I bodyboard all the time in super sharky waters (juvenile sharks though) and am terrified too but it has never really stopped me. I’ve never actually seen a shark with my own two eyes but I’ve been right next to people who are like “oh there is a shark right there” and I immediately bolt for the beach and everyone else just sits there lol
The freakiest place ever is a heavily localized spot that rarely breaks, in front of the childrens pool in la jolla. You feel like you’re at a shark buffet there are so many seals in the goddamn lineup.
1975 McDonald’s McDonaldland Specification Manual. This has a bunch of characters/costumes that I guess were Sid and Marty Kroft designs but there were legal disagreements or something. I’m not sure if Uncle O’Grimacy would fly today anyway. It has descriptions of the characters’ roles and personalities, and has instructions for who should wear the costumes (e.g. the honorable Mayor McCheese’s head is heavy, so it should be played by “a strong young man”)
When Jynneos was finally approved for both smallpox and monkeypox, the head of Bavarian Nordic thanked the U.S. government: “Jynneos is the culmination of a fifteen-year partnership that started with a call from the NIH for a safer smallpox vaccine, successfully transitioned to BARDA and was delivered to the Strategic National Stockpile for use in an emergency.” U.S. officials are more forthcoming about their contribution. Dawn O’Connell, assistant secretary for preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services, told reporters: “The world has Jynneos because we invested in it.” In a sense, it was a remarkable success—a rebuke to those who thought that public-health agencies could not develop drugs.
Yet the debacle of the monkeypox vaccine rollout nonetheless underscores the limits of this approach. Bavarian Nordic now controls how much vaccine is produced, where it is produced, for whom, and at what price. The profiteering is bad enough. But consider also the fact that the company threatened to cancel orders from the U.S. government even after its foundational support. Or that the company closed its factory last year because it wanted to increase the capacity to produce another vaccine. As the new outbreak raged, for several months, no new bulk vaccine was produced at all. Instead, the world was reliant on stockpiled bulk that could be converted into finished doses. As one former CDC official responsible for the Strategic National Stockpile recently asked on Twitter, “Who is in charge? … Why does [the] U.S. not hold [a] license for $2B investment?”
The problem, it turns out, was not empowering public-health agencies too much, but too little. A whole-of-government approach was organized only to prop up Bavarian Nordic, without asking for virtually anything in return. A better approach could have recognized the centrality of public power to public health. At a minimum, we might require up-front agreements for publicly funded companies to set reasonable prices and to license technology to help expand supply. The U.S. could also return to the model used in Bavaria that helped bring MVA to the world many decades ago: build a wholly public vaccine laboratory, working with academic partners, to develop and produce vaccines.
I does feel like the entire pharmaceutical industry plays a giant trick on the US government where somehow the US government puts up the money, the pharma industry gets rich, and the US government gets no equity, just some vague promise that this is the best way of doing things.
