A bite is being taken out of Apple, and weird ebola commentary.

WhyPhone 6 woes continue to grow. Some tech wonk stated that with the whyPhone 6 issues, and assorted ills, Apple is becoming like Microsoft. Not today's Microsoft. M$ products seem to be the least buggy things out there. With a new round of fear over a HUGE Unix vulnerability that is not yet really fixed in any way, Apple's woes continue to mount. Mac OS is essentially a bunch of APIs atop a Unix shell. Sorry about the geek speak. In other words, the pretty Mac OS is not an operating system. The Mac OS is all the pretty and fun stuff riding atop the operating system. All flavors of Unix are vulnerable. That means Macs, Linux, and Apache flavors of Unix are wide open. Uncut Unix is, of course, affected as well. At least 500 million computers worldwide are vulnerable.

I have a little Unix story to share. When I was in grad school, I coded a really simple UI for Unix. All it needed to become the forerunner(alternative?) to Linux was more prettier packaging. If I had known that Linus Torvalds was going to come along and REALLY do the job, I could have been first. I'm 1/4 Finn as well. Oh well. This is no BS story. One of the people I shared my secret project with is now an astrophysics professor at Columbia.

I could get into the POSIX stuff, but that set of protocols wasn't officially cast into IEEE stone until 1988.

So, other than a few papers and some patent royalties, I toil in relative anonymity. I do have that dish of a business as well.

Onward to ebola today....

I believe that this must be an opinion piece, as the business press typically gets hard news conveyed more accurately than mass media. At any rate, here 'tis: Ebola Shot Turned Down by WHO Is Best Hope as Virus Rages

I think it must be a rush job. That headline is dreadful.

This bit is particularly specious:

The sudden sense of urgency for an Ebola vaccine was an about face from a few months earlier when Glaxo contacted the WHO, asking whether its vaccine could help with the outbreak. At that time, the company was told the focus was on containment and the WHO didn’t have a policy for using vaccines in this type of situation. “We’ll get back to you” was the message, said Ripley Ballou, head of Glaxo’s Ebola vaccine program.

No one from the WHO was quoted directly from March of this year. However, an official offered this:

When Glaxo contacted the WHO in March, the vaccine was seen as a “diversion of energy” at a time when it was widely believed the outbreak would be controlled with traditional measures such as contact tracing and safe burials that have helped contain every previous outbreak, said Marie-Paule Kieny, the WHO’s assistant director-general for health systems and innovation.

“We were in a situation where GSK had a vaccine which had been tested in animals, and that was it,” Kieny said in a telephone interview. “It was only then when the situation started to be quite worse, and people understood that we’re not going to make it, that the effort came to a higher level.”

If you read the piece the pharmaceutical companies GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Johnson & Johnson claim that they reached out to the WHO in March of this year. The WHO, in addition to the statement in the blockquote above, claims that the WHO has no process in place for using vaccine prophylaxis. No, the WHO does has the protocols in place for known to be effective in humans vaccines. That is precisely how the scourge of Smallpox was eradicated from nature. What the WHO lacks--and I think that this is prudent--is that the WHO has no procedures in place for jabbing needles into people with drugs that have not undergone human trials.

If you think that the timing of these statements is all too convenient you are not alone. Once the US has offered up nearly a billion dollars to assist in the fight against ebola, the finger pointing starts. Now that the pharma giants have a place to deposit the bill, there is not a moment to spare.

My cynicism here is borne out my personal medical history. I have a partial retinal vein occlusion. The vision in my right eye flatly sucks. I had to almost threaten to kill my medical insurance provider to get the off-label use of an anti-tumor drug(Avastin) approved to treat the blocked vein. I buy health insurance as part of a group of small business owners, and my premiums at the time were roughly $920/mo. I NEVER used the insurance for anything but routine work. My death-by-poorly-wielded-machete worked, and after two weeks I had the first of six injections. Just the 1/30th dose needed for my right eye cost $1,200.00/shot. My retinal specialist called it "surgery" so each shot cost roughly $4,000. I paid 10 percent.

I am not going to state unequivocally that the pharma giants squeezed the WHO for guaranteed payment for their vaccine(s), but pharma's history in this area is not really great.

For a fabulous treatment of this very subject that is refreshingly devoid of hyperbole and tin hattedness, Siddhartha Mukherjee's instant classic: The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer is a must read. It is a must read for any thinking person. The book is the best on medicine I have ever read, and perhaps one of the top ten non-fiction books I have read. Ir would definitely make the top twenty.

Speaking of tin hats, at least one member of the GOP is donning one again today.

"Unless it is controlled, this will be one of the most explosive, dangerous, deadly epidemics in modern times." - Lamar Alexander(R-TN) Oy! Okay granted, if ebola gains the transmissibility of pandemic influenze, then sure. Until then, this WILL NOT be any of those adjectives unless you are in West Africa. I feel kinship with West Africa--and West Africans--as I have been to The Gambia, Guinea, and Mali. I have had hand drumming teachers from all over the region. I am glad that we are finally getting off our hands and moving towards doing something. I met Lamar Alexander when he ran for the GOP presidential nomination in 1996. The man did not strike me as shriekingly hyperbolic, but neither did he strike me as a deep thinker.

This state is very weird. We only have a bit over a million residents, yet because of our first in the nation presidential primary, every four years we see the very strange group of individuals narcissistic enough to believe that they can lead this country. It remains ever the show.

On Non Edit: The first part of this post is a rambling mess. For that I am sorry. I would tidy it up, but I am not so inclined. I am tired(worked until 3 AM this morning, and was at breakfast at 6 AM), cold, and hungry. Really..I'm flagging.