Month: June 2024

Endo Applied His Practical Knowledge of Molds to Search for First Statin

(p. 24) Akira Endo, a Japanese biochemist whose research on fungi helped to lay the groundwork for widely prescribed drugs that lower a type of cholesterol that contributes to heart disease, died on June 5 [2024]. He was 90.

. . .

Dr. Endo said his career was also inspired by a biography he read of Alexander Fleming, the Scottish biologist who discovered penicillin in the 1920s.

“For me Fleming was a hero,” he told Igaku-Shoin, a Japanese medical publisher, in 2014. “I dreamed of becoming a doctor as a child, but realized a new horizon as people who are not doctors can save people’s lives and contribute to society.”

After studying agriculture at Tohoku University, he joined Sankyo, a Japanese pharmaceutical company, in the late 1950s. His first assignment was manufacturing enzymes for fruit juices and wines at a factory in Tokyo.

He developed a more efficient way of cultivating mold by applying a method he had used as a child to make miso and pickled vegetables, he later told M3, a website for Japanese medical professionals.

. . .

. . ., he grew more than 6,000 fungi in the early 1970s as part of an effort to find a natural substance that could block a crucial enzyme involved in the production of cholesterol.

“I knew nothing but mold, so I decided to look for it in mold,” he said.

He eventually found what he was looking for: a strain of penicillium, or blue mold, that, in chickens, reduced levels of an enzyme that cells need to make LDL cholesterol.

For the full obituary see:

Hisako Ueno and Mike Ives. “Akira Endo, Scholar of Statins, Is Dead at 90.” The New York Times (Sunday, June 16, 2024): 24.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated June 15, 2024, and has the title “Akira Endo, Scholar of Statins That Reduce Heart Disease, Dies at 90.”)

Citizens with Criminal Records Are “Upset” at Liberals’ “Dehumanizing” Rhetoric in Calling Trump a “Convicted Felon”

(p. A16) Some Democratic leaders are eager to make former President Donald J. Trump’s new identity as a convicted criminal central to their pitch to voters on why he is unfit for office. At the same time, there has been a movement on the left for years to end the stigma of criminal records and point out grave issues in the country’s legal system.

That is why in the wake of the news last week that a New York jury had found Mr. Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, there were especially complex and personal reactions among the millions of Americans who have also been convicted of felonies.

. . .

For Dawn Harrington, who served time on Rikers Island in New York and now directs an organization called Free Hearts for families affected by incarceration in Tennessee, watching the news coverage of Mr. Trump’s criminal conviction last week was upsetting.

She heard liberals rejoice that he was now a “convicted felon,” a term she and others have tried to persuade people not to use.

Ms. Harrington said she did time for gun possession after traveling to New York with a handgun that was registered in Tennessee.

. . .

After the Trump verdict, she also heard President Biden defend the justice system as a “cornerstone of America” that has endured for “nearly 250 years” — back to a time, Ms. Harrington noted, when slavery was legal.

The rhetoric, she thought, was “quite frankly dehumanizing to the base that we organize with,” she said.

For the full story see:

Shaila Dewan. “Among People With Criminal Records, Complex Feelings About Trump.” The New York Times (Wednesday, June 5, 2024): A16.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 3, 2024, and has the title “People With Criminal Records React to Trump Verdict: ‘Now You Understand’.”)

Alert Children Make “Staggering Discovery” That “Advances Science”

(p. D2) In the summer of 2022, two boys hiking with their father and a 9-year-old cousin in the North Dakota badlands came across some large bones poking out of a rock. They had no idea what to make of them.

The father took some photos and sent them to a paleontologist friend. Later, the relatives learned they’d made a staggering discovery: They’d stumbled upon a rare juvenile skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex.

. . .

The friend of the father who identified the fossil, Tyler Lyson, who is the museum’s curator of paleontology, said in a statement that the boys had made an “incredible dinosaur discovery that advances science and deepens our understanding of the natural world.”

. . .

In a video, the brothers, Jessin and Liam Fisher, 9 and 12, and their cousin, Kaiden Madsen, now 11, said that they were busy hiking and exploring when they first came across the bones and had no inkling they could be so special. “I didn’t have a clue,” Jessin says in the video. At first, he added, Dr. Lyson believed they belonged to a duck-billed dinosaur.

For the full story see:

Livia Albeck-Ripka. “Family Discovery: Stumbling Upon a Tyrannosaurus Rex In the Badlands of North Dakota.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 11, 2024): D2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 10, 2024, and has the title “Family Discovers Rare T. Rex Fossil in North Dakota.” Where the wording of the versions differs, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The study co-authored by Camarós, and mentioned above, is:

Tondini, Tatiana, Albert Isidro, and Edgard Camarós. “Case Report: Boundaries of Oncological and Traumatological Medical Care in Ancient Egypt: New Palaeopathological Insights from Two Human Skulls.” Frontiers in Medicine 11 (2024) DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2024.1371645.

On the antiquity of cancer, see also:

Haridy, Yara, Florian Witzmann, Patrick Asbach, Rainer R. Schoch, Nadia Fröbisch, and Bruce M. Rothschild. “Triassic Cancer—Osteosarcoma in a 240-Million-Year-Old Stem-Turtle.” JAMA Oncology 5, no. 3 (March 2019): 425-26.

Non-Drug Treatments Are Under-Studied Because They Are Hard to Patent, and Hard to Test in Randomized Clinical Trials

(p. C3) In particular, decades of research show that mental, physical and social stimulation is one of the potential ways to ward off Alzheimer’s disease.

. . .

All of these findings come from observational studies that look at people’s existing lifestyle and cognitive health, as opposed to providing them with a “lifestyle treatment” and then assessing cognitive outcomes. The gold standard in modern medicine is randomized, blind, placebo-controlled trials, which are more quantifiable and objective, and there have been few such trials of lifestyle treatments for dementia and Alzheimer’s.

Those that exist have shown disparate results. For example, a study published in the journal Applied Neuropsychology in 2003 found that while mental drills could train people to do better on specific tasks like recalling words from a list, the effect didn’t translate into overall cognitive improvement. Clinical trials on social engagement are currently lacking.

One reason why the cognitive benefits of lifestyle enrichment haven’t been sufficiently studied is that nonpharmacological treatments such as physical exercise can’t be easily patented, so pharmaceutical companies aren’t interested in investing. It’s also difficult to use placebos. In drug trials, a look-alike sugar pill and a test drug are randomly assigned to participants, but there’s no equivalent of a sugar pill for enrichment activities. Instead, the control group either receives no intervention, a fact that can’t be easily hidden to avoid bias, or they receive some other interventions that may have effects of their own and muddle trial results.

For the full essay, see:

Han Yu. “An Active Lifestyle Can Help To Ward Off Alzheimer’s.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 27, 2021 [sic]): C3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date February 25, 2021 [sic], and has the title “Can an Active Lifestyle Help Ward Off Alzheimer’s?”)

The essay quoted above is adapted from Yu’s book is:

Yu, Han. Mind Thief: The Story of Alzheimer’s. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

The Dubious Result of a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT)

Randomized controlled trials are widely viewed as the “gold standard” of medical evidence. But RCTs can be flawed in a variety of ways. They can have too few participants, they can be improperly randomized for a variety of reasons (not all relevant variables may have been identified or the protocol may not have been properly implemented). Forgive me, but the results of the RCT described below seem highly implausible. I believe that something about the RCT was flawed. Who can believe the result that those who engage in moderate exercise live shorter lives than those who only engage in very modest exercise. Common sense and many observational studies say the opposite, and such evidence should not be cavalierly dismissed.

(p. D6) Scientists have known for some time, . . ., that active people tend also to be long-lived people. According to multiple past studies, regular exercise is strongly associated with greater longevity, even if the exercise amounts to only a few minutes a week.

But almost all of these studies have been observational, meaning they looked at people’s lives at a moment in time, determined how much they moved at that point, and later checked to see whether and when they passed away. Such studies can pinpoint associations between exercise and life spans, but they cannot prove that moving actually causes people to live longer, only that activity and longevity are linked.

To find out if exercise directly affects life spans, researchers would have to enroll volunteers in long-term, randomized controlled trials, with some people exercising, while others work out differently or not at all. The researchers then would have to follow all of these people for years, until a sufficiently large number died to allow for statistical comparisons of the groups.

Such studies, however, are dauntingly complicated and expensive, one reason they are rarely done. They may also be limited, since over the course of a typical experiment, few adults may die. This is providential for those who enroll in the study but problematic for the scientists hoping to study mortality; with scant deaths, they cannot tell if exercise is having a meaningful impact on life spans.

Those obstacles did not deter a group of exercise scientists at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway, however. With colleagues from other institutions, they had been studying the impacts of various types of exercise on heart disease and fitness and felt the obvious next step was to look at longevity. So, almost 10 years ago, they began planning the study that would be published in October [2020] in The BMJ.

. . .

The scientists tested everyone’s current aerobic fitness as well as their subjective feelings about the quality of their lives and then randomly assigned them to one of three groups. The first, as a control, agreed to follow standard activity guidelines and walk or otherwise remain in motion for half an hour most days. (The scientists did not feel they could ethically ask their control group to be sedentary for five years.)

Another group began exercising moderately for longer sessions of 50 minutes twice a week. And the third group started a program of twice-weekly high-intensity interval training, or H.I.I.T., during which they cycled or jogged at a strenuous pace for four minutes, followed by four minutes of rest, with that sequence repeated four times.

. . .

The men and women in the high-intensity-intervals group were about 2 percent less likely to have died than those in the control group, and 3 percent less likely to die than anyone in the longer, moderate-exercise group. People in the moderate group were, in fact, more likely to have passed away than people in the control group.

For the full story see:

Gretchen Reynolds. “Working Out With Intensity.” The New York Times (Tuesday, December 29, 2020 [sic]): D6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 10, 2021 [sic–yes 2021], and has the title “The Secret to Longevity? 4-Minute Bursts of Intense Exercise May Help.” Where the wording of the versions slightly differs, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The study published in The British Medical Journal (BMJ), and mentioned above, is:

Stensvold, Dorthe, Hallgeir Viken, Sigurd L. Steinshamn, Håvard Dalen, Asbjørn Støylen, Jan P. Loennechen, Line S. Reitlo, Nina Zisko, Fredrik H. Bækkerud, Atefe R. Tari, Silvana B. Sandbakk, Trude Carlsen, Jan E. Ingebrigtsen, Stian Lydersen, Erney Mattsson, Sigmund A. Anderssen, Maria A. Fiatarone Singh, Jeff S. Coombes, Eirik Skogvoll, Lars J. Vatten, Jorunn L. Helbostad, Øivind Rognmo, and Ulrik Wisløff. “Effect of Exercise Training for Five Years on All Cause Mortality in Older Adults—the Generation 100 Study: Randomised Controlled Trial.” BMJ 371 (2020): m3485.

Biden’s Tax and Regulation Plans Shift “Demonized” Silicon Valley Toward Trump

(p. B1) In 2021, David Sacks, a prominent venture capital investor and podcast host, said former President Donald J. Trump’s behavior around the Jan. 6 [2021] riot at the U.S. Capitol had disqualified him from being a future political candidate.

At a tech conference last week, Mr. Sacks said his view had changed.

“I have bigger disagreements with Biden than with Trump,” the investor said. Mr. Sacks said he and his podcast co-hosts were working on hosting a fund-raiser for Mr. Trump, which could include an interview for their “All In” show.  . . .

Such public support for Mr. Trump used to be taboo in Silicon Valley, which has long been seen as a liberal bastion. But frustration with Mr. Biden, Democrats and the state of the world has increasingly driven some of tech’s most prominent venture capitalists to the right.

. . .

(p. B5) Delian Asparouhov, an investor at Founders Fund, the investment firm founded by Mr. Thiel, recently marveled at how much the political winds had shifted. This month, Mr. Trump made a virtual appearance at a venture capital conference in Washington. There, he thanked attendees for “keeping your chin up” and said he looked forward to meeting them.

“Four years ago you had to issue an apology if you voted for him,” Mr. Asparouhov wrote on X.

Mr. Sacks, Mr. Palihapitiya and Founders Fund did not respond to a request for comment. Sequoia Capital declined to comment.

The comments and activity by the group of tech investors are particularly noticeable given Silicon Valley’s blue background.

. . .

The . . . “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.

During that time, Democrats moved further to the left and demonized successful people who made a lot of money, further alienating some tech leaders, said Bradley Tusk, a venture capital investor and political strategist who supports Mr. Biden.

“If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”

That feeling has hardened under President Biden. Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.

The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.

Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March [2024] to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments.

Mr. Sacks said at the tech conference last week that he thought such taxes could kill the start-up industry’s system of offering stock options to founders and employees. “It’s a good reason for Silicon Valley to think really hard about who it wants to vote for,” he said.

. . .

Mr. Andreessen, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm, said in a recent podcast that “there are real issues with the Biden administration.” Under Mr. Trump, he said, the S.E.C. and F.T.C. would be headed by “very different kinds of people.” But a Trump presidency would not necessarily be a “clean win” either, he added.

Last month, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Thiel, Elon Musk and other prominent investors attended an “anti-Biden” dinner in Hollywood, where attendees discussed fund-raising and ways to oppose Democrats, a person familiar with the situation said. The dinner was earlier reported by Puck.

For the full story see:

Erin Griffith. “Silicon Valley Notables Are Shifting to the Right.” The New York Times (Friday, May 24, 2024): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed years, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 22, 2024, and has the title “Some of Silicon Valley’s Most Prominent Investors Are Turning Against Biden.”)

Egyptians May Have Tried Surgery on Brain Cancer 4,600 Years Ago

(p. D2) Scientists led by Edgard Camarós, a paleopathologist at the University of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, were studying an approximately 4,600-year-old Egyptian skull when they found signs of brain cancer and its treatment.

. . .

Using a microscope, he and Tatiana Tondini of the University of Tübingen in Germany and Albert Isidro of the University Hospital Sagrat Cor in Spain, the study’s other authors, found cut marks around the skull’s edges surrounding dozens of lesions that earlier researchers had linked to metastasized brain cancer. The shape of the cuts indicated that they had been made with a metal tool. This discovery, reported in a study published Wednesday [May 29, 2024] in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, suggests that ancient Egyptians studied brain cancer using surgery. If the cuts were made while the person was alive, they may have even attempted to treat it.

. . .

The new discovery not only expands scientific knowledge of Egyptian medicine, it may also push back the timeline of humanity’s documented attempts to treat cancer by up to 1,000 years.

For the full story see:

Jordan Pearson. “An Ongoing Search: In an Ancient Egyptian Skull, Evidence of a Cancer Treatment.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 4, 2024): D2.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date May 29, 2024, and has the title “Ancient Skull With Brain Cancer Preserves Clues to Egyptian Medicine.” Where the wording of the versions differs, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The study co-authored by Camarós, and mentioned above, is:

Tondini, Tatiana, Albert Isidro, and Edgard Camarós. “Case Report: Boundaries of Oncological and Traumatological Medical Care in Ancient Egypt: New Palaeopathological Insights from Two Human Skulls.” Frontiers in Medicine 11 (2024) DOI: 10.3389/fmed.2024.1371645.

On the antiquity of cancer, see also:

Haridy, Yara, Florian Witzmann, Patrick Asbach, Rainer R. Schoch, Nadia Fröbisch, and Bruce M. Rothschild. “Triassic Cancer—Osteosarcoma in a 240-Million-Year-Old Stem-Turtle.” JAMA Oncology 5, no. 3 (March 2019): 425-26.

Chernow Channels McCloskey’s Index Card Advice

In her wonderful paper on how to research well and write clearly, Deirdre McCloskey suggests that we always carry with us a pack of 4 by 6 cards, so that we have them handy when we are hit by an epiphany or hear a relevant quote. (The suggestion probably also appears in the later book versions of her wonderful paper, but I do not have a copy handy to check.)

(p. C11) Mr. Chernow usually spends about twice as much time researching a book as writing it. He types up his research on a computer, so that he has it backed up, and then prints out the individual entries on paper with perforated edges that he can tear into 4-by-6-inch cards. (He was inspired to use index cards by Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote his novels on them.) He then files the cards chronologically and indexes them. His research on Grant fills some 25,000 cards packed into 22 boxes, all stacked up in the office of his Brooklyn brownstone under a big abstract painting.

For the full interview, see:

Alexandra Wolfe. “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Ron Chernow.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 16, 2017 [sic]): C11.

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Sept. 15, 2017 [sic], and has the title “WEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL; Ron Chernow’s New Chapter: Ulysses S. Grant.”)

The main Chernow book discussed in the interview is:

Chernow, Ron. Grant. New York: The Penguin Press, 2017.

McCloskey’s wonderful paper, mentioned above, is:

McCloskey, Deirdre. “Economical Writing.” Economic Inquiry 23, no. 2 (April 1985): 187-222.

To Reduce the Huge Costs of Randomized Clinical Trials, Groups Are Excluded for Whom the Trials Matter Most

(p. D5) Geriatricians have complained for years that figuring out treatments for their patients becomes dramatically more difficult when older people are excluded from clinical trials and other research.

For an 83-year-old, what are the risks and benefits of a surgical procedure, drug or medical device tested primarily on those in their 50s? When a drug trial excludes those who have several diseases and take other drugs, how do the results pertain to older adults — most of whom have several diseases and take other drugs?

. . .

Critics of age exclusion had reason to celebrate in December, when the National Institutes of Health issued new policy guidelines for the research it funds.

Starting next January, grant applicants will have to explain how they intend to include people of all ages, providing acceptable justifications for any group they leave out. The agency will monitor investigators to make sure they comply.

“It’s the right starting point,” said Dr. Florence Bourgeois, a pediatrician at Harvard Medical School. (Children also wind up taking drugs tested only in adults.)

. . .

How often are old people left out of important medical research? In 2011, it looked like progress when Dr. Donna Zulman and her colleagues at the University of Michigan reviewed 109 clinical trials published in leading journals and found that just 20 percent set upper age limits for participation.

An earlier review of trials published from 1994 to 2006 had found that 39 percent shut out people over age 65.

But, as the University of Michigan team also pointed out, even without age limits, studies may bar participants who have multiple disorders or disabilities, or those with limited life expectancy or cognitive impairment. Some researchers won’t enroll nursing home residents.

Those restrictions, too, effectively push older people out of clinical trials and other studies.

Maddeningly, exclusion rates remain high even for studies of diseases particularly common at older ages. Dr. Bourgeois and her colleagues looked at clinical trials for heart disease medications, for instance — primarily blood thinners, cholesterol and blood pressure drugs.

More than half of the trials had upper age limits, usually 75 or 80, and only about 12 percent of participants were aged 75 or older. Yet nearly 40 percent of people hospitalized with heart attacks are over age 75.

For the full story see:

Paula Span. “The Clinical Trial Is Open. Older People Need Not Apply.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 17, 2018 [sic]): D5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 13, 2018 [sic], and has the title “The Clinical Trial Is Open. The Elderly Need Not Apply.”)

Some published academic articles supporting the points made in the passages quoted above are:

Bourgeois, Florence T., Liat Orenstein, Sarita Ballakur, Kenneth D. Mandl, and John P. A. Ioannidis. “Exclusion of Elderly People from Randomized Clinical Trials of Drugs for Ischemic Heart Disease.” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 65, no. 11 (Nov. 2017): 2354-61.

Bourgeois, Florence T., Srinivas Murthy, Catia Pinto, Karen L. Olson, John P.A. Ioannidis, and Kenneth D. Mandl. “Pediatric Versus Adult Drug Trials for Conditions with High Pediatric Disease Burden.” Pediatrics 130, no. 2 (Aug. 2012): 285-92.

Cruz-Jentoft, Alfonso J., Marina Carpena-Ruiz, Beatriz Montero-Errasquín, Carmen Sánchez-Castellano, and Elisabet Sánchez-García. “Exclusion of Older Adults from Ongoing Clinical Trials About Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus.” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 61, no. 5 (May 2013): 734-38.

Lewis, Joy H., Meredith L. Kilgore, Dana P. Goldman, Edward L. Trimble, Richard Kaplan, Michael J. Montello, Michael G. Housman, and José J. Escarce. “Participation of Patients 65 Years of Age or Older in Cancer Clinical Trials.” Journal of Clinical Oncology 21, no. 7 (April 2003): 1383-89.

McGarvey, Caoimhe, Tara Coughlan, and Desmond O’Neill. “Ageism in Studies on the Management of Osteoporosis.” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 65, no. 7 (July 2017): 1566-68.

Zulman, Donna M., Jeremy B. Sussman, Xisui Chen, Christine T. Cigolle, Caroline S. Blaum, and Rodney A. Hayward. “Examining the Evidence: A Systematic Review of the Inclusion and Analysis of Older Adults in Randomized Controlled Trials.” Journal of General Internal Medicine 26, no. 7 (July 2011): 783-90.

After Safe Drinking Water, Vaccines Were the Second “Most Successful Medical Interventions of the 20th Century”

(p. B11) Dr. Paul D. Parkman, whose research was instrumental in identifying the virus that causes rubella and developing a vaccine that has prevented an epidemic of the disease in the United States for more than 50 years, died on May 7 [2024] at his home in Auburn, N.Y., in the Finger Lakes region. He was 91.

. . .

In 1966, Dr. Parkman, Dr. Harry M. Meyer Jr. and their collaborators at the National Institutes of Health, including Maurice R. Hilleman, disclosed that they had perfected a vaccine to prevent rubella. Dr. Parkman and Dr. Meyer assigned their patents to the N.I.H. so that the vaccines could be manufactured, distributed and administered promptly.

“I never made a nickel from those patents because we wanted them to be freely available to everybody,” he said in an oral history interview for the N.I.H. in 2005.

President Lyndon B. Johnson thanked the researchers, noting that they were among the few who could “number themselves among those who directly and measurably advance human welfare, save precious lives, and bring new hope to the world.”

Still, after Dr. Parkman retired from the government in 1990, as director of the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, he expressed concern about what he called the unfounded skepticism that persisted about the value of vaccines.

“With the exception of safe drinking water, vaccines have been the most successful medical interventions of the 20th century,” he wrote in 2002 in Food and Drug Administration Consumer, an agency journal.

For the full obituary see:

Sam Roberts. “Paul D. Parkman, 91, Researcher Whose Work Helped to Eliminate Rubella.” The New York Times (Friday, May 24, 2024): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 21, 2024, and has the title “Dr. Paul Parkman, Who Helped to Eliminate Rubella, Dies at 91.”)

The 2002 article by Parkman mentioned above is:

Parkman, Paul D. “We Can’t Forget the Value of Vaccines.” Food and Drug Administration Consumer 36, no. 4 (July-Aug. 2002): 40.

Rex Murphy Saw We Are Governed by People Who Look Down on Us

(p. B12) Rex Murphy, a Canadian newspaper, radio and television commentator who delighted his country’s conservatives with sharp attacks on environmentalists, liberal politicians and what he called their “woke politics,” died on May 9 [2024] in Toronto. He was 77.

His death, from cancer, was announced on the front page of The National Post, the widely read daily newspaper for which he wrote a column, one of several he had over the years in Canadian papers, including The Globe and Mail in Toronto. His editor at The National Post, Kevin Libin, said Mr. Murphy died in a hospital.

. . .

Mr. Murphy’s sharp political turn to the right — from commenting for centrist outlets like the CBC and The Globe and Mail, where he had a regular column until 2010, to the right-wing views he espoused at The National Post — had its roots in his own working-class background, in the view of those who knew him.

. . .

He regularly took on what he deemed the sins of “woke” politics and “wokeism.” In a February 2023 column, he wrote: “I have finally fixed upon the definition of progressivism. It means the dismissal of everything that counts, unconcern with what makes life hard for most, and a scorn for the realities of day to day; instead shepherding to very particular political interest groups.”

In his final days there were diatribes against critics of Israel during its war with Hamas and against the liberalism of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

. . .

Mr. Murphy was animated, Mr. Libin said, by “the sense that we were being governed by people who looked down on us.”

. . .

Throughout his career, Mr. Murphy set great store by verbal expression. His fans and his critics agreed that his distinctive, sometimes high-flown use of English was what set him apart from his country’s other journalists. Profiles noted that he was as devoted to the works of John Milton as he was to “The Simpsons.”

For the full obituary see:

Adam Nossiter. “Rex Murphy, 77, a Pundit on the Right in Canada.” The New York Times (Friday, May 24, 2024): B12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated May 23, 2024, and has the title “Rex Murphy, a Dominant Pundit on the Right in Canada, Dies at 77.”)