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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   33947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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NYTimes article that wasn't paywalled for me, with my browser extensions: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/06/health/usaid-clinical-trials-funding-trump.html

In more bad-things-happening-due-to-USAID-stop-work-order-news*, it turns out that USAID participated in clinical trials. ("The Times identified more than 30 frozen studies that had volunteers already in the care of researchers...") Interrupting clinical trials is bad:

Asanda Zondi received a startling phone call last Thursday, with orders to make her way to a health clinic in Vulindlela, South Africa, where she was participating in a research study that was testing a new device to prevent pregnancy and H.IV. infection.

The trial was shutting down, a nurse told her. The device, a silicone ring inserted into her vagina, needed to be removed right away.

When Ms. Zondi, 22, arrived at the clinic, she learned why: The U.S. Agency for International Development, which funded the study, had withdrawn financial support and had issued a stop-work order to all organizations around the globe that receive its money. The abrupt move followed an executive order by President Trump freezing all foreign aid for at least 90 days. Since then, the Trump administration has taken steps to dismantle the agency entirely.

Ms. Zondi’s trial is one of dozens that have been abruptly frozen, leaving people around the world with experimental drugs and medical products in their bodies, cut off from the researchers who were monitoring them, and generating waves of suspicion and fear.

The State Department, which now oversees U.S.A.I.D., replied to a request for comment by directing a reporter to USAID.gov, which no longer contains any information except that all permanent employees have been placed on administrative leave. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the agency is wasteful and advances a liberal agenda that is counter to President Trump’s foreign policy.

In interviews, scientists — who are forbidden by the terms of the stop-work order to speak with the news media — described agonizing choices: violate the stop-work orders and continue to care for trial volunteers, or leave them alone to face potential side effects and harm.

The Declaration of Helsinki, a decades-old set of ethical principles for medical research that American institutions and others throughout the world have endorsed, lays out ethical guidelines under which medical research should be conducted, requiring that researchers care for participants throughout a trial, and report the results of their findings to the communities where trials were conducted.

Ms. Zondi said she was baffled and frightened. She talked with other women who had volunteered for the study. “Some people are afraid because we don’t know exactly what was the reason,” she said. “We don’t really know the real reason of pausing the study.”

The stop-work order was so immediate and sweeping that the research staff would be violating it if they helped the women remove the rings. But Dr. Leila Mansoor, a scientist with the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa (known as CAPRISA) and an investigator on the trial, decided she and her team would do so anyway.

“My first thought when I saw this order was, There are rings in people’s bodies and you cannot leave them,” Dr. Mansoor said. “For me ethics and participants come first. There is a line.”

Setting aside that we now won't get the scientific results of these studies, fucking people over like this** seems like counterproductive foreign policy.

*I'm posting this, because I didn't recall clinical trials coming up in the other discussions (I only learned of it this morning), so it's presumably also news to others and I thought it was different in a key way. (see footnote 2)

**I say "fucking people over," because it's not a situation in which receiving something is better than nothing, even if you didn't receive everything you expected/were promised; these test subjects risked their own health on the basis of guarantees from the trials and the USA reneged on its part of the deal. (I.E., if you're too hard-heartened a libertarian to believe in Kantian medical ethics, the USA is still in the wrong, due to not following the terms of contracts it entered.)

Can’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.

We have a massive problem. 2T deficit p.a. We have an NGO network funded by our own government working against us. And indeed, it is almost certain that any of these stories are being coordinated by current USAID employees (in part why it was absurd for the judge to issue a TRO re thr admin leave). That is, we are paying the American executive to try to undermine the American executive.

No sorry I don’t care about this. Sorry it sucks but we can’t afford it and it needs to be cut. This is the way.

I can't take Trump seriously about the deficit when he openly plans on insulting massive tax cuts that will massively outdo whatever nibbling around the edges DOGE manages to accomplish.

I mean, do you not count tariffs as taxes? If you eliminate the 25% tax on the profits of China-to-Amazon Inc, but instead charge them 25% on everything they bring from china, are you cutting taxes? Or just shifting the tax burden?

Yeah, Trump's tariff announcement today was good actually. Certainly much better than his previous ideas.

  1. Reciprocal tariffs. We charge others what they charge us.

  2. VAT offsets. If European countries average 20% VAT and we average 6% sales tax, that's the equivalent of a 14% difference in tariffs that need to be accounted for.. Edit: I am wrong. Thanks to @The_Nybbler.

There's a good chance Trump could lower taxes in the US in a revenue neutral way.

A VAT isn't similar to a tariff at all, and reciprocating Euro VAT with American tariff is harm to Americans with no purpose. The way VAT works is an American hammer costs e.g. $10 in the US and $12 in Europe because of VAT... but a European hammer of the same base price ALSO costs $10 in the US and $12 in Europe. There's no unfair practice there.

If you set the tariffs off against sales tax, you've made a truly horrible incentive; it makes it easier for states to raise their sales taxes up to Euro/Canadian VAT levels.

i still dont get why people think VAT is comparable to tariffs? is trumps idea of "fair" that we keep taxing our own products with VAT but make an exception american imports?

Reciprocal tariffs. We charge others what they charge us.

Except that others don't charge us tariffs, we charge ourselves tariffs. It's more like "we charge ourselves what others charge themselves". When you formulate it that way it becomes clear why this is a losing proposition.

If it's purely self charging then why are there retribution tariffs? Obviously when you raise the price of a good when produced by foreigners such that you give your internal market an advantage it is bad for those foreigners. They need to pass the cost to the consumer but that would make them uncompetitive. The winner of tariffs is special local interests, the loser are general internal interests and foreign competitors. The only interests influential in foreign states are the foreign competitors thus foreign states oppose it.

The whole "the consumer pays 100% of the tariff" has ben debunked a million times. The cost is never passed on 100% to the consumer.

Can you provide more information on this? I'm curious what proportion is, as I'd assume it'd be fairly close intuitively, and I've never seen anything otherwise.

A quick peruse of google scholar give this paper: https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.jstor.org/stable/1814161

It suggests that for a change in tariff rates, less than 1/3 is reflected in end consumer prices.

Sorry I don't have more sources, I haven't read many econimics papers even though I'm an economist 🙃

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I don't see what that has to do with what I wrote.

I've always thought reciprocal carbon taxes on imports would be an amazing scissor-wrench to throw in the works.
Get the free traders arguing with the greens about why you can import silicon made with coal in China at 0% tax, but silicon made with coal in the US gets taxed and regulated to death.

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