Jan 22, 2021Liked by Claire Berlinski, Rachel motte
“ The solution is simple. The United States must finance and coordinate vaccination programs around the world. The implementation will be complicated, which is precisely why there must be a single coordinating power.”
Finance, maybe. Coordinate, think about that some more. In the US, fifty states are conducting fifty experiments to see how vax rollout should work. Some are doing fine. Others not so well. What if the “single coordinating power” gets it wrong?
Here’s how not to do it, as reported to me by a relative who got shot yesterday in the Bronx NY. (Vaccine shot, not street violence, the other epidemic).
The community health center they visited requires appointments. They schedule 12 appointments for “qualified” people in a single time block apparently because there are 12 doses of vaccine in each package. They also allow walk-ins if someone doesn’t keep their appointment.
To prevent waste of vaccine doses they won’t thaw a vial of vaccine unless they are certain they can use it all. When they have 12 people present — in the room — they proceed. If they don’t have 12 people present, they stop the process until they can find enough people to use all 12 doses.
Imagine what happens if it takes a while to find the 12th person and someone who has made an appointment (and is present) has to go to work. Now they need to find someone to fill that slot as well.
That’s how my relative got vaccinated. Someone who made an appointment didn’t show up. Some one who was waiting for their shot called my relative and told them to come running. Those waiting couldn’t be vaccinated until there were 12 people in the room. An hour later my relative arrived with two other people in tow. They arrived just before closing and got the vaccine.
And that’s the other thing. The health center closed for the day at 5:00 pm. They keep normal 9 to 5 hours....even during an emergency.
Claire, careful what you wish for. The “central coordinating power” in NYC (or state?) needs to go back to the drawing board. The system they designed isn’t working - fast enough.
It absolutely shocks (but at the same time not really) and disgusts me that vaccines are only being administered during normal clinic hours. I hesitate to even ask, but are they are least doing it 7 days a week?
Vaccines should be administered everywhere as fast as they're coming in. If that means emergency measures and funding to take on extra staff so vaccination centers can be open 24 hours as long as they have vaccines to use then it should be done.
In Germany they're taking a leisurely Sunday off. And 24-hour vaccination centers in France? C'est à rigoler. There is something wrong with the way the West is understanding the nature of this emergency, and I don't get what it is. Is it that the dead haven't been stacked like cordwood in footballs stadiums for everyone to see? Is it that the 3,000 who died on September 11 form some kind of upper limit to the amount of dead the human mind can really understand, after which it's all "a lot?" The global death toll is already incalculably much higher, with absolutely no end in sight until everyone is vaccinated. The long-term economic and political consequences of this will be so much more grave. Perhaps this only seems obvious to people who have a very particular temperament? To people who naturally think in numbers and exponents? I just don't get it. I growingly think the West's failure to grasp the gravity to this crisis will be understood, by historians, to mark the end of the Western era that began in the 15th century with the age of exploration. The year 2020 will be commonly known as the end of the Western era and the beginning of the Chinese era. All of our descendents will live in a Chinese world, for better or worse. This is what's at stake. And no one really seems to understand this. Everyone is too busy comparing their own abysmal performance to other Western countries and assuring themselves that it's perfectly normal. It's hot. It's a Holocaust that has revealed our societies to be morally bankrupt.
Yes. Sadly, the death of the West is death by suicide. The obituary will read that the weapon of self-immolation was wielded by a credulous, self-loathing, hypereducated elite.
Jan 21, 2021Liked by Claire Berlinski, Rachel motte
Learned a lot here! Definitely interesting to learn more about Russia and China's vaccines. Tying back to your previous pieces on China, hoping Biden agrees with you and makes the right call in his foreign policy. It's going to be essential to show leadership here. We have a moral duty to resist Chinese hegemony so long as China is controlled by the CCP, which has proven its willingness to enslave and torture its own citizens, and as we see here, subject foreign populations to hastily-developed vaccines that they don't trust to use on their Han majority.
Jan 21, 2021Liked by Claire Berlinski, Rachel motte
Very informative. I think you’re a little too pessimistic about the adenovirus-vector vaccines. We will hear about the J&J vaccine any day now; if it’s effective at one dose it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. The AZ vaccine is (as of now a two dose vaccine). Sadly, AZ screwed up their Phase III trial so no one really knows what the most efficacious first dose is.
It is true that the adenovirus vector can probably only be given once, but depending on the durability of protection this might not be a problem. If it protects for a decade or more (which is possible but not certain) there’s no need to worry about whether the vector can only be administered once.
Another advantage to the adenovirus vaccines is that long term (or semi long term) safety data is available. While the mRNA vaccines are literally brand new, J&J uses the exact same technology in its Covid vaccine that it uses in its Ebola vaccine. Around 1 million J&J Ebola vaccines have been delivered in Africa with practically no safety issues. The mRNA vaccines are almost certainly safe, but it’s hard to know for sure.
There’s a third vaccine technology that wasn’t mentioned (unless I missed it)-the protein based vaccines. Novavax has one and so does Sanofi (working in partnership with GSK). Basically they provide immunity by exposing the immune system to synthetically manufactured spike protein. These vaccines tend to be weaker so they are paired with chemicals called adjuvants which make the immune system hyper vigilant. The new Shingles vaccine (Shingrix) is this type of vaccine.
Mutation of the virus is something to worry about but not panic about. Most (not all) produce immunity not by priming the immune system to recognize the entire spike protein but by priming the immune system to recognize a part of the spike protein called the receptor binding domain (the part of spike protein which chemically attached itself to the ACE2 receptor found ubiquitously on cells in the human lung, nasal passages and bowel). The receptor binding domain is probably somewhat less likely to mutate.
What regulatory agencies have gotten wrong is the emphasis on development of symptomatic disease as the primary end point in the trials. I think it makes much more sense to focus on whether the vaccines prevent severe disease, hospitalization or death. After all, if the vaccines turn a deadly disease into the sniffles, that would be pretty good.
Claire is right; the United States is ideally suited to vaccinating the world. In fact our country has played the most important role in vaccine development. While Claire can’t bring herself to admit it, the Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed was a brilliant and unparalleled success. Most (not Pfizer) companies in the West with the most promising vaccines took warp speed money.
It also pays to remember that the only reason that the world is blessed with a viable and dynamic pharmaceutical and biotech industry is because American patients pay almost all the freight for R&D. Almost every successful pharmaceutical company in the world undertakes the remarkably risky research needed to produce new medicines because most of their profit comes from prices paid by Americans. If Pharma ha to rely on drug prices paid by Europeans, Canadians, Australians and all the nations in Asia, the business would not be profitable enough to justify the risks. In this sense, Claire, Americans are already footing the Bill for almost all Covid vaccine discovery efforts.
Last year, the House of Representatives passed a Bill which would have severely restricted drug prices. Speaker Pelosi was a fierce advocate of the Bill. In the Senate, a less onerous but still destructive Bill was introduced.
This was one case where gridlock proved to be a great thing. Does anyone think we would have gotten Covid vaccines (not to mention new antibody treatments) so rapidly if the Pharmaceutical industry had tens of billions of dollars in reduced revenues?
As for getting shots in the arm, most American States have failed miserably. So have all European nations (with the possible exception of the UK). The only country getting it right is Israel. As of today, Israel is offering vaccines to citizens aged 40 and up. Maybe our leaders should call Benjamin Netanyahu for advice.
I think a lot of your points are good, and make the same essential argument made in the article--that we should use all the vaccine tools in our medical bag that we have. Except maybe the Russian one. I'll be honest, not sure if I'd get that even if the choice was that or nothing. I would however, get any of the three Chinese vaccines; but I'd prefer one from Moderna, Pfizer, or AZ/Oxford.
In terms Operation Warp Speed, I think the Trump Administration really does deserve kudos for that. They've handled many other aspects of this pandemic very poorly, but that particular one, A+. There wasn't really a natural place for it in the article however. It may or may not show up in a future one, we'll see.
Owen, It’s all hypothetical, but the vaccinologists I’ve spoken to tell me that they have more confidence in the Sputnik vaccine than Sinovac’s dead virus vaccine. But they don’t have much faith in either.
I have seen it suggested that Israel’s success with its vaccination roll out is because it’s a small country with a relatively centralized health care system. Actually in population Israel is only slightly smaller than Belgium, around the same size as Greece, Hungary and Austria and larger than Ireland, Denmark, Slovenia or Bulgaria. Israel leaves these nations in the dust when it comes to vaccines administered.
One question our cosmopolitan globalist friends may want to think about is whether there’s something in the nature of large governmental bureaucracies (like the EU) which render them less nimble and thus less effective at administering vaccines.
In the United States we suffer from bureaucratic sclerosis at both the Federal and the State levels. While private sector experts delivered in record time a technological achievement (the vaccine) almost unprecedented since the moon landing government experts (who work for government agencies or advise these agencies from their perch at universities) have delivered failure after failure. The calamity with vaccine administration was preceded first by the failure to approve reliable Covid testing to the debacle in recommending the wearing of masks. These failures were not the fault of politicians of either party; they were failures of the expert class that Government relies on, especially public health experts.
What Israel did was administer vaccines strictly by age group (with allowances made for comorbidities). Extra doses when available were given first come first serve regardless of age.
Compare this with the the problematic American roll out. Here the idea was to vaccinate frontline health care workers and first responders before anyone else regardless of age. This might have made sense last March; it no longer does. Adequate supplies of PPP and current infection control techniques means these workers actually have a relatively low risk, not a high risk, of contracting Covid compared to the background population.
Then there was the laudable desire to vaccinate minority populations who had born the brunt of Covid, especially in urban centers. Sadly, this approach has turned into a tragedy for these minority populations.
Many states (including New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, California and others) followed recommendations formulated by CDC’s “expert” academic advisors to vaccinate grocery store cashiers before patients with severe comorbidities.
That means a 20 year old African American cashier will get vaccinated before her 63 year old grandfather suffering from poorly controlled Type II diabetes (which is epidemic in older African American people). The 20 year old has virtually no chance of dying from Covid and a very low chance of getting severe disease. Her grandfather, who may have had a leg amputated, probably has protein in his urine (a sign of impending kidney disease) and also probably has coronary artery disease can’t get a vaccine for months after his granddaughter because he doesn’t qualify. That grandfather probably is 100 times more likely to die of Covid than his granddaughter. For reasons I find bewildering, our academic experts don’t seem to care.
But it’s worse than that. The 20 year old grocery cashier who gets her second vaccine will be asymptomatic if she’s exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Remember, we don’t know if the vaccines provide sterilizing immunity. What’s the result? The vaccinated young cashier won’t know that she’s harboring the virus. Because she doesn’t feel sick, she may not hesitate to go visit her grandfather. It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine the tragic results.
Israel did it right; the United States is doing it tragically wrong. The number of unnecessary deaths resulting from the stupidity of our brilliant expert overlords is truly staggering.
We're soon going to run a piece from one of our writers in Israel, David Hazony, explaining exactly why Israel has been so successful. It's *very* interesting. Unfortunately, it will take a bit of time because he is, alas, recovering from Covid19 himself. (Get well soon, David!)
Before WigWam points out the incompetence of the Massachusetts govt I want to point out the friggin vaccine was invented in Massachusetts NOT Israel or West Virginia.
You’re right. Moderna is headquartered in the Boston area. It’s founder is on the faculty of MIT. The hedge fund that provided most of the initial funding for the mRNA technology is located in Boston. MIT will reap a windfall off its royalties for the polymer capsule that encases the mRNA (for both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine). It’s not called MIT for nothing-it’s in Massachusetts too.
All this makes it doubly ironic that the good citizens of Massachusetts have almost no access (so far) to Moderna’s vaccine. How far is Massachusetts General Hospital (perhaps the best hospital in the world) from Kendall Square? By my reckoning it’s around two miles (a short ten minute ride on the Red Line). Yet MGH is still forbidden from dispensing the vaccine to the general public.
The Joslin Diabetes Center is in “the Medical Area.” That’s no more than five miles from where the Moderna vaccine was developed. Joslin treats thousands of Type II diabetics who are at enormous risk from Covid. Yet Joslin is still precluded from administering vaccine to elderly diabetic patients who will fare very poorly with Covid if they get it.
How far is the Dana Farber Cancer Center from the home of the MIT labs in Kendall Square where the vaccine technology was perfected? It can’t be more that five or six miles. Yet Dana Farber is prevented by the State of Massachusetts from administering the Moderna Vaccine to 75 year old patients with metastatic breast cancer or 70 year old patients with metastatic prostate cancer.
You know who can get the Moderna Vaccine in Massachusetts right now? A 25 year old medical resident can. A 30 year old podiatrist can. An 18 year old cashier can. The risk of serious disease or death if these folks get Covid is near zero. How can this policy make sense?
Tim, there are a lot of really smart people in Massachusetts. Our country owes a lot the the experts who work in Boston’s Pharma and Biotech communities.
What’s really sad is that the people calling the shots in State Government are criminally negligent. Also, they’re stupid.
To be fair I have not really been paying that much attention as to who is eligible for getting the vaccine as I myself will be at the end of the line. Just to give a clearer geographic picture the MA State House(where these decisions are being made) is more like a 5 minute subway ride from MIT while MGH is more like 2 minutes. The CEO of Moderna almost lives across the street from the State House in Beacon Hill and he can literally walk(a longish walk) to work. My only explanation is the MA state govt at the highest level(i.e. the governor called the CEO of Moderna) and tried to deal directly with them outside of the US Federal govts process and was turned down by Moderna(on the basis of their contract with the Federal govt) and from this point afterwards has simply pinned the blame of the Feds for any messups.
I just found that several key people in charge of vaccine distribution in Massachusetts state government have just been hired by Biden to work in Washington in addition to the fact that the mayor of Boston(who has a tangential role in vaccination issues) has been nominated as Biden's Labor secretary so you can interpret this as you want.
One thing I can tell you is if you receive the Moderna vaccine in Massachusetts or New Hampshire right the vaccine is actually being shipped from the two production facilities in MA and NH to Mississippi first then shipped "back" to MA and NH for patients receiving them in these two areas. This does not at all seem to be a smart logistical choice. In particular the facility in New Hampshire Moderna is using is on the grounds of a former Air Force base that still has an very long/large active runway and a NH Air National Guard base. It seems to be that some type of distribution hub should be setup there and then send the vaccines manufactured at Pease/Portsmouth, NH via air or truck depending on the distance of the distributors from New Hampshire.
The problem is not large bureaucratic governments per se--China has done brilliantly at containing the virus--but large, *stupid* bureaucratic governments. The diagnosis--"big government is always bad"--does not seem correct to me. Nothing but a big government can handle certain tasks, among them warfare and a vaccination campaign on this scale. Israel's vaccination campaign certainly wasn't a private-sector accomplishment. But Israel's bureaucracy is more competent than other Western bureaucracies. The incompetence of our governments, not their size, is the problem.
Here’s something for those with a globalist perspective to reflect on. As of two days ago, the UK had administered 8 times as many vaccine doses per capita as the EU as a whole.
British regulators approved the mRNA vaccines in record time; the EU Medicines Agency dawdled. The UK has already approved the AZ adenovirus vaccine; the European Medicines Agency hasn’t (nor has the FDA) even though it is clearly safe and efficacious (at least to some degree).
As much as cosmopolitan globalists may detest Brexit, when it comes to Covid at least, there are now thousands of British citizens who have been vaccinated and thus won’t get sick or die because the UK exited the EU in the Nick of time.
But for Brexit, it is likely that when it comes to vaccination, the UK would be performing as horribly as the rest of Europe.
Yes, and that alone is sufficient to justify Brexit, but the larger picture is comprehensive Western failure--and Britain has done only marginally better. The ramifications of this just don't seem to be dawning on people.
Martin Jacques is a lifelong communist who is now almost an unofficial spokesman for the CCP. He's also a very intelligent and serious scholar. What he says in this video is correct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoBTenUxUWY&feature=youtu.be
2020 was a watershed year and a test of liberal democracy's ability to cope with a massive and unforeseen crisis. Liberal democracy failed. I don't quite understand why Westerners don't grasp the significance of this. Brexit v. Remain is a trivial debate; the debate is now liberal democracy versus socialism with Chinese characteristics. The West's failure has been to liberal democracy what Chernobyl was to Soviet communism--only vastly, vastly more damaging and consequential.
If you think that alone justifies Brexit your an idiot. Anyways the actual death rate from Covid-19 is still much higher in the UK than in the rest of the EU except perhaps Sweden. What really bothers from the perspective of someone like myself who is 37 is there is this huge clique of people(What I call the 1989 generation) starting in the early 50's like Claire and I suspect like WigWam who pray every night at the alter of Margaret Thatcher who in my opinion as history has shown was a total loser as Donald Trump would say. Thatcher in fact it turned out didn't want the Berlin Wall to come when push came to shove and in fact was incandescent with rage at Reagan's Brandenberg Gate "Tear Down this Wall" speech in front of Helmut Kohl. This was all covered up by the smooth Oxford and Cambridge trained civil servants that were horrified that America and Reagan/Bush would find out and shred there most beloved UK-US special relationship.
What is really funny is that for all of Thatcher's "success" in turning around the British economy after 1979 that Claire describes in her biography of Thatcher she and Great Britain were in no position to offer a competing financial arrangement to what Helmut Kohl and the FRG where offering to Gorbachev and the USSR to carry out Glasnost(Nor was btw the HW Bush's US but you could at least say Britain that was supposed to be "back" as a major European power under Thatcher would have at least taken up some interest).
What Thatcher I would give credit for understanding is a lot of people including herself after 1945 had as PBS' Commanding Height's documentary pointed out little interest in the FRG's post 1945 economic miracle(The Nazi's would always by the Nazi's) so instead after 1979 Thatcher came up with her own economic miracle that was far less consequential than Erhard's in late 1940s Germany. In fact without Erhard the entire "West" may have also gone irrevocably toward a "mixed" economic model after 1945. Yet to this day far more people are interested in buying books about Thatcher than Ludwig Erhard.
The line about no one wanting to model themselves on West Germany comes at 3:50 in the video below.
Another video from Jacques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ptkgaFEFU. It makes no sense for any Western country to compare itself to another Western country; what's been challenged by the pandemic is the idea of individual rights and limited government. It's not just China that has excelled: Most of East Asia has done just as well. So this doesn't vindicate Chinese-style authoritarianism. But something is clearly totally dysfunctional in Western society: "Individual rights" have come to be understood as a suicide pact.
“ The solution is simple. The United States must finance and coordinate vaccination programs around the world. The implementation will be complicated, which is precisely why there must be a single coordinating power.”
Finance, maybe. Coordinate, think about that some more. In the US, fifty states are conducting fifty experiments to see how vax rollout should work. Some are doing fine. Others not so well. What if the “single coordinating power” gets it wrong?
Here’s how not to do it, as reported to me by a relative who got shot yesterday in the Bronx NY. (Vaccine shot, not street violence, the other epidemic).
The community health center they visited requires appointments. They schedule 12 appointments for “qualified” people in a single time block apparently because there are 12 doses of vaccine in each package. They also allow walk-ins if someone doesn’t keep their appointment.
To prevent waste of vaccine doses they won’t thaw a vial of vaccine unless they are certain they can use it all. When they have 12 people present — in the room — they proceed. If they don’t have 12 people present, they stop the process until they can find enough people to use all 12 doses.
Imagine what happens if it takes a while to find the 12th person and someone who has made an appointment (and is present) has to go to work. Now they need to find someone to fill that slot as well.
That’s how my relative got vaccinated. Someone who made an appointment didn’t show up. Some one who was waiting for their shot called my relative and told them to come running. Those waiting couldn’t be vaccinated until there were 12 people in the room. An hour later my relative arrived with two other people in tow. They arrived just before closing and got the vaccine.
And that’s the other thing. The health center closed for the day at 5:00 pm. They keep normal 9 to 5 hours....even during an emergency.
Claire, careful what you wish for. The “central coordinating power” in NYC (or state?) needs to go back to the drawing board. The system they designed isn’t working - fast enough.
It absolutely shocks (but at the same time not really) and disgusts me that vaccines are only being administered during normal clinic hours. I hesitate to even ask, but are they are least doing it 7 days a week?
Vaccines should be administered everywhere as fast as they're coming in. If that means emergency measures and funding to take on extra staff so vaccination centers can be open 24 hours as long as they have vaccines to use then it should be done.
In Germany they're taking a leisurely Sunday off. And 24-hour vaccination centers in France? C'est à rigoler. There is something wrong with the way the West is understanding the nature of this emergency, and I don't get what it is. Is it that the dead haven't been stacked like cordwood in footballs stadiums for everyone to see? Is it that the 3,000 who died on September 11 form some kind of upper limit to the amount of dead the human mind can really understand, after which it's all "a lot?" The global death toll is already incalculably much higher, with absolutely no end in sight until everyone is vaccinated. The long-term economic and political consequences of this will be so much more grave. Perhaps this only seems obvious to people who have a very particular temperament? To people who naturally think in numbers and exponents? I just don't get it. I growingly think the West's failure to grasp the gravity to this crisis will be understood, by historians, to mark the end of the Western era that began in the 15th century with the age of exploration. The year 2020 will be commonly known as the end of the Western era and the beginning of the Chinese era. All of our descendents will live in a Chinese world, for better or worse. This is what's at stake. And no one really seems to understand this. Everyone is too busy comparing their own abysmal performance to other Western countries and assuring themselves that it's perfectly normal. It's hot. It's a Holocaust that has revealed our societies to be morally bankrupt.
Yes. Sadly, the death of the West is death by suicide. The obituary will read that the weapon of self-immolation was wielded by a credulous, self-loathing, hypereducated elite.
Learned a lot here! Definitely interesting to learn more about Russia and China's vaccines. Tying back to your previous pieces on China, hoping Biden agrees with you and makes the right call in his foreign policy. It's going to be essential to show leadership here. We have a moral duty to resist Chinese hegemony so long as China is controlled by the CCP, which has proven its willingness to enslave and torture its own citizens, and as we see here, subject foreign populations to hastily-developed vaccines that they don't trust to use on their Han majority.
We couldn't agree more.
Very informative. I think you’re a little too pessimistic about the adenovirus-vector vaccines. We will hear about the J&J vaccine any day now; if it’s effective at one dose it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. The AZ vaccine is (as of now a two dose vaccine). Sadly, AZ screwed up their Phase III trial so no one really knows what the most efficacious first dose is.
It is true that the adenovirus vector can probably only be given once, but depending on the durability of protection this might not be a problem. If it protects for a decade or more (which is possible but not certain) there’s no need to worry about whether the vector can only be administered once.
Another advantage to the adenovirus vaccines is that long term (or semi long term) safety data is available. While the mRNA vaccines are literally brand new, J&J uses the exact same technology in its Covid vaccine that it uses in its Ebola vaccine. Around 1 million J&J Ebola vaccines have been delivered in Africa with practically no safety issues. The mRNA vaccines are almost certainly safe, but it’s hard to know for sure.
There’s a third vaccine technology that wasn’t mentioned (unless I missed it)-the protein based vaccines. Novavax has one and so does Sanofi (working in partnership with GSK). Basically they provide immunity by exposing the immune system to synthetically manufactured spike protein. These vaccines tend to be weaker so they are paired with chemicals called adjuvants which make the immune system hyper vigilant. The new Shingles vaccine (Shingrix) is this type of vaccine.
Mutation of the virus is something to worry about but not panic about. Most (not all) produce immunity not by priming the immune system to recognize the entire spike protein but by priming the immune system to recognize a part of the spike protein called the receptor binding domain (the part of spike protein which chemically attached itself to the ACE2 receptor found ubiquitously on cells in the human lung, nasal passages and bowel). The receptor binding domain is probably somewhat less likely to mutate.
What regulatory agencies have gotten wrong is the emphasis on development of symptomatic disease as the primary end point in the trials. I think it makes much more sense to focus on whether the vaccines prevent severe disease, hospitalization or death. After all, if the vaccines turn a deadly disease into the sniffles, that would be pretty good.
Claire is right; the United States is ideally suited to vaccinating the world. In fact our country has played the most important role in vaccine development. While Claire can’t bring herself to admit it, the Trump Administration’s Operation Warp Speed was a brilliant and unparalleled success. Most (not Pfizer) companies in the West with the most promising vaccines took warp speed money.
It also pays to remember that the only reason that the world is blessed with a viable and dynamic pharmaceutical and biotech industry is because American patients pay almost all the freight for R&D. Almost every successful pharmaceutical company in the world undertakes the remarkably risky research needed to produce new medicines because most of their profit comes from prices paid by Americans. If Pharma ha to rely on drug prices paid by Europeans, Canadians, Australians and all the nations in Asia, the business would not be profitable enough to justify the risks. In this sense, Claire, Americans are already footing the Bill for almost all Covid vaccine discovery efforts.
Last year, the House of Representatives passed a Bill which would have severely restricted drug prices. Speaker Pelosi was a fierce advocate of the Bill. In the Senate, a less onerous but still destructive Bill was introduced.
This was one case where gridlock proved to be a great thing. Does anyone think we would have gotten Covid vaccines (not to mention new antibody treatments) so rapidly if the Pharmaceutical industry had tens of billions of dollars in reduced revenues?
As for getting shots in the arm, most American States have failed miserably. So have all European nations (with the possible exception of the UK). The only country getting it right is Israel. As of today, Israel is offering vaccines to citizens aged 40 and up. Maybe our leaders should call Benjamin Netanyahu for advice.
I think a lot of your points are good, and make the same essential argument made in the article--that we should use all the vaccine tools in our medical bag that we have. Except maybe the Russian one. I'll be honest, not sure if I'd get that even if the choice was that or nothing. I would however, get any of the three Chinese vaccines; but I'd prefer one from Moderna, Pfizer, or AZ/Oxford.
In terms Operation Warp Speed, I think the Trump Administration really does deserve kudos for that. They've handled many other aspects of this pandemic very poorly, but that particular one, A+. There wasn't really a natural place for it in the article however. It may or may not show up in a future one, we'll see.
Owen, It’s all hypothetical, but the vaccinologists I’ve spoken to tell me that they have more confidence in the Sputnik vaccine than Sinovac’s dead virus vaccine. But they don’t have much faith in either.
Yes, they should.
I have seen it suggested that Israel’s success with its vaccination roll out is because it’s a small country with a relatively centralized health care system. Actually in population Israel is only slightly smaller than Belgium, around the same size as Greece, Hungary and Austria and larger than Ireland, Denmark, Slovenia or Bulgaria. Israel leaves these nations in the dust when it comes to vaccines administered.
One question our cosmopolitan globalist friends may want to think about is whether there’s something in the nature of large governmental bureaucracies (like the EU) which render them less nimble and thus less effective at administering vaccines.
In the United States we suffer from bureaucratic sclerosis at both the Federal and the State levels. While private sector experts delivered in record time a technological achievement (the vaccine) almost unprecedented since the moon landing government experts (who work for government agencies or advise these agencies from their perch at universities) have delivered failure after failure. The calamity with vaccine administration was preceded first by the failure to approve reliable Covid testing to the debacle in recommending the wearing of masks. These failures were not the fault of politicians of either party; they were failures of the expert class that Government relies on, especially public health experts.
What Israel did was administer vaccines strictly by age group (with allowances made for comorbidities). Extra doses when available were given first come first serve regardless of age.
Compare this with the the problematic American roll out. Here the idea was to vaccinate frontline health care workers and first responders before anyone else regardless of age. This might have made sense last March; it no longer does. Adequate supplies of PPP and current infection control techniques means these workers actually have a relatively low risk, not a high risk, of contracting Covid compared to the background population.
Then there was the laudable desire to vaccinate minority populations who had born the brunt of Covid, especially in urban centers. Sadly, this approach has turned into a tragedy for these minority populations.
Many states (including New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, California and others) followed recommendations formulated by CDC’s “expert” academic advisors to vaccinate grocery store cashiers before patients with severe comorbidities.
That means a 20 year old African American cashier will get vaccinated before her 63 year old grandfather suffering from poorly controlled Type II diabetes (which is epidemic in older African American people). The 20 year old has virtually no chance of dying from Covid and a very low chance of getting severe disease. Her grandfather, who may have had a leg amputated, probably has protein in his urine (a sign of impending kidney disease) and also probably has coronary artery disease can’t get a vaccine for months after his granddaughter because he doesn’t qualify. That grandfather probably is 100 times more likely to die of Covid than his granddaughter. For reasons I find bewildering, our academic experts don’t seem to care.
But it’s worse than that. The 20 year old grocery cashier who gets her second vaccine will be asymptomatic if she’s exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Remember, we don’t know if the vaccines provide sterilizing immunity. What’s the result? The vaccinated young cashier won’t know that she’s harboring the virus. Because she doesn’t feel sick, she may not hesitate to go visit her grandfather. It doesn’t take much imagination to imagine the tragic results.
Israel did it right; the United States is doing it tragically wrong. The number of unnecessary deaths resulting from the stupidity of our brilliant expert overlords is truly staggering.
We're soon going to run a piece from one of our writers in Israel, David Hazony, explaining exactly why Israel has been so successful. It's *very* interesting. Unfortunately, it will take a bit of time because he is, alas, recovering from Covid19 himself. (Get well soon, David!)
Before WigWam points out the incompetence of the Massachusetts govt I want to point out the friggin vaccine was invented in Massachusetts NOT Israel or West Virginia.
You’re right. Moderna is headquartered in the Boston area. It’s founder is on the faculty of MIT. The hedge fund that provided most of the initial funding for the mRNA technology is located in Boston. MIT will reap a windfall off its royalties for the polymer capsule that encases the mRNA (for both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine). It’s not called MIT for nothing-it’s in Massachusetts too.
All this makes it doubly ironic that the good citizens of Massachusetts have almost no access (so far) to Moderna’s vaccine. How far is Massachusetts General Hospital (perhaps the best hospital in the world) from Kendall Square? By my reckoning it’s around two miles (a short ten minute ride on the Red Line). Yet MGH is still forbidden from dispensing the vaccine to the general public.
The Joslin Diabetes Center is in “the Medical Area.” That’s no more than five miles from where the Moderna vaccine was developed. Joslin treats thousands of Type II diabetics who are at enormous risk from Covid. Yet Joslin is still precluded from administering vaccine to elderly diabetic patients who will fare very poorly with Covid if they get it.
How far is the Dana Farber Cancer Center from the home of the MIT labs in Kendall Square where the vaccine technology was perfected? It can’t be more that five or six miles. Yet Dana Farber is prevented by the State of Massachusetts from administering the Moderna Vaccine to 75 year old patients with metastatic breast cancer or 70 year old patients with metastatic prostate cancer.
You know who can get the Moderna Vaccine in Massachusetts right now? A 25 year old medical resident can. A 30 year old podiatrist can. An 18 year old cashier can. The risk of serious disease or death if these folks get Covid is near zero. How can this policy make sense?
Tim, there are a lot of really smart people in Massachusetts. Our country owes a lot the the experts who work in Boston’s Pharma and Biotech communities.
What’s really sad is that the people calling the shots in State Government are criminally negligent. Also, they’re stupid.
To be fair I have not really been paying that much attention as to who is eligible for getting the vaccine as I myself will be at the end of the line. Just to give a clearer geographic picture the MA State House(where these decisions are being made) is more like a 5 minute subway ride from MIT while MGH is more like 2 minutes. The CEO of Moderna almost lives across the street from the State House in Beacon Hill and he can literally walk(a longish walk) to work. My only explanation is the MA state govt at the highest level(i.e. the governor called the CEO of Moderna) and tried to deal directly with them outside of the US Federal govts process and was turned down by Moderna(on the basis of their contract with the Federal govt) and from this point afterwards has simply pinned the blame of the Feds for any messups.
I just found that several key people in charge of vaccine distribution in Massachusetts state government have just been hired by Biden to work in Washington in addition to the fact that the mayor of Boston(who has a tangential role in vaccination issues) has been nominated as Biden's Labor secretary so you can interpret this as you want.
One thing I can tell you is if you receive the Moderna vaccine in Massachusetts or New Hampshire right the vaccine is actually being shipped from the two production facilities in MA and NH to Mississippi first then shipped "back" to MA and NH for patients receiving them in these two areas. This does not at all seem to be a smart logistical choice. In particular the facility in New Hampshire Moderna is using is on the grounds of a former Air Force base that still has an very long/large active runway and a NH Air National Guard base. It seems to be that some type of distribution hub should be setup there and then send the vaccines manufactured at Pease/Portsmouth, NH via air or truck depending on the distance of the distributors from New Hampshire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pease_Air_National_Guard_Base
The problem is not large bureaucratic governments per se--China has done brilliantly at containing the virus--but large, *stupid* bureaucratic governments. The diagnosis--"big government is always bad"--does not seem correct to me. Nothing but a big government can handle certain tasks, among them warfare and a vaccination campaign on this scale. Israel's vaccination campaign certainly wasn't a private-sector accomplishment. But Israel's bureaucracy is more competent than other Western bureaucracies. The incompetence of our governments, not their size, is the problem.
Here’s something for those with a globalist perspective to reflect on. As of two days ago, the UK had administered 8 times as many vaccine doses per capita as the EU as a whole.
British regulators approved the mRNA vaccines in record time; the EU Medicines Agency dawdled. The UK has already approved the AZ adenovirus vaccine; the European Medicines Agency hasn’t (nor has the FDA) even though it is clearly safe and efficacious (at least to some degree).
As much as cosmopolitan globalists may detest Brexit, when it comes to Covid at least, there are now thousands of British citizens who have been vaccinated and thus won’t get sick or die because the UK exited the EU in the Nick of time.
But for Brexit, it is likely that when it comes to vaccination, the UK would be performing as horribly as the rest of Europe.
Yes, and that alone is sufficient to justify Brexit, but the larger picture is comprehensive Western failure--and Britain has done only marginally better. The ramifications of this just don't seem to be dawning on people.
Martin Jacques is a lifelong communist who is now almost an unofficial spokesman for the CCP. He's also a very intelligent and serious scholar. What he says in this video is correct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoBTenUxUWY&feature=youtu.be
2020 was a watershed year and a test of liberal democracy's ability to cope with a massive and unforeseen crisis. Liberal democracy failed. I don't quite understand why Westerners don't grasp the significance of this. Brexit v. Remain is a trivial debate; the debate is now liberal democracy versus socialism with Chinese characteristics. The West's failure has been to liberal democracy what Chernobyl was to Soviet communism--only vastly, vastly more damaging and consequential.
If you think that alone justifies Brexit your an idiot. Anyways the actual death rate from Covid-19 is still much higher in the UK than in the rest of the EU except perhaps Sweden. What really bothers from the perspective of someone like myself who is 37 is there is this huge clique of people(What I call the 1989 generation) starting in the early 50's like Claire and I suspect like WigWam who pray every night at the alter of Margaret Thatcher who in my opinion as history has shown was a total loser as Donald Trump would say. Thatcher in fact it turned out didn't want the Berlin Wall to come when push came to shove and in fact was incandescent with rage at Reagan's Brandenberg Gate "Tear Down this Wall" speech in front of Helmut Kohl. This was all covered up by the smooth Oxford and Cambridge trained civil servants that were horrified that America and Reagan/Bush would find out and shred there most beloved UK-US special relationship.
What is really funny is that for all of Thatcher's "success" in turning around the British economy after 1979 that Claire describes in her biography of Thatcher she and Great Britain were in no position to offer a competing financial arrangement to what Helmut Kohl and the FRG where offering to Gorbachev and the USSR to carry out Glasnost(Nor was btw the HW Bush's US but you could at least say Britain that was supposed to be "back" as a major European power under Thatcher would have at least taken up some interest).
What Thatcher I would give credit for understanding is a lot of people including herself after 1945 had as PBS' Commanding Height's documentary pointed out little interest in the FRG's post 1945 economic miracle(The Nazi's would always by the Nazi's) so instead after 1979 Thatcher came up with her own economic miracle that was far less consequential than Erhard's in late 1940s Germany. In fact without Erhard the entire "West" may have also gone irrevocably toward a "mixed" economic model after 1945. Yet to this day far more people are interested in buying books about Thatcher than Ludwig Erhard.
The line about no one wanting to model themselves on West Germany comes at 3:50 in the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0D1RAY5NZ8
Another video from Jacques: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6ptkgaFEFU. It makes no sense for any Western country to compare itself to another Western country; what's been challenged by the pandemic is the idea of individual rights and limited government. It's not just China that has excelled: Most of East Asia has done just as well. So this doesn't vindicate Chinese-style authoritarianism. But something is clearly totally dysfunctional in Western society: "Individual rights" have come to be understood as a suicide pact.