Still Half Way There

We have been tracking weekly new claims for unemployment benefits in California as an index of the labor market and general economy. For a long time, we were stuck at around 60,000 when 40,000 would be more like normal. We seem now (as of the end of the week ending Feb. 12) to be about half way towards normal, about the same as last week. California still has a higher-than-average unemployment rate.

As always, the weekly data are at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.

We are catching up with the Regents' Health Services Committee which had an off-cycle meeting last Wednesday. The public comment period consisted of anti-vaccine and antiabortion remarks. UC president Drake then spoke about the pandemic and other matters. EVP Carrie Byington also spoke about the pandemic. In answer to a question she said she expected that booster shots would be annual, not more frequently. Whether UC campuses will require such boosters was not discussed.

UC-Irvine's health center was reviewed and the discussion then turned to student counseling. Delays in appointments were part of the discussion. It was said that the speed of appointments is determined by a triage method whereby more serious cases such as potential suicides are given priority.

As always, we preserve the recordings of meetings indefinitely since the Regents - for no apparent reason - delete them after one year. You can see this meeting at:

https://archive.org/details/regents-health-services-committee-2-16-22.

Congressional Representative Ted Lieu, whose district includes UCLA, recently announced views that may disturb medical researchers on campus:

REPS LIEU AND MACE LEAD BIPARTISAN LETTER OPPOSING ANIMAL TESTING FUNDED BY NIH

February 15, 2022 Press Release

WASHINGTON - Last week, Congressman Ted W. Lieu (D-Los Angeles County) and Congresswoman Nancy Mace (R-SC) led a bipartisan group of lawmakers in calling for the National Institutes of Health to discontinue animal experiments and find alternatives to animal testing. Congressman Lieu and the seven other Members asked the NIH to conduct a systematic review of animal-based research to determine other humane ways to conduct vital research.

In the letter, the Members write:

Dear Dr. Tabak,

Thank you for your service to our nation’s health. As Members of Congress, we are concerned the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is placing undue priority on funding experiments on animals that have failed to lead to treatments, vaccines, and cures for human diseases. NIH’s own startling statistic shows that 95% of new drugs fail in human trials and 90% of basic research, much of it involving animal models, fails to lead to human therapies. Moreover, in certain areas of research, the failure rates for new drugs are even higher: Alzheimer’s disease (99.6%), sepsis (100%), and stroke (100%).

On September 16, in a monumental move for scientific research, motivated largely by the scientific failings of animal models, the European Parliament passed a resolution calling on the European Commission to create an action plan to end all experiments on animals. The resolution was proposed by members of Parliament (MEPs) who reviewed PETA’s Research Modernization Deal and calls for accelerating scientific innovation without the use of animals in research, regulatory testing, and education. The MEPs have directed the European Commission to work with scientists, including scientists from animal protection organizations, to accomplish this. Currently, the U.S. and NIH have no such

action plan.

The lack of a firm commitment to modernizing research puts the U.S. at risk of losing its role as the world leader in biomedical research and deflects funding from research that could address and alleviate some of the world’s most deadly diseases.

We ask that you direct the NIH to begin to address these issues by immediately taking the following actions:

Cease funding of new projects involving animals for areas of disease research where there is ample evidence of poor translation from animal models to humans.

Conduct thorough systematic scientific reviews of the utility of animal-based research in all remaining disease and research areas in order to identify additional areas in which the use of animals can be immediately ended.

Prioritize funding for research that uses non-animal, human-relevant research methods, including preventative and interventional research involving human participants.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Source: https://lieu.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/reps-lieu-and-mace-leadbipartisan-letter-opposing-animal-testing-funded.

We are again catching up with an off-cycle meeting of the Regents, this time the Special Committee on Innovation Transfer & Entrepreneurship: 2-17-2022. There were no public comments at this session, probably because the Health Services Committee, which often meets off-cycle, had its public comments the day before. The Special Committee is focused on commercialization of intellectual property generated at UC.

There was much discussion of the existing patent tracking system which is being devolved to the campus level. And much discussion of complicated legal and financial arrangements for having UC "participate" in an equity sense in start-up companies' use of UC intellectual property. It seems to be assumed that it is better for UC to participate rather than simply cash out valuable IT. It might be useful to have some articulate why it is better as a general rule. Obviously, you can always tell success stories. But presumably there are failures, too. There were some hints in the discussion that start-ups generally don't have the cash, or access to the cash, to buy IT but can offer participation. Still, it wouldn't hurt to look at this issue more critically.

You can see the meeting at https://archive.org/details/regents-special-committee-oninnovation-transfer-and-entrepreneurship-2-17-22.