{"id":1760,"date":"2009-11-03T20:01:33","date_gmt":"2009-11-03T20:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/11\/03\/hell_1_nightmare_1\/"},"modified":"2009-11-03T20:01:33","modified_gmt":"2009-11-03T20:01:33","slug":"hell_1_nightmare_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/11\/03\/hell_1_nightmare_1\/","title":{"rendered":"Hell 1 Nightmare 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got the flu.
\nBut the title of this post does not refer to my symptoms, which I’m pleased to report have been relatively mild [1]. It refers instead to what the people responsible for making, distributing, and rationing the H1N1 vaccine must be going through at the moment.
\nHonestly, there’s no pleasing some people – first they were complaining about the government approving the vaccine before it had been tested to their satisfaction (apparently unaware that it’s being made in essentially the same way as every other flu vaccine for years), and now they’re complaining that it wasn’t approved quickly enough, and are crying conspiracy!<\/strong> over the news that the manufacturers can’t maintain a steady rate of production. Add to this the normal levels of anti-vaccine hysteria, and I don’t envy the people tasked with this job one little bit.
\nYes, there have been manufacturing problems – but what do you expect when dealing with a biological system? Biology is messy<\/em>. It’s not like a manufacturing plant where the rate of input of parts determines the rate of output of product – anyone who’s ever worked in a lab knows that sometimes things just don’t work<\/em> like they should. Cells don’t grow, antibodies don’t bind, plasmids don’t ligate. Why else would otherwise rational human beings wear lucky socks on important experiment days, or keep a lucky troll on their bench?[2]
\nThe government and the vaccine manufacturing companies need to do a better PR job and get this kind of information out there.
\nThey can leave out the part about the lucky socks, though.
\nAny typos or grammatical errors in this post can be written off as a symptom of the flu<\/em><\/p>\n

1<\/sup> The fever and aches started at 5 am on Saturday, and were almost completely over by Monday morning. I’m still coughing very painfully, and I have very little mental and zero physical energy, but I can breathe more freely than I could even yesterday, and should be on my flight to Varadero on Saturday night as planned (assuming my husband doesn’t get it – but he has the constitution of an ox, rarely gets sick, and gets over things very quickly when he does succumb).<\/p>\n

2<\/sup> Socks mine, troll labmate’s.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got the flu. But the title of this post does not refer to my symptoms, which I’m pleased to report have been relatively mild [1]. It refers instead to what the people responsible for making, distributing, and rationing the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1760","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}