“Medical Roundup #1” by Zvi

Saving up medical and health related stories from several months allowed for much better organizing of them, so I am happy I split these off. I will still post anything more urgent on a faster basis. There's lots of things here that are fascinating and potentially very important, but I’ve had to prioritize and focus elsewhere, so I hope others pick up various torches.

Vaccination Ho!

We have a new malaria vaccine. That's great. WHO thinks this is not an especially urgent opportunity, or any kind of ‘emergency’ and so wants to wait for months before actually putting shots into arms. So what if we also see reports like ‘cuts infant deaths by 13%’? WHO doing WHO things, WHO Delenda Est and all that. What can we do about this?

Also, EA and everyone else who works in global health needs to do a complete post-mortem [...]

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Outline:

(00:25) Vaccination Ho!

(02:57) Potential Progress

(07:05) It's Not Progress

(11:09) Cost Plus

(13:18) New Findings

(15:21) FDA Delenda Est

(20:57) Covid Response Postmortem and Paths Forward

(23:56) Covid Origins

(28:32) Ban Gain of Function Research

(28:51) Cause Areas

(30:26) I criticize Effective Altruists for insufficiently high levels of epistemic rigor, because reality does not grade on a curve, but let no one confuse them with governments.

(34:04) GLP-1 Has Barely Begun

(41:53) No One Understands Nutrition

(43:24) Model This: Exercise Edition

(49:00) A Bold Stand Against Torture

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First published:
January 16th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kFDk4Q9QhqrDE68qp/medical-roundup-1

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.