an arsenal of drugs, surgeries, vaccines and therapies that will surround and destroy this scourge. Cancer is wily and often very specific to the patient. This isn’t smallpox we’re fighting; it’s something far more dangerous and deadly. But the progress we’ve made in the last few decades has been amazing.
In the meantime, here’s a video on how your body kills cancer all the time. And how we’re trying to harness the body’s natural defenses to keep killing it:
[ThTh2] Speaking of vaccines … it turns out that the decision to delay between first and second vaccination in the early days of 2021 may have saved a lot of lives by stretching sparse vaccine supplies over a larger population.
[ThTh3] Is black-on-white crime way more common than white-on-black crime? It’s not that simple. The gripping hand here is the vast majority of crime is intra-racial.
[ThTh4] Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about quantum computing but were afraid to ask.1
[ThTh5] Another species bites the dust.
[ThTh6] Remember Downfall parodies? Here’s a new one I quite liked.
Witness the moment anti-vaxxers realize they’re frauds 😂
— The Real Truther (@thereal_truther) May 10, 2023
Also this:
Still love Twitter. pic.twitter.com/daA6vYyuQg
— Trevor Beattie (@trevorbmbagency) April 25, 2023
[ThTh7] Before all the crazy conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccine, there were crazy conspiracy theories about the HPV vaccines. The latest results? The HPV vaccine cuts cervical cancer rates by almost two-thirds. And in girls who get it before age 17, it cuts the rate by 90%. That doesn’t include the oropharyngeal cancers that the vaccine prevents. The HPV vaccine may end up being one of the most stunningly successful public health initiatives of our time.
[ThTh8] What’s JWST been up to lately? Oh, nothing, just imaging the asteroid belt of a nearby star.
This image of the dusty debris disk surrounding the young star Fomalhaut is from Webb’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI). It reveals three nested belts extending out to 14 billion miles (23 billion kilometers) from the star. The inner belts – which had never been seen before – were revealed by Webb for the first time.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, A. Gáspár (University of Arizona). Image processing: A. Pagan (STScI)
[ThTh9] The demand for EV’s is creating a huge crunch in the minerals needed to build them.
[ThTh10] Did Watson and Crick really steal their discovery from Rosalind Franklin? As with most things, it’s … not that simple.
[ThTh11] Want to know what my day job is? Here is Dr. Becky Smethurst talking about some research I was involved in. You’ll see my name near the end of the fourth line of authors.
[ThTh12] I really hope that all the money being thrown at nuclear fusion produces something. This would be a technical revolution.
[ThTh13] I mean, a CO2-gobbling microbe sounds good. But not if it engulfs the entire planet eventually.
[ThTh14] Birds like to FaceTime. Who knew?
ThTh7: 15 years to determine whether a vaccine worked or not? Sounds about right. the caveat on RCTs and HPV vaccines is well taken.
“We did not find a significant difference in risk reductions associated with HPV vaccination among birth cohorts”
Um. What??? I’m literally citing the article above.
Does the OP even read these?Report
We have know that the vaccine worked since Phase 3 trials. This is just the latest and most extensive study of just how effective they are.
The cohort analysis is to see if there are herd immunity effects, which we don’t expect unless vaccinations rates are very high, given how contagious HPV is.
Reading comprehension is your friend.Report
ThTh3 is sophistry. The basic point the meme is making is completely correct. This strikes a nerve, so people want to say it’s wrong; since it isn’t, they pretend that it’s saying something else, and critique that instead. The point is that while the media obsessively focus on white-on-black violence and promote the idea that it’s a major threat to black people, while black-on-white violence is an order of magnitude more common.
Yes, intraracial violence is much more common, but the chart is explicitly about interracial violence, and how the media chooses to exaggerate the prevalence of one kind while ignoring other kinds. And I can’t help noticing that right up until this meme went viral, the left was saying that talking about black-on-black homicide was a racist distraction from the real problem, white-on-black homicide.
Responding to a couple of specific points:
Tweets 6 and 7: It makes no sense to adjust for population. If non-Hispanic whites are 60% of the population and blacks are 15%, and they both offend at the same rate and choose victims at random, then the rates of white-on-black and black-on-white offending will be 0.6 * 0.15 and 0.15 * 0.6, both equal to 9%. If we assume a same-race bias such that 80% of crime is same-race, and the other 20% is random-victim, then both should be 0.2 * 0.09 = 4.5%. If a fixed percentage of people of each race specifically target the other race for violence, then we should expect to see much more white-on-black crime, because the number of X-on-Y crimes depends only on the population of X and not at all on Y. The data shown in the original chart cannot be explained away by unequal populations.
The caption doesn’t make it clear, but the chart in tweet 7 (from the report “Race and Hispanic Origin of
Victims and Offenders, 2012-15”) is adjusting for the population of the victim’s race. Figure 4 in the same report shows absolute numbers, which reveals that for 2012-15, white-on-black crime was about a sixth as common as the reverse. The correct interpretation of that chart is that interracial violence poses a similar threat to both black and white people, not that white and black people commit interracial violence at similar rates.
If you switched it to use the population of the race of the offender as the denominator, the chart would show a huge gulf between black-on-white and white-on-black, but that wouldn’t be appropriate, either. I believe that that’s what that (incorrect) viral chart about interracial homicide from a couple of years ago was doing.
The study linked in tweet 10 was published in 2014, with data from 2008-2012. It may have been true that in those years the media downplayed white-on-black crime while exaggerating black-on-white crime, but a) this isn’t actually contradicted by the excerpts he posted, and b) this was before the BLM movement, and before the media went all in on gaslighting us with the new blood libel.
I agree that interracial violence is not a major threat to white Americans right now. But it’s at least as much of a concern as it is for black Americans. I don’t want the media to exaggerate black-on-white violence—I want them to stop lying about white-on-black violence.
And I want people to take crime seriously. Since 2015, half of the progress in reducing homicide rates since the early 90s has been reversed. In some sense we’re all in this together, but black people are bearing a wildly disproportionate share of the impact, well over half of all homicides. The people who are hurt most by black crime denialism and the idea that black overrepresentation in prison is inherently racist are the law-abiding black people who have to deal with it in their neighborhoods. Whitey just gets the spillover.
Good response from Richard Hanania here: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/interracial-crime-and-perspectiveReport