February 12, 2026
Briefly
- The US FDA will not even review the application for Moderna’s new flu vaccine. The FDA is very careful to give itself the flexibility to do this: if they say supportive things about your trial design today there is no legal guarantee that they can’t change their minds six times before breakfast. However, they are usually reluctant to make radical changes in their advice and, for example, typically don’t require placebo controls when an existing treatment works and is already widely recommended.
- Hayden Donnell at the Spinoff did a deeply felt post on the scale of the Moa Point sewage discharges, with comparisons to everyday life. I want to quote one: “ If you started now, it would take you 2,535 years, 15 days, 13 hours, and 20 minutes of non-stop shitting to produce as much waste as the Moa Point plant is expelling onto schools of unsuspecting fish every day. From this we can deduce with a little additional calculation that the roughly 200,000 people living in Wellington City would take about four and half days to produce one day of the Moa Point poop. Even allowing for politicians, that’s a lot of effort. The problem, of course, is dilution: a toilet flush is about 10 litres rather than the 0.1 litres the Spinoff is allowing for, and there may well be further dilution downstream.
- A set of six posts about colour (or perhaps ‘color’) from NASA
- The American Statistical Association is taking nominations for its “Excellence in Statistical Reporting” award, due March 1st.
- “And it turned out that the previous gender discrimination policy had been nothing like discriminatory enough; women were much safer drivers, and hadn’t previously been getting anything like enough credit for it.” Dan Davies’s excellent “Back of Mind” newsletter.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »