Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
@Jirikiha I think you're spot-on about the economic argument.
I am a #medic. If you know nothing else about me, know that.
Whatever happens, wherever you are, whoever you are—call me and I will come for you. That's what medics do. That's what we are.
Mostly.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/21/nx-s1-5387723/cdc-communications-cuts-social-media-public-health
I've made my living many other ways over the decades. #Infantry, #writing, #web development, #database administration, #teaching, #clinicaltrials, #bioinformatics. Maybe one of these days writing again, for more than a few months this time. All of them have shaped me to one degree or another.
They're all things I did, all part of who I am. Medic is what I am. If you're lucky enough to have your own "what" as well as "who" ... well, you understand.
Until World War One, more #soldiers in every war died of #disease than of #injuries received on the #battlefield. The decreasing death toll of modern wars (you can look it up) is directly due, in large part, to advances in military public health. Those advances travel both ways, back and forth between the military and civilian worlds, preserving life all the while.
#Epidemiology and #immunology and #biostatistics and #environmental #medicine aren't TV fodder, generally speaking. It's hard to make them look glamorous. They're just the reason you're alive to read these words.
#PublicHealth, taken as a whole, is unquestionably the greatest advance in medical history. Nothing else even comes close. Arguably it's the greatest advance in history, period, with no qualifiers needed.
Deliberately breaking it is mass #murder.
I am a medic. I am also a human being. The alleged human beings responsible for this monstrosity, if they ever call me, will call in vain.
@BrianAllbee thank you!
As of today (May 21, 2025) through tomorrow, the #FDA is taking public #comments on the proposed rule change for #covid #vaccine #boosters. I have no idea who will read these comments or if they'll do any good. But it seems like we have to try. Please add your voice at https://www.regulations.gov/commenton/FDA-2025-N-1146-0001
Note that you have to choose a category for your submission. I picked "#Drug industry" since that's where most of my work is these days. Those still in patient care should choose "#Health professional. For everyone else, "Individual consumer" is probably appropriate. My letter appears below.
Good morning, and good luck.
===
Recently announced plans to change the covid vaccination approval process will, if implemented in their current form, make it difficult to impossible for people under aged 65 without serious medical conditions to receive vaccine boosters.
This proposed change seems to be rooted in the idea that covid is a serious threat only to certain groups. Nothing could be further from the truth. Of course older people, and those with underlying medical conditions, are at greater risk of morbidity and mortality from covid infection. However, healthy younger people do can and do die from the disease.
Consider that as of July 2022, about 8,000 people in the US aged 18 to 30 had died of the disease. This is greater than the number of US military deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, over a much shorter period: two and a half years for covid, vs. eight years for Iraq and twenty for Afghanistan.
The idea that vaccination and boosters should be restricted is a lethal myth. As a biomedical researcher and former military medic, I consider this change deeply unwise, and urge the FDA to continue using current approval protocols.
Daniel Dvorkin
Ph.D., Bioinformatics, University of Colorado, 2013
M.S., Biostatistics, University of Minnesota, 2007
Medical Service Technician, United States Air Force, 1989-1997
#Bondi is slaying her thousands, and #Hegseth may slay his tens of thousands. But #Kennedy will slay his millions. Exactly as I predicted.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/20/nx-s1-5405013/fda-covid-vaccine-limits
The day may come when someone makes a good, entertaining, and reasonably accurate #movie about humans interacting with (non-avian) #dinosaurs ... but NOT THIS DAY. Clearly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6m1eOoUoVao
By "accurate," to be clear, I don't mean something that actually could happen, or have happened, according to our current understanding of the universe. The WISP (Work In Some Progress) depends on a #time portal. Lost world scenarios, extinct organisms resurrected from preserved #genetic material, whatever ... any setup requires breaking the rules of at least one of #physics, #chemistry, or #biology as we know them. Usually more than one.
*Given the gimmick*, I want to believe the rest. And given my proclivities, that's not hard to do. A tiny bit of effort is all it takes.
I'm just waiting for #PrimitiveWar. Not that I expect it to make much sense, but I do have some hope it will be better than anything the #Jurassic * franchise has turned out lately, or ever will again.
To be clear: I'm not asking if the supposed mob etymology is the origin of the term. I know it isn't. What I am asking is whether anyone knows if it's ever been used that way, *after* it became common slang in the "leave and don't come back" sense.
"Eight miles out, six feet down" smells like an urban legend to me. It's certainly not the origin or common usage of "86," but I'm willing to admit the *possibility* that some mobster used it that way. Does anyone have any real knowledge about this?
8647 is going full Streisand.
The Supreme Court just blocked the use of the Alien Enemies Act for deportation on a 7-2 vote. I'm sure you can guess which two.
The Big Beautiful Bill just failed in the House. Mainly because some RWNJs don't think it's draconian enough, but I'll take the win, for however long it lasts.
Becca and I are planning an afternoon hike.
It's shaping up to be a pretty good day.
And okay. It is possible that someone, somewhere, sometime has used "86" to mean "kill." But that's not what it generally means, and anyone who pretends it does is a fucking liar.
#Politics makes strange bedfellows. 8647.
Open access article, and the "non-technical summary" section near the beginning gives an overview everyone can understand. 🧪🦖
Very short version: #Troodon was considered a valid #genus for well over a century, until it was merged with #Stenonychosaurus about a decade ago, and due to specimen quality Stenonychosaurus took priority. Now careful examination indicates Troodon is a valid genus again.
This process is familiar from other famous #dinosaur genera, most notably #Brontosaurus and #Apatosaurus. Even *living* animals are hard to classify a lot of the time; nothing between #kingdom and #species is really set in stone. The tension between "#lumpers" and "#splitters" never ends.
Troodon is special. Maybe it was intelligent, in a way we'd recognize as such, and maybe it wasn't. But it was almost surely *smart*, and quite possibly social, and likely an omnivore. Does that remind you of anyone?
Maybe I'm fooling myself, when I feel a kinship across deep time. And maybe I'm not.
This is how #waterwars start. It's going to be really bad.
For anyone who doesn't know, the #Gunnison, #SanMiguel, #SanJuan, #Yampa, and #White #rivers are all tributaries of the #Colorado. So the entire #Southwest is in *deep* trouble. The #RioGrande and #Arkansas are equally important: much of #NewMexico and southern #Texas depend on the former; and #Kansas, #Oklahoma, and of course Arkansas itself on the latter.
As rough as it will be in Colorado, downstream it will be worse. We have the #headwaters for all the major rivers across about a quarter of the country ... and our water-sharing agreements were written during an unusually wet period. The fighting will begin in the courts, but I'm not at all sure it will stay there.
Seriously: there has never been a time in the entire history of the #Catholic #Church when the #papacy wasn't a #political position. The new #Pope's politics don't line up exactly with the #American political spectrum, and neither did the last one's, but that hardly makes them #apolitical. You can't "politicize" someone who's already there.
On a friend's post, a FOAF says, "Don't #politicize the #Pope." Uh ...
"Like anybody actually KNOWS this."
"Yes, we do know this. 'We' in the general sense, that is: clearly you don't, but smart people do."
I said I was cutting down on the rage. I made no promises about snark.
#MountSaintHelens, 1980. The big boom really grabs your attention, of course. I think the first part of the video, where nothing much seems to be happening until you realize the *entire mountainside* is sliding down, is even more awesome.
Anyone who knows me knows how I love #mountains, and how purple I get talking about them. It's one of the few parts of my life where I indulge in mysticism. I love them for their permanence, their impartiality. They make no demands. They expect nothing. They *are*.
They don't hate us, they don't love us—they're not even indifferent, because indifference is a choice. I like to think they'd feel a kind of indulgent affection for the small scurrying life on their flanks, if they could. I know they don't.
But they're not immortal. They're born, they grow, they age, they die. We live on their shattered bones.
Unimaginable violence drives their life cycles, and by extension ours. Heat, pressure, collision, miles of rock folding and shattering. Bubbles of the mantle rising through the cracks, and sometimes escaping to give us the *tiniest* glimpse of the power below our feet.
#Volcanoes live fast and die young, compared to the more common kinds of orogenesis, the slow folding and slipping that builds entire ranges. They often nestle among their older, calmer cousins, unremarked until—
—well, until.
All mountains are alive, and sometimes they remind us. They will kill us if we give them the chance, with no malice at all. We have choices they don't. The danger will never stop us from giving them that chance, over and over. At least not those of us who can't stay away.
We can't change their lives, nor should we try. On the balance, I sure am glad they're here to change ours.
#Authoritarians are often very fond of #engineering, because they always want better ways to kill people. But they hate and fear #science, because the laws of #nature don't care about their #ideology at all. This is a reaction as instinctive as a rattlesnake's bite.
Never let it be said I'm above a little self-promotion. 🙂 This may be the last short story in the Seaway Station universe for a while: I'm going to concentrate for a while on the Silmarillisaurus, the writer's bible for the universe, and then get to work on the novels.
#dinosaurs #timetravel #sciencefiction #SeawayStation
Main BSQ site: https://www.boundaryshockquarterly.com/product/30-fading-empires/
Amazon, including paperback option: https://www.amazon.com/Fading-Empires-Boundary-Shock-Quarterly-ebook/dp/B0F397V5QY
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran USAF medic and Army infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, long-ago kickboxer, oldbat goth, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
