![\"HALThreeMonths\"](\"https:\/\/www.technologyinvestor.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/UWTIThreemonths.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI’m investigating a number of other “brilliant” ideas. None\u00a0 are ready for prime time. It’s amazing how long this stuff takes.<\/p>\n Son Michael found a neat investment property on the weekend in his town, Portland, Oregon. By the time he had run some Excel numbers on it, it had sold. Two days listed and sold for full price! I kid you not. Turned out the numbers were awful. But it still sold at full price! Go figure.<\/p>\n I emailed him:<\/p>\n Figure you look at 100 properties to bid low on 10 and end up buying one. That’s the immutable rule.<\/p>\n That’s the rule. A lot of frustrating work.<\/p>\n “Nice” thing about the stockmarket is that you can buy and sell faster — buy and sell faster wrong.<\/p>\n Weekend reading can be depressing. <\/strong>Why would Brian Williams want to destroy his nice $10 million a year job? Why do Muslim keep holding demonstrations against cartoons they don’t like? Why does Grexit (Greece leaving the EU) look like it’s going to happen and throw Europe into shambles. Why is South Africa destroying its “democracy” — just because the president (like most other African country presidents) is a thief. The overwhelming impression this Monday morning is just how powerful “marketing” is and how strongly people want to believe in something, anything. There’s the story of the company who sold the unapproved, crappy hip surgery thingees and the surgeons wanted to believe — without doing their own due diligence. (click here<\/strong><\/a>). And there’s the story of the unchecked pills half of us pop:<\/p>\n Stupid Pills<\/strong> SALT LAKE CITY – One pill makes you smarter. One pill makes you thin. One pill makes you happy. Another keeps you energized. And so what if tests conducted by scientists in New York and Canada have found that the substances behind these miracle enhancements may contain nothing more than powdered rice or houseplants. If enough people believe they’ll be healthier, well, it’s a nice racket.<\/p>\n Nice, to the tune of $13 billion a year in sales. And here in Utah, which is to the dietary supplement business what Northern California is to marijuana, a huge industry has taken hold, complete with a network of doctors making unproven claims, well-connected lobbyists and entrenched politicians who keep regulators at bay.<\/p>\n If you want to know how we came to be a nation where everyone is a doctor, sound science is vilified and seemingly smart people distrust vaccinations, come to Utah – whose state flower should be St. John’s wort. Here, the nexus of quack pharma and industry-owned politicians has produced quite a windfall: nearly one in four dollars in the supplement market passes though this state.<\/p>\n We’re not talking drugs, or even, in many cases, food here. Drugs have to undergo rigorous testing and review by the federal government. Dietary supplements do not. Drugs have to prove to be effective. Dietary supplements do not.<\/p>\n These are the Frankenstein remedies – botanicals, herbs, minerals, enzymes, amino acids, dried stuff. They’re “natural.” They’re not cheap. And Americans pop them like Skittles, despite recent studies showing that nearly a third of all herbal supplements on the market may be outright frauds.<\/p>\n The labels say Ginkgo biloba, or ginseng, or St. John’s wort. But testing announced by the state of New York this week found that the Ginkgo biloba sold by Walmart, for example, contained no Ginkgo biloba DNA – it was a mixture of rice, mustard, wheat and radish.<\/p>\n Some of the country’s largest retailers are selling junk in a pill, a step removed from sawdust. Counting on the stupidity of consumers, the big chains don’t seem to care. As of Thursday, four days after Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York State attorney general, asked retailers to pull the tested products from their shelves in his state, you could still go to Walmart online and buy the allegedly fraudulent products.<\/p>\n So, there is Spring Valley echinacea – with a bold label reading: Immune Health – selling for $8.98 a bottle on Walmart’s website. It comes with a handy “customer review,” touting an “Excellent quality product!” This about a substance that contained no echinacea, according to the attorney general.<\/p>\n Too bad it takes Canada, or the maverick work of someone like the New York attorney general, to get at the truth of this industry, because it is so well-insulated from federal government oversight. Schneiderman’s investigation was prompted by an article in The New York Times Science section, reporting on Canadian findings that some of the most popular supplements were nothing but cheap fillers.<\/p>\n To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 1994, when Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah midwifed through Congress a new industry protected from all but minimal regulation. It is also an industry that would make many of his closest associates and family members rich. In turn, they’ve rewarded him with sizable campaign contributions.<\/p>\n Even though serious illnesses, and some deaths are on the rise from misuse of these supplements, Hatch is determined to keep regulators at bay. “I am committed to protect this industry and the integrity of its products,” he told a gathering of potency pill-pushers and the like in Utah last fall.<\/p>\n In the past, Hatch has been remarkably blunt about helping his family and friends in the fake drug trade. “I do whatever they ask me to do many times because they’ve never asked me to do anything that is improper,” Hatch said in 2011. He was referring to the firm of his son, Scott Hatch, a longtime lobbyist for the supplement industry.<\/p>\n That’s the political side, an all-too-familiar story of mutual beneficiaries born in the halls of Congress. But what about the medical implications? These pills and powders can’t, by law, make specific claims to cure anything. So they claim to make you healthier. The consumer is left playing doctor, reading questionable assertions that course through the unfiltered garbage of the Internet.<\/p>\n “There’s a lot of wrong information out there,” warns the American Cancer Society, in its tutorial on these products. “Even for those who are usually well informed, it can be hard to find reliable information about the safe use and potential risks of dietary supplements.”<\/p>\n And there was this finding reported in the authoritative Annals of Internal Medicine: “Enough is enough: Stop wasting money on vitamin and mineral supplements.” Oh, those elites at the American College of Physicians, what do they know?<\/p>\n So, the industry keeps growing, with 65,000 dietary supplements now on the market, consumed by nearly half of all Americans. The larger issue is mistrust of authority, a willful ignorance that knows no political side. Thus, right-wing libertarians promote a freewheeling market of quack products, while left-wing conspiracy theorists disdain modern medicine in favor of anything sold as “natural” or vaguely countercultural. These are some of the same people who will not vaccinate their children.<\/p>\n Everyone wants to live longer, to be happier, to have better sex. And, if you think you can do it without exercise, or eating enough vegetables, or getting regular sleep, there are a thousand pills for you, sold not far from the candy counter. It’s all based on the honor system. If you trust them, go buy some possibly Ginkgo biloba-free Ginkgo biloba, and thank Orrin Hatch for the unfettered right to be a sucker.<\/p>\n My strongest weekend ire was reserved for the likes of Chris Christie and Ran Paul who have strange ideas about encouraging parents to opt our of immunizing their children against measles. My newest granddaughter is too young to be immunized but young enough to catch measles from non-immunized, opted-out children. My daughter, Claire, the child’s mother, believes it ought to be mandatory to immunize your kids, just like it’s mandatory to wear a seatbelt.<\/p>\n This piece from The Week magazine does a good job of summarizing the issues:<\/p>\n The appalling, incoherent selfishness of Chris Christie’s vaccine ‘choice’<\/strong><\/p>\n On CBS’s Face the Nation last Sunday, Tom Frieden, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he is “very concerned” about the possibility of a massive, sustained outbreak of measles in the United States. A growing number of parents are deciding not to vaccinate their children, resulting in 100 cases of measles in 14 states in the latest outbreak. Frieden argued that it is extremely important to prevent measles from re-establishing itself as an endemic disease, after it was eradicated at great expense and effort around the year 2000.<\/p>\n New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) chose the very next day to downplay the threat, a reply of sorts to President Obama, who strenuously recommended vaccination in an interview. At a press conference in England, part of a trip that is widely considered to be a rehearsal for a presidential run, Christie said that while he has vaccinated his own children, he did not expressly recommend vaccination for others. Instead, people “should have some measure of choice.” (The libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) went further, saying of vaccines, “Most of them ought to be voluntary.”)<\/p>\n After criticism, Christie amended his statement to emphasize that “there is no question kids should be vaccinated,” while still maintaining that the danger of vaccine-preventable illnesses should be “balanced” against the supposed risks of vaccines. But it still doesn’t wash, given the 2009 letter he wrote saying he would “stand with” vaccine-refusenik parents.<\/p>\n Christie is utterly mistaken on the science. But his comments exemplify a typically American selfishness, one that in this case is not just morally odious, but incoherent.<\/p>\n It’s true that an individual case of measles is a lot less threatening than one of Ebola, for which Christie – again acting against the best advice of medical scientists – last year briefly enacted a forcible quarantine for health-care workers who had treated Ebola in Africa. By this reasoning, it is worth curtailing individual liberty for very deadly diseases, but not so with less dangerous ones.<\/p>\n But just because a disease is not as bad as Ebola does not mean it isn’t still worth eradicating. Furthermore, the measles vaccine is extremely safe for healthy people: though there is a tiny risk, as there is with every activity, it is far smaller than getting measles itself. Only the very young, and those with compromised immune systems or allergies, have an actual reason to avoid it.<\/p>\n And make no mistake, measles is still a very serious illness. A quarter-million people worldwide got it last year, mostly children in the developing world; more than half died (though that death rate can be reduced to about 1 to 2 out of 1,000 with modern medicine). Long-term complications can include deafness, pneumonia, encephalitis, and a degenerative nerve disease. It’s also incredibly contagious, “probably the most contagious infectious disease known to mankind,” as a CDC specialist told NPR. Back in the pre-vaccine days, each person who caught it infected 17 new ones – as opposed to less than two for Ebola.<\/p>\n More broadly, this entire argumentative frame misses the greatest benefit of vaccines: herd immunity. A population vaccinated to a high enough level becomes largely impervious to the disease by sheer statistics, and that protects the vulnerable ones who can’t be vaccinated, or those whose vaccines didn’t take root. Vaccines are not just about preventing personal illness, but stopping them from spreading. Done systematically enough, it can eradicate diseases completely. The elimination of smallpox, which killed something like 300 million people in the 20th century alone, ranks high on the list of human accomplishments.<\/p>\n That is why this is as much a moral issue as a scientific one. The appalling selfishness inherent in the idea of “vaccine choice” was starkly illustrated in a recent CNN story. After the measles outbreak at Disneyland, CNN talked to a family whose 10-month-old baby had contracted the disease. They’re terrified he’ll pass it on to their 3-year-old daughter, who has leukemia and can’t get the vaccine – but might be killed by the disease. Here’s the response of a refusenik parent:<\/p>\n CNN asked Wolfson if he could live with himself if his unvaccinated child got another child gravely ill. “I could live with myself easily,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate thing that people die, but people die. I’m not going to put my child at risk to save another child.” [CNN]<\/p>\n In other words, it’s okay to cause the death of another child if your kid wants to go to Disneyland. And that’s leaving aside the risk to Wolfson’s own kids, who are put at risk by his atrocious parenting.<\/p>\n Every person depends on society to function. From public roads to sanitation to clean water to the very economic system itself – your day is made possible by millions of other people doing their small part to maintain our civilization. When it comes to violently contagious diseases, it is not possible to speak meaningfully of choice divorced from the needs of those people.<\/p>\n Herd immunity, like many of the great public goods, is literally an issue of life and death. As such, Christie’s parental “choice” is a gross infringement of others’ basic rights.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n
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\n The Politics of Fraudulent Dietary Supplements <\/strong>(from the New York Times)
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