Daily Archives: January 12, 2023

Moderna CEO: 400% price hike on COVID vaccine “consistent with the value”, Pfizer-BioNTech thinks so too

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Moderna is considering raising the price of its COVID-19 vaccine by over 400 percent—from $26 per dose to between $110 and $130 per dose—according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Ars has reached out to Moderna for comment but has not yet received a response. The plan, if realized, would match the previously announced price hike for Pfizer-BioNTech’s rival COVID-19 vaccine.

The Journal spoke with Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco Monday, who said of the 400 percent price hike: “I would think this type of pricing is consistent with the value.”

Until now, the mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech have been purchased by the government and offered to Americans for free. In the latest federal contract from July, Moderna’s updated booster shot cost the government $26 per dose, up from $15–$16 per dose in earlier supply contracts, the Journal notes. Similarly, the government paid a little over $30 per dose for Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine this past summer, up from $19.50 per dose in contracts from 2020.

But now that the federal government is backing away from distributing the vaccines, their makers are moving to the commercial market—with price adjustments. Financial analysts had previously anticipated Pfizer would set the commercial price for its vaccine at just $50 per dose but were taken aback in October when Pfizer announced plans of a price between $110 and $130. Analysts then anticipated that Pfizer’s price would push Moderna and other vaccine makers to follow suit, which appears to be happening now.

Lawmakers have already lambasted Pfizer for the steep increase. In a letter sent last month to Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Peter Welch (D-Vt.) called the price hike “pure and deadly greed” and accused the company of “unseemly profiteering.”

“We urge you to back off from your proposed price increases and ensure COVID-19 vaccines are reasonably priced and accessible to people across the United States,” they wrote.

The revelation that Moderna may match Pfizer’s price increase comes just a day after Moderna announced that its COVID-19 vaccine sales in 2022 totaled approximately $18.4 billion.

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Source: Moderna CEO: 400% price hike on COVID vaccine “consistent with the value” | Ars Technica

Kids Are Being Exposed to Lead From Aircraft at Airports using AVGAS

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People living near airports that service piston-engine aircraft are disproportionately exposed to lead, a dangerous neurotoxin.

A study published this week in PNAS Nexus found that children living near the Reid-Hillview Airport in Santa Clara County, California, had elevated blood lead levels. They’ve pinpointed piston-engine aircrafts at airports like the one in California as a source of lead exposure for children.

Overall blood lead levels in U.S. children have gone down significantly in the last half century. Since the 1970s, policymakers have removed lead from everyday items like pipes, food cans, and vehicle gasoline. But despite those efforts, airports that house and service piston-engine aircraft, which mainly use leaded aviation fuel, continue to pollute the air. These are small, single- or two-propeller airplanes, such as training Cessna airplanes, small commercial aircraft, and the planes commonly seen trailing advertisement banners.

“Lead-formulated aviation gasoline (avgas) is the primary source of lead emissions in the United States today, consumed by over 170,000 piston-engine aircraft,” according to the new paper.

The researchers analyzed 14,000 blood samples, taken from 2011 to 2020 from children under 6 years old living near the California airport, to gauge exposure to lead. They found that blood lead levels increased the closer the children lived to the airport. Blood lead levels were also 2.18 times higher than a health department threshold of 4.5 micrograms per deciliter in children who lived east, or downwind, of the airport, according to the study.

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Source: American Kids Are Being Exposed to Lead From Airports

Corrupt NOTAM database file and backup led to the FAA ground stoppage.

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Officials are still trying to figure out exactly what led to the Federal Aviation Administration system outage on Wednesday but have traced it to a corrupt file, which was first reported by CNN.
In a statement late Wednesday, the FAA said it was continuing to investigate the outage and “take all needed steps to prevent this kind of disruption from happening again.”
“Our preliminary work has traced the outage to a damaged database file. At this time, there is no evidence of a cyberattack,” the FAA said.
The FAA is still trying to determine whether any one person or “routine entry” into the database is responsible for the corrupted file, a government official familiar with the investigation into the NOTAM system outage told CNN.
Another source familiar with the Federal Aviation Administration operation described exclusively to CNN on Wednesday how the outage played out.
When air traffic control officials realized they had a computer issue late Tuesday, they came up with a plan, the source said, to reboot the system when it would least disrupt air travel, early on Wednesday morning.
But ultimately that plan and the outage led to massive flight delays and an unprecedented order to stop all aircraft departures nationwide.
The computer system that failed was the central database for all NOTAMs (Notice to Air Missions) nationwide. Those notices advise pilots of issues along their route and at their destination. It has a backup, which officials switched to when problems with the main system emerged, according to the source.
FAA officials told reporters early Wednesday that the issues developed in the 3 p.m. ET hour on Tuesday.
Officials ultimately found a corrupt file in the main NOTAM system, the source told CNN. A corrupt file was also found in the backup system.
In the overnight hours of Tuesday into Wednesday, FAA officials decided to shut down and reboot the main NOTAM system — a significant decision, because the reboot can take about 90 minutes, according to the source.
They decided to perform the reboot early Wednesday, before air traffic began flying on the East Coast, to minimize disruption to flights.
“They thought they’d be ahead of the rush,” the source said.
During this early morning process, the FAA told reporters that the system was “beginning to come back online,” but said it would take time to resolve.
The system, according to the source, “did come back up, but it wasn’t completely pushing out the pertinent information that it needed for safe flight, and it appeared that it was taking longer to do that.”
That’s when the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop at around 7:30 a.m. ET, halting all domestic departures.
Aircraft in line for takeoff were held before entering runways. Flights already in the air were advised verbally of the safety notices by air traffic controllers, who keep a static electronic or paper record at their desks of the active notices.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg ordered an after-action review and also said there was “no direct evidence or indication” that the issue was a cyberattack.
The source said the NOTAM system is an example of aging infrastructure due for an overhaul.
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Source: A corrupt file led to the FAA ground stoppage. It was also found in the backup system | CNN Travel

Agreed, the NOTAM system (which stood for NOtice To AirMen until this article) is definitely ancient and in dire need of a refresh.

3 Native Americans ask Apache foundation to change name, hope to cancel a culture bigger than Native Americans have ever been

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Natives in Tech, a US-based non-profit organization, has called upon the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) to change its name, out of respect for indigenous American peoples and to live up to its own code of conduct.

In a blog post, Natives in Tech members Adam Recvlohe, Holly Grimm, and Desiree Kane have accused the ASF of appropriating Indigenous culture for branding purposes.

Citing ASF founding member Brian Behlendorf’s description in the documentary “Trillions and Trillions Served” of how he wanted something more romantic than a tech term like “spider” and came up with “Apache” after seeing a documentary about Geronimo, the group said:

This frankly outdated spaghetti-Western ‘romantic’ presentation of a living and vibrant community as dead and gone in order to build a technology company ‘for the greater good’ is as ignorant as it is offensive.

(We could have sworn Apache stood for a patchy web server at one point…)

The aggrieved trio challenged the ASF to make good on its code of conduct commitment to “be careful in the words that [they] choose” by choosing a new name. The group took issue with what they said was the suggestion that the Apache tribe exists only in a past historical context, citing eight federally recognized Native American tribes that bear the name.

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Source: Native Americans ask Apache foundation to change name • The Register

Most of the world wide web runs on servers running Apache software. I’d say the tech apache outnumbers the Native American Apaches significantly and these guys are pulling on the tails of the  Apache foundation to gather attention to their cause of putting themselves into the news.

CNET Is Quietly Publishing Articles Generated By AI, curated by journalists

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CNET, a massively popular tech news outlet, has been quietly employing the help of “automation technology” — a stylistic euphemism for AI — on a new wave of financial explainer articles, seemingly starting around November of last year.

In the absence of any formal announcement or coverage, it appears that this was first spotted by online marketer Gael Breton in a tweet on Wednesday.

The articles are published under the unassuming appellation of “CNET Money Staff,” and encompass topics like “Should You Break an Early CD for a Better Rate?” or “What is Zelle and How Does It Work?”

That byline obviously does not paint the full picture, and so your average reader visiting the site likely would have no idea that what they’re reading is AI-generated. It’s only when you click on “CNET Money Staff,” that the actual “authorship” is revealed.

“This article was generated using automation technology,” reads a dropdown description, “and thoroughly edited and fact-checked by an editor on our editorial staff.”

Since the program began, CNET has put out around 73 AI-generated articles. That’s not a whole lot for a site that big, and absent an official announcement of the program, it appears leadership is trying to keep the experiment as lowkey as possible. CNET did not respond to questions about the AI-generated articles.

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Based on Breton’s observations, though, some of the articles appear to be pulling in large amounts of traffic

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But AI usage is not limited to those kinds of bottom of the barrel outlets. Even the prestigious news agency The Associated Press has been using AI since 2015 to automatically write thousands and thousands of earnings reports. The AP has even proudly proclaimed itself as “one of the first news organizations to leverage artificial intelligence.”

It’s worth noting, however, that the AP‘s auto-generated material appears to be essentially filling in blanks in predetermined formats, whereas the more sophisticated verbiage of CNET‘s publications suggests that it’s using something more akin to OpenAI’s GPT-3.

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Source: CNET Is Quietly Publishing Entire Articles Generated By AI

The source article is the usual fearmongering against AI and you must check / care if it was written by a human, but to me it seems that this is a good way of partnering current AI with humans to create good content.