Vaccine Risk Shift to Taxpayers

Context

When drug makers ramp up drug or vaccine production before clinical trials and data analyses are complete, it is called “at risk” production. The risk lies in the FDA’s refusal to approve the drug or vaccine on safety and/or efficacy grounds. All drug and vaccine production is usually costly, so the risk tends to be high. Companies tend to hesitate to produce at risk unless they are confident about their safety and efficacy data. The upside of at risk production is that once FDA approval is received, product sales can occur almost immediately after approval. Each day of sales protected by either market exclusivity or patents is precious. Each day can be worth millions in profit to a company.

Risk shift

The Washington Post reports that under a federal government effort, called “Operation Warp Speed”, taxpayers will assume the risk of at risk production of Covid-19 vaccine. That seems like a dumb name. Maybe the president dictated it. It sounds like him. Whatever.

Operation ludicrous speed

The downside is that taxpayers will have to pay the cost of at risk production if the vaccine fails to be sufficiently safe or effective. The upside is that if a vaccine does get FDA marketing approval, it can be at least fairly widely available within a few weeks. The goal of the effort is to have a vaccine publicly available by January of 2021. If that timeline pans out, it would be an amazing research and production achievement in such a short time.

The risk shift to taxpayers illustrates a key aspect of America’s for-profit healthcare system. Namely, it is a for-profit industry. Companies will not take risks that do not pass muster with internal company reviews, even if the risk could save many lives. Taking excessive risk can open a company and its executives up to shareholder lawsuits. Shareholders hold shares to make money, not to make people safe. That is the cold, hard reality of American healthcare. Profit, not service to the public interest, is the overwhelming moral imperative of capitalism.

Incoherent, self-serving drivel from our endlessly blame-shifting Blitherer-in-Chief

Naturally, the president chimed in. WaPo writes:

“President Trump said it is not too optimistic to try to produce roughly 300 million doses of vaccine in eight months, enough for the entire country.

‘No, I’m not overpromising. I don’t know who said it, but whatever the maximum is, whatever you can humanly do, we’re going to have. And we hope we’re going to come up with a good vaccine,’ the president said at the White House.

He added that ‘we’re going to fast-track it like you’ve never seen before, if we come up with a vaccine.’

Asked who is in charge of the effort, Trump said he is. 

‘I think probably, more than anything, I’m in charge. And I’m the one that gets blamed. And I get blamed anyway,’ Trump said.”

“I don’t know who said it.” That pretty much sums up the president’s grasp of things like science, the Covid-19 pandemic and reality in general.

“I think probably, more than anything, I’m in charge.” Probably in charge? Har, har, har! He will claim to be in charge if the effort works. But it will be the fault of Obama, Hillary’s Benghazigate and/or emailgate or something like that if it fails.

Sarcasm: Russia, if you’re listening, please find the missing emails. That is where Covid-19 came from and the vaccine recipe is in there too. Ludicrous speed on that hacking, please.

The fact that the president waited this long to jump to warp speed does mean he will be blamed for the needless delay because the delay was needless and he should be blamed. Why do this now and not three or four months ago? That inexcusable incompetence-driven delay is on the president, not Barak, Hillary, Pelosi, Schumer, the New York Times hidden emails or anything or anyone else.

Even at this very late date, the president clearly does not grasp the scope or gravity of what America is facing right now. He is amazingly clueless.

A sincere wish for the future

Maybe one day, the news won’t be so endlessly bad and idiotic. Maybe one day American politics will return to some reasonable degree of coherence and some reasonable grounding in facts, sound reason and transparent accountability. I do not know when that day will be, but I hope it is very soon.

‘MOST PEOPLE JUST DON’T THINK,’ SAYS SELF-HELP GURU JESSE ELDER AS HE FILMED HIMSELF WALKING GARBERVILLE’S MAIN STREET YESTERDAY

Texas man, Jesse Elder, self-described “Millionaire Mentor, an Improv Philosopher, former MMA fighter turned entrepreneur, and also the author of The Upgraded Life”, rolled through Garberville yesterday, walking and filming himself giving a monologue on critical thinking.

Elder, whose website says “his popular Mind Vitamin videos, online courses, events, and private coaching [teach] others how to create their own success and fulfillment, reclaim their personal freedom, and master their reality,” argues in the video that confusion is key to critical thinking as it allows one to ask the right questions.

With the empty streets of the tiny Southern Humboldt town lit by sunset, the self-help guru explained to viewers that he is traveling through on his way towards Seattle.  Elder is apparently unworried about catching COVID-19. He says he’s “wearing his mask on the inside in the form of a wolverine-like immune system.”

He adds that if anyone is concerned about “catching some sort of thing” from him as he reads “the look of fear on their face,” he alters his trajectory to stay more than six feet away from them.

Video  was filmed in Garberville by Elder and posted on Facebook. Unfortunately, they may make it difficult for some to view.

To view:

https://kymkemp.com/2020/04/29/most-people-just-dont-think-says-self-help-guru-jesse-elder-as-he-filmed-himself-walking-garbervilles-main-street-yesterday/

The Continuing Failure of the Mainstream Media

CONTEXT

Before the 2016 election, the broadcast media gave the president more far air time than other candidates. An estimate the New York Time published in March 2016 was that the free air time was worth about $1.9 billion to the president's campaign.

NPR's failure

NPR's Morning Edition program broadcast a 4-minute segment on how the Trump campaign is raising money for the 2020 elections. It is a fluff piece. It is very supportive of how the president is harvesting cash from the public for his campaign. The segment sounded like an advertisement paid for by the president's re-election campaign.

There was no mention of Biden or his campaign anywhere in today's Morning Edition program.

I found the segment to be highly offensive. I wrote to NPR complaining about supporting the president's re-election without also supporting Biden's election campaign with equal air time and an equal tone of approval.




Questions: Am I overreacting and this piece isn't anything of importance to the president's re-election? Should Biden be given equal airtime for every second that NPR and other broadcast sources give to the president?

Coronavirus Update 9

Some states are going to start reopening their economies within the next few days and weeks. That is coming despite a persistent inability to do large scale testing in the US. Reopening has already started in some places such as Georgia and Alaska. Some states never issued stay-at-home orders and are under various degrees of business and health care closures. Despite assertions from some governors that it is safe to begin to reopen, there is no way to know that without large scale testing. In essence, each state will be a separate experiment in how the Covid-19 pandemic will play out.

Absent testing data, it will be basically impossible to follow the course of the infection in detail. The number of infections and deaths could increase in coming weeks. The president continues to reject responsibility for spearheading and coordinating testing efforts. The New York Times commented: “A White House document makes clear that the states are still primarily responsible for testing and that Washington is only the ‘supplier of last resort.’” Clearly, the president has rejected a major role for a federal government testing effort, despite being the only source of national authority for coordination efforts. That level of incompetence and stupidity is incomprehensible.

The new set of symptoms

The CDC announced that it now considers nine symptoms to be common to most Covid-19 infections. Previously, three symptomes were considered dominant, i.e., shortness of breath, cough and fever. The list now also includes chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and new loss of taste or smell. These nine symptoms most commonly appear at two to 14 days after exposure to the virus. This nw listing of overt symptoms is an astonishing change in how the disease is perceived by the CDC. Why it took this long to simply see what the dominant symptoms are suggests that there is a profound problem or dysfunction in the CDC. This revelation comes weeks after hundreds of thousands of cases have been observed.

My guess is that the president has neutered the CDC for his personal political reasons. Maybe the president has muzzled the experts. Maybe he put incompetent loyalists in charge. Whatever the reasons, it is very hard to understand why it has taken this long to simply characterize the main symptoms of the disease, except for attributing it to factors such as the president's typical gross incompetence, his blatant dereliction of his duties, concern for his own re-election, and/or just plain corruption.

People still trust Trump

Reuters reports that an astounding 47% of Americans report that they are “very” or “somewhat” likely to follow recommendations the president makes about the virus. Although that is a 15% decrease from a poll at the end of March, it is arguably staggeringly high in view of how poorly the president has performed so far. The poll did indicate that 08% of democrats and republicans will not take the president's advice to inject themselves with bleach or other disinfectants. At least that sliver of reality appears to have sunk in with Americans. Reuters comments that the president’s popularity remains stable: “Overall, Trump’s overall popularity has not changed much over the past week. Forty-three percent of Americans said they approve of his overall job performance, and the same number also approve of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Where we are and where we are going

Given America’s feeble, failed federal response to Covid-19, the imminent reopening of states and our continuing inability to do adequate testing, it now appears reasonable to speculate that the virus is going to spread through almost the entire US population. Isolated pockets of people may avoid the disease, but most of the US population seems destined to develop herd immunity on its own whether we want to get immunity that way or not. That will probably happen before a widespread antiviral treatment or vaccine becomes available. It also assumes that once people recover from an infection, they will have protective immunity. That is an open question at the moment, but it is reasonable to think that that protective immunity probably will result in most people who survive the infection.

Some evidence indicates that an antiviral drug now in testing, remdesivir, may be somewhat helpful if given fairly early in the course of the infection. That is good news, but it needs to be confirmed. Also of concern is whether the company can ramp up to large scale production if the drug does prove to be useful. Also, a team in England is optimistic that an effective vaccine they are developing can be available by September of this year. If that comes to pass, it would about as close to a medical miracle as humans can muster in such a short time.

That is something no longer possible from the US government. It is too late for that.