XPost: alt.tv.pol-incorrect, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.politics.usa
XPost: sci.med.diseases

Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the media have spilled
barrels of ink over mistakes by the federal government. We’ve heard
endlessly about the failure to quickly ramp up testing, the confusion
over mask-wearing and the debates over proper lockdown policy. But when
the history of this time is written, the fundamental mistake made by
the United States government won’t be rhetorical excesses by the
president or conflicting public health advice. It will be the same
mistake the government always makes: trusting the bureaucracy.

We now know that the miraculous Moderna vaccine for COVID-19 had been
designed by Jan. 13, 2020. That was just two days after the sequencing
of the virus had been made public. As David Wallace-Wells writes for
New York magazine, “the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend.
... By the time the first American death was announced a month later,
the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial.” Meanwhile, for six weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci assured Americans that
there was little to worry about with COVID-19.

Fast-forward to the end of 2021. Hundreds of thousands of Americans
have died. Tens of thousands of Americans continue to die every week.
The Food and Drug Administration has still not cleared the Oxford-
AstraZeneca vaccine, which costs a fraction of the other vaccines
(about $4 per dose, as opposed to $15 to $25 per dose for Moderna’s
vaccine or $20 per dose for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine). The FDA
approval process cost us critical months, with thousands of Americans
dying each day. As Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University told me
this week, “Safety is their eternal excuse. They are entirely a broken
federal bureaucracy ... Why did we not have a combined Phase I-Phase II clinical trial for these vaccines?”

This is an excellent question, of course. Phase I trials involve small
numbers of participants, who are then monitored. Phase II trials
involve larger numbers. Huge numbers of Americans would have
volunteered for a combined Phase I-Phase II trial. And even after we
knew the vaccines were effective, the FDA delayed. Data was collected
by late October that suggested Phase II/?III trials had been
successful. The FDA quickly requested more results, which it did not
receive until November. It then took until Dec. 11 for the FDA to issue emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine. The Moderna vaccine
wasn’t cleared until Dec. 18, nearly a year after it had first been
produced.

The disgrace continues. The government continues to hold back secondary
doses of the vaccine, despite the fact that the first doses provide a significant effect. As Dr. Makary says, “We’re in a war. The first dose
gives immunity that may be as high as 80 to 90 percent protection, and
we can probably give half the dose, as Dr. Moncef Slaoui suggested ...
We can quadruple our supply overnight.”

Meanwhile, states continue to be confused by the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention guidance on how to tranche out the vaccines. It
took until nine days after the FDA authorized the Pfizer vaccine for
the CDC to release its recommendations. Those recommendations were
still complex and confusing and often rife with self-defeating
standards — even though it was perfectly obvious from the start that
the solution ought to be based on age.

Americans have relied on the government — a government supposedly
comprised of well-meaning experts — to get us through a pandemic. The government not only failed with conflicting information and incoherent
lockdown policy but also actively obstructed the chief mechanism for
ending the pandemic thanks to bureaucratic bloat. If Americans’
takeaway from the COVID-19 pandemic is that centralized government is
the all-purpose solution, they’re taking precisely the lesson most
likely to end in mass death in the future.

--
Trump won.

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