Second shot update

 

Twelve hours into it. I seem to be a little bit cranky as shown in this selfie.

Twelve hour report: Soreness at the injection site. I did not expect soreness in lats and pectorals. Mrs ERJ was in the most distress twelve hours after her shot. If this is the worst that happens I will be good-to-go.

I couldn't sleep. Questions spun around in my mind.

How do Vampires get enough Vitamin D? What do Vegans do if they inhale a bug? Is there Vegan confession? Why don't professors worried about carbon footprint teach students how to repair buttons and zippers?

Home improvements

We tried to get our house re-roofed last summer. We got stiffed by the contractor.

We tried again this year with different contractors and the roof is scheduled for this week. Unfortunately, it is when I am scheduled to be at Mom's. This would not have been a problem except Mrs ERJ is at her Sister's and I should be here while the guys are on the roof.

I was given a list of other projects to keep me busy and out-of-trouble while Mrs ERJ was gone.  I got a heck of a deal on ceiling fans on-line. What color is "Puce"? Does it go with earth-tones?

"Experimental"

One of the formative events in my professional life was to attend a seminar put on by Shainin Consulting.

Shainin Consulting specialized in industrial problem solving. Their approach emphasized data collected on the plant floor and did not rely solely on science done in labs.

They taught by telling stories. One story involved a factory that made electrical wire. The technician who ran the equipment that extruded the insulation over the bare, copper wires made money in the lunchroom by placing bets on the scrap rate.

Management suspected he was sabotaging the operation so they moved him to another job on the other side of the plant.

He continued to win bets.

When asked, he pointed out the window. "We have high scrap rates when it is raining"

Management called HQ. HQ put their best scientist on the problem. He built a room around a smaller version of the equipment and controlled the humidity. He ran from bone dry to dripping wet and there was no change in the insulation. The scientist declared "This process is impervious to moisture. It must be something else."

The company called Shainin. Shainin walked out into the plant and talked with the operator who was back on his job.

Shainin verified that the scrap rate tracked closely with relative humidity.

The bottom line was that the manufacturer of the powder that was used to produce the plastisol slurry directed the users to mix for thirty minutes before extruding. Since this was a PRODUCTION factory, they mixed for ten minutes (and that is what they had mixing capacity for) and extruded away. That worked fine when the weather was dry.

But when the bags had been sitting in high humidity, the powder got lumpy and needed to be mixed for the full, thirty minutes, just like the supplier specified. Incidentally, the lab scientist mixed for thirty minutes because he could not be bothered to travel to the plant and see what the actual process it used was. He just used the directions that were printed on the bag.

When presented with the data, plant management decided that slightly reduced throughput on rainy days was preferable to high scrap rate. So, on the days when the humidity was over 80% they ran the mixer for thirty minutes before extruding.

"Cool story, Joe. But what is the point?"

Look through the cast-of-characters. Who is most likely to become the regulator who determines if something is still "experimental"?

Not the guy running the equipment in the un-airconditioned plant. Not Shainin or the plant management. It is the scientist in the lab.

The guy who whiffed at solving the problem because of a variable he did not consider. 

How do you suppose that scientist will respond to the next process he is asked to evaluate? 

My guess is that he will double or quadruple the number of repetitions of the same failed method. He will justify his existence by flogging that horse that-much-longer and add another decimal-point of precision to a number that isn't in play.

Regulators are all about minimizing risk to their reputation and never being wrong. They are also into milking projects for as long as possible to justify their existence. Given their mind-set, they would prefer that all drugs and vaccines remained experimental long enough for them to retire...say in twenty years.

There comes a point where in-lab testing hits the wall.

Life is an experiment. We only know the endpoint. We do not know when. We do not know what happens in between. The word "experimental" does not freak me out.

Scientists tend to hyper-focus

I listened to a doctor talk about the incredible safety of Ivermectin.

He said that four billion people have been treated with it and "only two or four died and that was because of some, extremely rare genetic anomaly."

Let's do a quick reality check. If you had a sample of four BILLION people with an even distribution of age and an average lifespan of 70 years (2.21 billion seconds), you would have about two of them (1.8 by my calculations) die every second. *

That would be 156 thousand deaths in the twenty-four hours after administering Ivermectin from random, natural causes.

How, pray tell, are you going to find "two or four" anomalous deaths under that pile numbers? You could probably hide ten thousand deaths in there if the symptoms mimicked a heart attack or stroke.

Big numbers. Darned big numbers. They act differently.

*Thanks to BOB, aka, Best Of the Best for catching that error.