To Take or not to Take. That is the Question. The Pfizer Vaccine

 

 I have studied and blogged about the Covid pandemic since early February and I have followed treatment and vaccine development with interest since then recommending tiered approaches of prevention and management to friends and family. The first tier is to build up your natural immunity with diet, exercise and vitamins and supplements thought to be useful. I have scoured the world literature and media reports and one does need to maintain skepticism no matter the source. Early on the WHO and the CDC issued misleading and entirely wrong assessments and recommendations and I relied upon European and Asian studies early on. It does appear that Vitamin D in 5000 units/day along with selenium and zinc confers resistance to Covid but this is not well supported by properly constructed US studies. There is no downside to their use in moderate amounts. There are many companies rushing their vaccines to market utilizing some tried and true vaccine technologies while others are using revolutionary genetic sequencing methods. Most companies use either  injection of messenger RNA of the Spike protein of the sars covid-2 virus. Pfizer and Moderna’’s trials use this technique.  Messenger RNA is very fragile and these RNA chunks are encased within a protective fatty shell or nanoparticle. They then get into your body’s cells and instruct your protein making machinery of ribosomes to make copies of the virus spike proteins which allow the body to recognize the real Covid invaders spike protein and thereby mount an immune response firing up the various components of the immune system.  This is a new technology and may have risks to some in our population such as those with autoimmune diseases, a class of diseases poorly understood. The clinical trials were run by Pfizer and Moderna and were not large or lengthy. Only 95 cases of Covid occurred in the Moderna  trial and most were in the placebo group. The PCR test used did not mention how many”cycles” were used in the run which influences  positive results. Side effects were  said to be minimal. The vaccines were not administered to all age groups and duration of immunity is unknown. The immunity does appear to last at least two months which is when the results were released. The Oxford(UK) AstraZeneca vaccine uses an inactivated Chimpanzee cold virus bonded to the mRNA spike protein. Participant numbers were small and only vaccinating those between 18 and 55(Moderna) and there was some question of dosing regimens. The most widely distributed vaccine is the Chinese vaccine by Sinopharma using traditional methods of an inactivated corona virus which has been given to over a million people. Unfortunately data on the efficacy is sketchy and hampered by poor US/China relations.

The Russian Sputnik vaccine also uses a human adenovirus bonded to spike protein. Results and efficacy is anecdotal and there was nothing resembling anything like a Phase 3 trial.

Novovax is a US company using a wacky idea of selecting the baculovirus, an insect virus to get the spike protein into Moth(!) cells who then produce the proteins which are somehow captured. This technique is called “protein subunit” technology. Sanofi/GlaxoSmithKline are also using this protein subunit method.  Johnson and Johnson has a Phase 3 trial underway since September  and they have announced they are including Black, Hispanic and Native American as well as people with and without comorbidities . They also are offering it as a single dose injection.

  Here are my conclusions based upon preliminary reliable information. The trials are relatively small in extent and duration.  They are certainly RUSHED. The project is called Warp Speed. Duration and intensity of immunity is unknown. Not all age and racial groups both healthy and those with compromised health were tested nor were children, infants or pregnant women or patients on chemotherapy or immune rejection regimens. Could these RNA subunits provoke genetic mischief down the line?  Corona viruses are sturdy stable viruses but mutations in the spike protein or in the parent virus might  doom these vaccines requiring nimble  changes in their configuration. DNA is robust and RNA falls apart quickly so this is probably a safe new technology but there is no way to know for sure. One thing is certain. The companies are in it for the money. Billionaires are being minted daily under their roofs. These vaccines are not polio vaccines which were open source vaccines in the public realm. Unregulated profit driven proprietary vaccine development is problematic by its very structure. The US medical establishment is rushing new and expensive vaccines into distribution and not bothering to test inexpensive promising vaccines from other countries from non US companies. They are also not waiting on other vaccines from domestic companies. I plan on waiting.

UPDATE: Dec 28 2020): Since this initial post the Pfizer variety has been released and several million doses administered so far. There have been  some anaphylactoid and anaphylactic reactions  but to my knowledge no deaths. I have read that Pfizer will cost $40 for the 2 doses and both Moderna and AstraZeneca are considerably less.Astra Zeneca is said to cost $2 and  has waived obtaining a patent. Pfizer is patented. Duration of immunity remains unknown. Frontline medical people are prioritized as well as older people. People over 55 were not part of the Moderna Trials, nor were anyone under age 18 or people with comorbidities including pregnant women.Will the vaccine be effective or safe in these groups? It also appears dosing regimens in Moderna and AstraZeneca have been shifting to find the sweet spot.  If you are vaccinated can you still transmit the virus if you are infected? . Likely not, but still an unknown.  Now perhaps the most worrying factoid: Pfizer negotiated a "Heads I win. Tails you lose" contract with the US Government.  That means  no legal liability  with their Covid vaccine.   Do the American people know that if the vaccine is ineffective or dangerous that they will have no legal recourse to sue Pfizer? It would seem that this needs to be understood before anyone presents their bare shoulder. To take or not to take. ??  Once all or most of the US companies have had  their vaccines approved and released to significant numbers of people I will seriously consider joining the line of willing guinea pigs. Until then, I plan on waiting.

Book Review of Hope Jahren's The Story of More(2020)

Hope Jahren PhD is an utterly engaging and easy to read author of scientific subjects. Her first Book “Lab Girl” was a NYT bestseller dealing with her scientific and teaching career.

The Story of More is her latest short book published this year(2020). The sub title”How we got to climate change and where to go from here” is in some ways incomplete but I’ll give you her slow to evolve conclusions: Burning fossil fuels releasing carbon dioxide is generating global warming.  ‘’ll also give you her “where to go from here” segment: USE LESS and SHARE MORE.”:

    The structure of the book is uniquely hers if not anthropocentric. She was born in 1969 in a small town in southern Minnesota whose economy had one big employer, the “Hog Kill”, a meat processor operating in a rural region encircled by corn and soybean fields. She uses her lifetime to show how the world had changed in her 51 years. Early in the book she said we have 4 resources: “Earth, the sky, the ocean and ourselves”. This is not a unique idea as the ancients said the key elements were earth, air, fire, and water. Notice that the ancients did not consider “ourselves” an important element nor do I. I regard “ourselves” as part of the problem.

   Hope breaks her book into 4 parts: (1)Life, who, how and where we are

(2)Food: for these inhabitants: grains, meat fish. (3) Energy: and its impacts on us and the planet and  and (4) more impacts on same, including melting icecaps, rising seas, changing weather etc..

    Her book is an extensive data recital of human resource consumption of the planet and the alterations it has induced. She uses no footnotes but offers a complete source list of her data at the end of the book; She includes no graphs or pictures which might have been useful. Her writing style is conversational at times humorous and digresses occasionally into her upbringing and teaching and research career and unrelated topics such as her chapter on high fructose corn syrup and its impact on diet and health.

   Her conclusions and recommendations at the end mirror the title. She says that the world population has doubled, while energy use has tripled since she was born in 1969 and that it will probably “never have less than 7 billion people.” Her recommendation to solve these looming risks to the planet are an egalitarian sharing of these resources as a means of combating inequality of access to opportunity, health, education and communal happiness.   It is a sunny view of life reflecting her optimistic outlook.

  I feel that as a reviewer I must point out shortcomings and omissions in her treatise.

My biggest critique of her book is that while she has an entire section dealing with energy, she misses its significance on how it altered the world in the last 250 years of the Industrial Revolution. She misses the WHY and HOW of the changes on the earth wrought by the availability of the unexpected but the all too brief energy bonanza of fossil fuels. For example the population explosion occurred first and foremost because of the availability of industrial food production, processing, and distribution of food and goods made possible by the concentrated energy of oil, particularly diesel oil. She also makes the common mistake of how many of these fossil resources remain to be discovered   and consumed as she conflates “resources” and “reserves.” Nowhere in the book does she address the Economy and the role of energy. Bluntly, Energy IS the Economy and  fossil energy consumption is the root of all the positive and negative changes  made to human civilization and the natural world. She may very well be aware of all of this but it is absent from the book. She entirely lacks an ecological perspective of the world and all its living components such as concepts of “carrying capacity” or “Overshoot and collapse.” Reference her statement that “The earth may never have less than 7 billion people.”  Hope Jahren gets many factors well integrated into her arguments but her naively optimistic Kumbaya conclusions at the end of the book were unconvincing to this reader.

   Nevertheless the book is an excellent primer on providing a broad perspective on many of the processes and products altering climate. She concludes by recommending individual responsibility in the developed nations to consume not more but less of the fruits of our industrial civilization.

 

 

The Plastic Problem

          

                                                                                                                                                                         In previous posts I have covered decarbonization of energy and it is high time to continue to look at the  complex interconnected global industrial system focusing on one of its dominant components: Plastics. It is past time to cover Dematerialization of plastics.

      Who can forget the key line of the 1967 movie The Graduate,when Dustin Hoffman got the famous advice for his career: “Plastics.”

Back in 1967 plastics were known and utilized in society but who would have expected that plastics would within 50 years become such a dominant industrial substrate and worldwide pollutant and contributor to species extinction and CO2 emission induced climate change? Plastic pollution is now on the radar of environmentalists but I see little in the way of restricting plastic use anywhere outside of some insignificant silliness like banning plastic straws. Less silly are some decent first steps like banning plastic bags. One nation, Vanuatu, has in fact recently banned plastic bags nationally and is attempting to add many other plastic product bans to their list. Other nations such as Chile have made efforts in the same direction which no surprise has been fought vigorously by the plastic industry.

Which companies are the dominant polluters of our oceans and waterways. Greenpeace and some other environmental organizations have compiled worldwide oceanic surveys and here are worst of the worst:

1. Coca-Cola
2. PepsiCo
3. Nestlé
4. Danone
5. Mondelez International
6. Procter & Gamble
7. Unilever
8. Perfetti van Melle
9. Mars Incorporated
10. Colgate-Palmolive

As soon as the spotlight was on them, many of these companies scrambled through their PR Departments to pledge better recycling in the future but virtually none offered to remove plastic entirely from their packaging. This is patent nonsense of course. Most plastics are not recycled and many countries starting with China have stopped accepting unsorted plastic trash for recycling. The whole recycling movement is largely a bogus feelgood scam to make consumers assuage their guilt about plastic use in their lives. This writer’s opinion is that most plastic recycling is a waste of time and energy and does nothing to reduce the USE OF PLASTIC in our lives. Another factor is that the price for Ethane, the feedstock has hit rock bottom in the past several tears making recycling economically pointless. Here is a recent graph from the EIA of current prices for the main natural gas liquids:                         

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/_hydrocarbon-gas-liquids/prices-for-hydrocarbon-gas-liquids.php.     The only way to get rid of single use plastic pollution is to stop producing it! Who are the biggest producers of  PE/PP plastics?

Top Plastic Manufacturing Companies in USA – Manufacturers of Plastics and Plastic Goods

Table 2 – Summary of top U.S.A plastics manufacturers

Name	Headquarters	Annual Revenue (Billion $)**	Mkt Cap (Billion $)***
Exxon Mobil	Irving, TX	237.16	308.87
Chevron Corp.	San Ramon, CA	134.78	215.82
DowDuPont Inc.	Midland, MI	62.37	146.67
Eastman Chemical Company	Kingsport, TN	9.51

There are no surprises here if you are familiar with the feedstock for single use plastic: Fossil Fuels. Specifically natural gas. More specifically the Ethane fraction of natural gas which undergoes conversion to Ethylene which becomes the precursor to Poly ethylene(PE), polypropylene(PP) and a myriad of others. It is the polyethylene plastics that are called “Food grade” that dominate plastic pollution and the shocking fact of PE production is that these big oil and gas and chemical companies have been on a massive multi-billion dollar factory construction binge in the past few years primarily along the US Gulf Coast in Texas and Louisiana to meet the “increasing demand.” One new factory in Texas built by Dow claims to be the world’s largest facility:

HOUSTON (ICIS)–DowDuPont Materials Science, the business division of DowDuPont to be named Dow, on Thursday announced the start-up of its new integrated world-scale ethylene production facility and its new ELITE enhanced polyethylene (PE) production facility, both in Freeport, Texas.

The units will continue to ramp up through the third quarter and are expected to reach full rates in the fourth quarter of 2017.

The ethylene production facility has an initial nameplate capacity of 1.5m tonnes/year. As part of a next wave of investment, capacity will be expanded to 2m tonnes/year, “making it the world’s largest ethylene facility”, the company said.

Exxon Mobil in Baumont Texas has also just completed an enormous facility to produce PE : Here is the PR announcement:

ExxonMobil begins production on Beaumont high-performance polyethylene line

IRVING, Texas – ExxonMobil said today it started production on a new high-performance polyethylene line at its Beaumont, Texas polyethylene plant. The expansion increases plant production capacity by 65 percent or 650,000 tons per year, bringing site capacity to nearly 1.7 million tons per year.

ExxonMobil begins production on Beaumont high-performance polyethylene line

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• Increases polyethylene plant production capacity by 65 percent or 650,000 tons-per-year
• Project supported more than 2,000 temporary jobs and approximately 40 permanent jobs
• Expansion makes Texas the company’s largest polyethylene producer.

Notice that this enormous highly automated computerized facility not only will produce 1.7 million tons of PE but it has created 40 permanent jobs to boot!

If you go on the Industry organization websites you might be aghast as I was to see no sign of industry guilt or responsibility for causing worldwide plastic pollution. It’s not their fault. It harks back to the old NRA phrase that “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” Dow doesn’t cause plastic pollution. People cause plastic pollution.

This blogger has a pessimistic outlook of any meaningful chances for measures to mitigate climate change because of the lack of leverage and pressure points to alter the growth paradigm but I feel that that is not the case with plastic pollution. There are many measures that we as individuals can do and many individuals and organizations now having an effect at the local and state level. There needs to be a national and international initiative to END ALL USE OF SINGLE USE PLASTICS WORLDWIDE. That means that any new plastics factories being built to produce single use plastics need to be stopped. This will be a hard sell given  the obvious political power of the globalized oil and chemical companies in Texas and Louisiana. The only high paying jobs in the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana are in the petrochemical and Oil and gas industry.  These existing factories might be able to reconfigured to producing different plastic: multiuse, durable and long lasting and not single use garbage. These companies are arguably indifferent to the ecological damage they have caused to the planet for decades and until they are brought to heel by concerted consumer driven pressure, they are unlikely to yield their power and influence. The national grocery chains could play a big role if they leaned on their suppliers en masse and ship their products in bulk, paper or glass and metal. That is the way it was done just 50 years ago and it could be done again. No beverages should be bottled in single use plastic and that includes the worst offender: bottled water. Most people remember the French Bottler Perrier and their iconic light green 1 liter bottles. If plastic containers could be returned for refill and reuse just the way that coca cola reused their beautiful sexy glass  coke bottles, plastic containers could remain in circulation. Put a deposit on the containers. British Columbia has a 10 cent deposit on glass and plastic bottles ut to one liter. Put deposits on containers of all sizes so they can be returned for reuse or incineration! The problem of course is that sterilization and reuse of plastic containers is problematic at least for polyethylene which disintegrates rapidly compared to many other plastics. It disintegrates into smaller and smaller particles and is  eventually ingested by all living organisms in the food chain. I read recently that most samples of Sea Salt are now contaminated with microplastics.

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Since recycling of plastics is largely a failure, the obvious solution in my opinion is to burn most plastics in efficient furnaces which could include co-generation and electricity generation. It is possible to burn plastics cleanly if they are not co mingled with other household trash because remember: Polyethylene comes from a natural gas fraction:ethane, and any plastics in that family could be burned to generate heat and electricity. David Reed in a letter to the Guardian Newspaper had this to say about burning plastics: “The effort of collecting, transporting and cleaning plastics for possible recycling has largely failed, created much more pollution and contributed massively to climate change. The idea of burning plastics and using the energy to heat our homes was proposed by the plastics company Dow more than 30 years ago: it suggested treating all plastics as “borrowed oil”. At that time, ordinary domestic waste had a calorific value of low-grade coal, so the suggestion was that this plastic waste should be burned in efficient plants with heat recovery and treatment of the gases produced, perhaps even trapping the carbon dioxide produced, rather than trying to recycle the complex (and dirty) mix of plastics.  Today, with higher use of more complex plastics, this makes even more sense. Mixed plastics cannot really be recycled: they are long-chain molecules, like spaghetti, so if you reheat and reprocess them, you inevitably end up with something of lower performance; it’s called down-cycling.”

      This approach to stopping worldwide plastic pollution can succeed using a region by region approach applying pressure at the local and regional level long enough that the packagers and producers will be forced to do the right thing. They are certain to fight tooth and nail using the legal system, the Interstate Commerce Rules and lobbying their political toadies to preserve their wealth and power. If the consumer stops buying their garbage, they will be forced to stop selling it.