Early Trumpist medical treatments

And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute! And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that.

When Donald Trump used a Covid-19 press briefing to recommend injecting disinfectants to kill viruses within the human body, people reacted as though this were entirely unprecedented. But it wasn’t, entirely. From Frank Snowden’s Epidemics and Society:

Of all nineteenth-century treatments for epidemic cholera, however, perhaps the most painful was the acid enema, which physicians administered in the 1880s in a burst of excessive optimism after Robert Koch’s discovery of V. cholerae. Optimistic doctors reasoned that since they at last knew what the enemy was and where it was lodged in the body, and since they also understood that bacteria are vulnerable to acid, as Lister had demonstrated, all they needed to destroy the invader and restore patients’ health was to suffuse their bowels with carbolic acid. Even though neither Koch nor Lister ever sanctioned such a procedure, some of their Italian followers nevertheless attempted this treatment during the epidemic of 1884–1885. The acid enema was an experimental intervention that, in their view, followed the logic of Koch’s discoveries and Lister’s practice. The results, however, were maximally discouraging…

Apparently it’s a not uncommon response on someone first learning of the germ theory of disease.

Count no statue happy…

Count no man happy till he dies.

Sophocles, Oedipus the King (trans. Robert Fagles)

Must no one at all, then, be called happy while he lives; must we, as Solon says, see the end? Even if we are to lay down this doctrine, is it also the case that a man is happy when he is dead? […] for both evil and good are thought to exist for a dead man, as much as for one who is alive but not aware of them; e.g. honours and dishonours and the good or bad fortunes of children and in general of descendants.

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book 1 (trans. W D Ross)

In all of the discussion of racist statues one fundamental point is rarely mentioned: Above all, public statues represent the unwillingness of “great men” to simply go away. Those who bestrode their narrow world like a Colossus are loath to let death remove them from the scene, so like the stuffed dodo in a diorama they have their effigies propped up in the public square.

While they lived they received the adulation of the crowds, and the opprobrium of their opponents. If the great one’s supporters need a public icon as a focus for their devotions, the icon will have to continue to participate in the hurly-burly of public life, including the scrutiny of their lives and deeds brought on by shifting ethical standards. If Winston Churchill were alive today he would rightly have paint and rotten tomatoes flung at him by those appalled at his racist ideas and actions. Reasonable can believe that his near-genocidal actions in Bengal, among others places inhabited by darker-skinned people, are more significant than a few well-crafted speeches that bucked up the spirits of the Island Race. Reasonable people did think so during his life. The place where one is beyond praise or blame is called the grave, and no one is suggesting disinterring WC’s bones — though an earlier generation of Tories did exactly that with Oliver Cromwell, after the tide of history turned against him.

His supporters are welcome to hide his statues away in private shrines, or public museums. If you put them up in public you have to accept that people are going to continue to engage with them. Sometimes angrily. Sometimes disorderly.

Vaccine probabilities

From an article on the vaccine being developed by Robin Shattock’s group at Imperial College:

The success rate of vaccines at this stage of development is 10%, Shattock says, and there are already probably 10 vaccines in clinical trials, “so that means we will definitely have one”

It could be an exercise for a probability course:

  1. Suppose there are exactly 10 vaccines in this stage of development. What is the probability that one will succeed?
  2. Interpret “probably 10 vaccines” to mean that the number of vaccines in clinical trials is Poisson distributed with parameter 10. What is the probability that one will succeed?