TigerDoc

My read is that Flats was riffing on the familiar “buried breakthrough” thread storyline rather than endorsing it, sort of pointing out how these claims tend to cluster (secret cancer cures, miracle carburetors, etc).

That said, your breakdown of patents is useful because it shows why these stories don’t map well onto how innovation processes (be they for carburetors or chemo) actually function. It’s a nice example of how sometimes we’re debating narratives as much as facts.

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This is the dumbest shite. So they let relatively young folks die rather quickly instead of drawing out the treatment for years and actually making more money? Seems like if they “cure” the able bodied people of cancer with these hidden cures they could then profit off of other maladies or relapses, etc.

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Yes, if you're looking just at the crass financial motives, living people allow you to generate RVU's and dead people don't. Others have said more or less this & that effective treatments are also bankable (except for extremely rare diseases whose treatments don't have cross-disease treatment potential), but what I should add because it’s easy to miss in conversations like this is that oncologists don’t actually use “cure” as their main benchmark & not because they’re cynical, but because cancer isn’t a single enemy you defeat once. It’s more like a whole ecosystem of diseases that behave differently and change over time.

If you look at medical history, progress against cancer looks less like a movie climax and more like a long engineering project. Mortality has been falling for decades. Treatments that used to be devastating are often more targeted. Some cancers that were once quick death sentences are now managed for years or decades.

It’s a bit like heart disease - nobody talks about how we're either suppressing (or have found) “the cure for heart disease”, but we generally all recognize that fewer people are dying because of incremental advances that quietly accumulated, so slowly that you mostly didn't notice it happening.

There’s something almost tragicomic about it - there is no dramatic moment where someone announces victory, just thousands of clinicians and researchers modestly nudging survival curves year after year while most of the public understandably wishes for a clean breakthrough.

The real story isn’t suppression. It’s slow progress that doesn’t make headlines because it arrives a few percentage points at a time. That leaves things open for grift/ghoulposting however (also tragicomic :lol:).

thanks. Once the background level of trust drops, it’s surprisingly easy for even smart people to start connecting dots differently than they would have before. It obviously gets more complex than that when there are things like audience incentives, but that's a piece of it, as I see it, and it's probably good to keep separating “something feels off” from “this specific explanation is supported”.

I think what you’re describing, that sense of “it’s everywhere, across domains, all at once”, is something a lot of people have felt over the past decade. When trust takes repeated hits, it can start to feel less like evaluating individual claims and more like living in a general atmosphere of suspicion. In that environment the mind naturally starts linking very different events together and revisiting old ones through the same lens. Sometimes that surfaces real problems & sometimes it can also make unrelated things feel like part of a single pattern even when they may not be.

Probably worth keeping an eye on that distinction. Otherwise it’s easy for the feeling of “something’s off everywhere” to do more of the reasoning than the evidence itself.

That’s partly why I find Uygur’s turn interesting. When someone’s trust collapses publicly, especially someone with a large audience, there’s also a risk of audience feedback amplifying that shift. The more distrust resonates, the more the most distrust-affirming interpretations get rewarded. That dynamic can push almost anyone further than the underlying evidence alone might justify. And then their views feed back to their audience and you can see how it might snowball. In dramatic examples, it can end up in utter epistemic collapse (e.g. Candace Owen).

That makes sense to me, honestly. Having a child in the ICU for HUS is the kind of experience that permanently recalibrates what “real risk” feels like, and it’s reasonable that abstract warnings from regulators won’t move the needle much after that. I wonder if part of what we’re all bumping into here is that once you’ve seen a worst-case scenario up close, everything else gets graded on a different curve, e.g. regulators, activists, even RFK himself depending on the decade. How do you decide when a warning clears a bar of sufficient significance for you?

Are you kidding? He spent decades as a trial lawyer suing polluters and trying to get stricter environmental regulation passed. He believes chemicals can harm you and should be out of rivers, but E. coli is A-ok.

eta: doubles

(a classic MacGuffin)

that discomfort makes sense. When something goes into people’s bodies, it feels like dosage and timing should be “settled facts”, not moving targets.

What’s tricky (& unsatisfying) is that in medicine, especially during a fast-moving outbreak, some of the most important safety refinements only become visible after very large numbers of people are exposed. That doesn’t mean nobody knew anything beforehand. It means some risks are too rare or too context-dependent to show up until scale forces them into view.

The part that matters ethically is what happens after those signals appear. In this case, spacing doses further apart turned out to reduce risk and recommendations changed accordingly. That’s not evidence that “nobody knew what they were doing”. It’s evidence that the system was willing to revise course instead of pretending early assumptions were sacred.

I get that that still leaves a bad taste. Acting under uncertainty always means some people bear costs we wish they hadn’t. The alternative, though, would have been freezing decisions until perfect knowledge existed, which in a pandemic would have meant a very different set of harms, just less visible ones.

I agree that it's a really promising technology for both seasonal vaccines and promising for cancer and even HIV. One thing you might highlight for skeptics is how other major public funders (EU, Singapore investment pools, CEPI, multinational alliances, likely China eventually) continue to invest in this technology and eventually we'll get a chance to decide to license it from them if it bears out and we continue to be allergic to trust Moderna/Pfizer.

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it was obvious the vaccine was marketed and pushed in the wrong way

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Good article and good point. It’s not about eliminating all infections. It’s about shifting the odds away from the worst outcomes.

This is crucial because given we've been raised in an era of eradication, people today expect perfect prevention, not risk reduction. The public language around vaccines (especially early messaging) underplayed that distinction. When people do get infected after vaccination (as shown by all lines rising during Omicron) it reinforces the belief that “vaccines don’t work” (or even making people vulnerable to adopting the wacky "it's not a vaccine" idea), unless you carefully frame what “working” really means. You see in the right graph that deaths stay low in the vaccinated group. The vaccines kept people out of the morgue even as they still got sick.

Quite right about the danger you’re pointing at. History goes wrong when narrative hardens first and evidence is made to conform to it rather than discipline it.

What’s worth noticing, though, is that this doesn’t usually happen because people reject facts outright. It happens because narratives serve functions - identity, meaning, cohesion - that facts alone don’t provide (I've banged my head arguing facts against narratives long enough here to have learned it the hard way). When those functions dominate, myth can quietly replace inquiry.

Founding legends can oversimplify messy origins & histories can be told as if outcomes were inevitable rather than contingent (or other like oversimplifications), but the problem wasn’t having a narrative (narratives are inevitable). it was forgetting that the narrative was a tool, not the territory. This can happen with abolition history, civil rights history, or any other and you're right to discipline it. What practices, in your experience studying history, best prevent that slide from interpretation into myth?