Immunization and Autism; The Apple Anti-trust case puzzle

View 783 Wednesday, July 24, 2013

It hasn’t been all funk. I’ve managed to do some fiction and got a few other things done around here. But I did come down with something, or I think I did. Not much in the way of symptoms except a general malaise and lack of energy, and I think that has cured itelf.

I did make a list of important topics to comment on in the next few days. One, the importance of NSF and what is happening to NSF in this administration, seems important enough to warrant a bit of digging. And as usual I have a good collection of really interesting mail, some of which I’ll comment on and the rest I guess I’ll just have to run as I try to catch up. Apologies, but I did manage some fiction during the slump and that may turn out to be the most important thing of all. And in an hour I’ll leave this and go up to the monk’s cell to do more.

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Vaccinations and Autism

When I was growing up everyone got measles. Measles and mumps were just a part of childhood, and most of us wanted to get them and get it over with, preferably during the school year so that we spent a few days in bed or cooped up inside instead of going to classes, rather than use up valuable vacation time. Since the way one gets measles is to catch it from someone else, that usually happened, so that when you class in a school got it, you did, and it was all over in a week or two. Similarly with mumps, which was a bigger deal, or at least getting mumps seemed to worry our parents more than measles did.

There was also “German Measles”, which you could get even if you’d already had measles, which seemed unfair. There seemed to be general disagreement over which was the most serious, measles or German measles (which we later learned to call rubella), but neither was serious. We were also told to stay away from pregnant women if we had any kind of measles, because it was suppose to be particularly dangerous to them. I didn’t really learn why until I read the Agatha Christie mystery in which that turns out to be a key plot point.

The thing that scared everyone was polio. We weren’t scared of smallpox because everyone got smallpox vaccinations – not inoculations – in first grade. Boys got theirs on the upper left arm. Girls had a choice and could get them on some part of the thigh that boys never saw, and as I recall most of the girls at St. Anne’s in Memphis chose (or their parents chose) the thigh, while most of the girls in Capleville consolidated had the telltale mark on the upper left arm. I was curious as to why, but it may be that out in the country they weren’t given the thigh choice. The vaccinations were given by a travelling county team, and they were pretty painful: drops were put on the skin and then you got stabbed about twenty times with a little needle, and it all swelled up and itched like crazy for a day or so. I got mine at age 5 at St. Anne’s. If anyone in my part of Memphis (known as the Normal district because it was the location of the Memphis Normal College, which transmogrified into Memphis State College, then Memphis State University, and now, I think, the University of Tennessee at Memphis) escaped the smallpox vaccinations I wasn’t aware of it.

Also in the 1930’s one routinely got a tetanus shot, a diphtheria shot, and a whooping cough shot. I am told it was possible to get them all at once, but that wasn’t what I got. Being under 5 years old I wasn’t asked an opinion, but I gather than my parents and Dr. Dimarco agreed that it was better to get them over a period of a month rather than all in one shot the way they gave them at County Hospital where you had to go if you wanted them free. You had to have had the diphtheria and whooping cough shots before you entered first grade. You’d get the smallpox vaccination at school, and everyone in first grade got them at once. We stood in line, got then, went back to class, and went to school the next day although apparently those who didn’t feel well could stay home without an additional excuse.

Incidentally, when I joined the Army n 1950 one of the first things that happened to us was a smallpox vaccination. Since we were all men we all got them on an arm. I’m not sure where it went in relation to where the previous inoculation had been. Nearby, I think. The rather large scar from the previous inoculation was still very visible at the time, and when I asked the doctor supervising the inoculations why we needed a second one when I had clearly had the desired reaction to the first he nodded agreement and said that the army had found it was cheaper to give them to everyone just to be sure.

We also got a whole bunch of other shots during the first week in boot camp. The army took immunization seriously, as had the State of Tennessee when I was growing up there. If you could be immunized against something you were pretty well required to have that done, either at state/county cost or your own, essentially your choice. Except for the smallpox I had all mine in Dr. Dimarco’s office, but my friend down the street went on the street car to the county hospital to get the free shots.

There weren’t any flu shots, and the only thing you could do about polio was pray, although some did avoid going to summer camp because it was possible to for a polio wave to sweep through the camps. Mostly we just prayed. In my case I got a light case of something that might have been flu and might have been polio while I was in summer camp and spent a week essentially in isolation until it subsided. No one was ever sure whether I had polio or not, but Dimarco thought I probably had a mild case without aftereffects. He didn’t quite say I could stop worrying about polio, but it was clear to me he thought so.

It’s hard to emphasize how frightened we all were when “polio season” – Spring – came around. Sniffles in polio season got you a day or two in bed, period. Whenever there was a case – and there were always some – it was reported in the newspapers including the district it happened in. We were scared of polio. Everyone knew that President Roosevelt had it and that he was somewhat crippled although we didn’t know how badly. No one my age ever saw a picture of him in his wheel chair while he was alive. But we knew he had one. Polio was serious stuff.

And it’s time for me to go upstairs and work on fiction. I’ll continue this tomorrow.

This came this evening:

Vaccinations and autism

You mentioned "autism" in the title, but never addressed it in the body. Do you think there is a bona fide link between the two, or is it just a statistical anomaly?

Jay Ward

No, I said I’d get back to the subject. What’s above is just the introduction.  In 1954 the graduate psychology class in abnormal psychology had one lecture on autism, and very few symptoms were associated with it.  It was rare. I need to introduce that topic before we can look at vaccination and autism. Sorry for the confusion.

 

 

 

(I wrote what comes after this earlier today),

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I’m still trying to figure out what Apple did to warrant the Wrath of Washington in the anti-trust case. The Wall Street Journal editorial “Guilty of Competition” last week http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324879504578597883383524650.html pretty well says it: Apple up competition in the eBook business, the prices of eBooks went down while sales went up, Amazon’s market share remained high but fell significantly so that Amazon came up with numerous author-friendly schemes, and there are still more eBooks sold by Amazon to Apple iPad users than are bought by them from Apple. If this was a conspiracy in restraint of trade it was the most incompetent one I ever heard described.

As proof of Apple’s malfeasance she [Judge Denise Cote] notes that the company "did not want to begin a business in which it would sustain losses" and "hoped to launch a new content store that was both profitable and popular." Next up, indictments for every other successful American company.

Before Apple’s creation of the tablet computer, Amazon dominated 90% of the e-book market and the book industry worked on wholesale distribution, with publishers charging a fixed price and retailers setting the consumer sale price. Amazon was selling e-books at $9.99 as loss leaders for the Kindle device. That price point and business model were not for all time revealed to man by God in a burning bush, unless He turns out to be Jeff Bezos.

Apple preferred agency pricing, in which it would take a fixed 30% commission of sales, with prices set by publishers. Retailer royalties are routine and have long been upheld by the courts, but Judge Cote accepts the Justice Department’s bizarre legal theory: By following its independent business interests and using new products and content to disrupt an incumbent near-monopoly, Apple thereby gave the publishers a platform to challenge Amazon’s dominance and the leverage to force Amazon to flip to the agency model too.

This helps explain why the average price of "trade" e-books fell to $7.34 from $7.97 over the next two years. Judge Cote called this fact "not persuasive" because Apple "did not present any analysis that attempted to control for the many changes that the e-book market was experiencing during these early years of its growth." In other words, the only way to show harm to consumers is by slicing the e-books pricing data in ways that automatically lead to the conclusions that Justice and Judge Cote had already reached.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324879504578597883383524650.html

I find that analysis persuasive. The Federal Government had no business getting involved in this. Silicon Valley, the Internet, Amazon, and the whole industry grew up without Federal Regulation and did just fine. The Feds with their ham handed anti-trust action managed to make it so painful for Bill Gates that he has left Microsoft to go search for a new vision while he and Melinda try to change the world by spending money, which may or may not be a good thing (it certainly wasn’t for computer users, but it was good for his competitors). Now it goes after Apple.

I am reminded of the story of Tarquin the Proud. For those wondering what that’s about, see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view476.html.

I would be pleased to see a rational defense of the government’s action against Apple in this matter. I have so far seen none.

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I found on looking up the Tarquin the Proud story that I said in 2007:

Three things are pretty clear about Iraq:

o   If we leave in a hurry, it will come apart, and there will be civil war. I doubt those who call for US intervention in Darfur will agitate for us to go back in. The Turks will probably intervene in the Kurdish zone of Iraq. In Baghdad those who collaborated with the US and/or the US backed coalition government will probably be killed, some quickly, others over time. Their families are not likely to survive either.

o   The Civil war will be our fault. We broke it.

o   Any rational analysis of the situation would have reached these conclusions before we invaded. It was not only predictable but predicted. 

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view476.html.

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DC-X 20th Anniversary

Jerry,

The upcoming DC-X 20th Anniversary conference is shaping up. I somewhat poor-mouthed the Friday August 16th session out at the New Mexico Spaceport in an earlier letter, but they’ve since added considerably more good content. In particular, both of the reunited DC-X Team sessions are now out there on Friday, and it’s worth catching despite the need to deal with getting on a bus in Truth or Consequences NM at 8 am, then that evening driving to Alamogordo for the Saturday and Sunday sessions.

Saturday in Alamogordo, after our morning session on the politics behind DC-X, the focus is on all the things that came of DC-X’s success, then the Sunday workshop sessions will look at where things should go next.

This is very much a worthwhile event for anyone interested in where "newspace" came from and where it’s headed.

The latest conference details are at http://dc-xspacequest.org/.

best

Henry

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A final toast for the Doolittle Raiders

 

Verified. The item below is from CNN, April 4, 2013, by Bob Greene.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/14/opinion/greene-doolittle-raiders

There are additional pictures and video at the web site.

Thirty seconds over Tokyo

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