I have been thinking about how to respond to this article for the last 24 hours and haven't been sure what to say so I am going to take a different strategy which is to suggest what I think I "will" happen and why.
What I think will happen is Biden will do the bare minimum he can to avoid looking completely ghoulish and blame everything on Trump and Trumpism. Why is he going to do that? Well that is what all the political incentives in our current political system are(not just in the US but in Claire's France and Owen's Canada too). How many people who voted Biden last time are going to vote Trump in 2024 in a Trump vs Biden re-match? Or more specifically how many Cosmopolitan Globalists will vote Trump next time? Not many even if Biden only does a "fair" job of rolling out the vaccine? True I can imagine there will be one or two prominent Biden supporters who might go Trump next time that the media will make hay about but the political boundary lines fairly or unfairly have already been drawn. Again all of this is amoral and ghoulish to boot but if you are actually asking me what I think WILL happen this is it and largely due to are present societies political incentives.
The second issue that I hope will be explored in Part IV is I think anti-vax sentiment is very real and has a large degree of overlap with support for Trump and Trumpism. So Biden has to either convince a part of the population who thinks he is illegitimate to take the vaccines or use the full force of state power to make them. Again I wouldn't get my hopes up too high on this front
Again sorry to be such a pessimist but this is unfortunately where I see this going. I will also point out this is not the first time a US President has used inaction as a means to sandbag his political opponents. Franklin Roosevelt did this all the time and did it in part to get the US into World War Two which nowadays is considered a good and necessary thing.
Congratulations on an excellent article. There are many good suggestions in this installment of the series just as there were in the previous installments. Sadly, it is a virtual certainty that few if any of the suggestions itemized by the Cosmopolitan Globalists will ever be enacted. It’s a shame really, because if the Cosmopolitan Globalists were running the FDA and EMA, the pandemic might actually be brought under control.
The people actually calling the shots, the government bureaucrats and their allies in the academic community who sit on the powerful advisory boards of the regulatory agencies, true to form, are behaving like little more than languid sybarites.
They feel far more allegiance to the bureaucratic norms (which don’t work that well even in normal times) than they do to solving the biggest global emergency since the Second World War. The bureaucrats who’ve risen through the ranks into senior decision-making positions have gotten where they are by worshipping at the altar of a sclerotic approval process, not smashing that altar to smithereens.
There’s an irony here that Claire Berlinski in particular will, I suspect, hesitate to acknowledge. She wants President Biden to take charge, bypass the bureaucratic nonsense and lead the world out of the crisis. Does that sound like President Biden to anyone who has paid attention to his career?
President Biden as well as his entire political party (along with most members of the GOP) has spent decades accreting that bureaucracy. It’s as massive and inefficient as it is because that’s what Democrats have encouraged in every election since World War II. That’s also what cosmopolitans and globalists have encouraged; it’s part and parcel of their ideology. As for the EU; it’s even worse.
Call it the administrative state or the deep state; the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is ill-suited to address the current crisis and the idea that Joe Biden, a man with deep reverence for this bureaucracy would walk away from doesn’t pass the smell test.
There was one person who might have told the bureaucrats at the FDA and CDC (and to a lesser extent the NIH) to take a flying you know what; his name was Donald Trump. No one can be sure of what Trump would have done and he surely wouldn’t have tried to lead the world out of the crisis. But he would have been far more likely to overrule the bureaucrats (who he couldn’t stand) than Biden is. Perhaps this might have helped lead the United States out of the pandemic and set a good example for the rest of the world. Even those with Trump Derangement Syndrome should, if they are honest, admit that Operation Warp Speed (championed by Trump) was the most successful American endeavor since the Apollo Mission. Of course, had Trump been re-elected and if he had followed the recommendations outlined in this essay to a tee, the bureaucrats, the academic community, the press and Democratic politicians would have accused him of being anti-science. In fact, our hosts, the Cosmopolitan Globalists would probably have accused him of being anti-science. The real problem is that making bureaucrats and academics the sole arbiters of what scientific fact is, insures that the prejudices and bigotries of those communities sets the final agenda. Call it by it’s real name; the autocracy of the “experts.”
Unless I missed it, one issue the article didn’t address in depth is the durability of protection offered by the various vaccines. If the durability of protection is short or the vaccines need to be tweaked for new variants, it may be necessary to inoculate people periodically, perhaps yearly. Over years or decades (until the patents of the vaccines expire-which is continuously extended if vaccines are adjusted to protect from new variants) the companies will make lots of money. $6 billion to compensate the companies for appropriating their IP doesn’t even come close.
There’s another reason that fair compensation for the IP attributable to the vaccine will need to be far greater than the author anticipates. The valuable IP is not in the genetic coding for spike protein; it’s in the vector. In a certain way, the companies see the Covid vaccines as a loss leader. Whether it’s the polyethylene glycol for the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine or the various adenoviruses used by Janssen and AstraZeneca, it’s the delivery devices for the antigen that matter.
These companies all see the possibility of replacing all vaccines currently available (dead and attenuated virus vaccines) with this new technology. Lots of money to be made there. Then there’s the annual flu vaccine and the potential possibility of a universal flu vaccine. If one or more of these technologies could be harnessed to an antigen that provided universal protection from flu, that alone would be worth far more than $6 billion.
Then there’s the grand prize; it’s what Pfizer, Moderna and many others were working on long before Covid came along; the possibility of vaccines against various forms of cancer. That’s why the mRNA vaccines we’re fortuitously ready to role when Covid came along; companies were perfecting the technologies to immunize against cancer. Asking these companies to forgo IP for Covid or to accept compensation far less than a cancer vaccine would be worth is a sure fire was to stop biomedical innovation dead in its tracks.
Most people who like to accuse people of Trump Derangement Syndrome seem to be his supporters or apologists. I can't help but feel that TDS has two poles. The traditional pole of people who cannot stand him, the other who will excuse almost any statement or behavior by the former president. TDS is used at least as often as not as a low effort dismissal / ad hominen.
Have you ever seen an old show called "Yes Minister"? Basically makes fun of the bureaucracy, you'd probably enjoy it. I found it both hilarious and pretty accurate myself.
You raise a good point too that we've briefly touched on a few times in the series. That liberal democracies, by and large, have failed miserably at putting together a coherent and effective response to the pandemic. Not entirely, take Operation Warp Speed for example, or consider countries like South Korea, or New Zealand. But overall, China has done better than we have in many ways. That's worrisome as they present an alternative to liberal democracies.
We didn't talk about how long protection might last in this one, but I'll certainly mention it when I do the one on distribution and logistics. So far what I've seen seems encouraging. That immunity lasts at least 6-8 months, with indications it could last for years. The biggest problem is likely to be mutations like the South African one. But those will become less common once we greatly reduce the number of people catching Covid. Less people, less viral particles, less mutations. Hopefully it doesn't necessitate an annual shot, but I guess we'll see.
Compensation is tricky...Moderna at least has already given the go-ahead for other companies to make it's vaccine for the duration of the pandemic. As you say, the technology had been worked on for years prior to this. That also means it's unlikely Pfizer and Moderna would maintain a monopoly on working products with this technology for long anyways. There are a number of ongoing efforts to make additional mRNA based vaccines right now, and their success has given things a massive boost.
I think as long as it was understood that this is a unique situation, I think the impact on innovation would be minimal...but even if the appropriate compensation was 20 or 30 billion, it's a drop in the bucket to past and proposed pandemic spending.
“ There are a number of ongoing efforts to make additional mRNA based vaccines right now, and their success has given things a massive boost.” (Owen Lewis)
You’re right about that. The really good news is that some of the other vaccines (both mRNA and adenovirus) are looking at other antigen targets to inspire immunity.
The current crop of vaccines focus on the receptor binding domain (the tip of the spike protein that cleaves to the ACE2 receptor thus facilitating the entrance of the pathogenic part of the virus into the cell). Many of the vaccines under development target other regions of SARS-CoV-2.
This is quite promising because many of the variants that we are currently worried about result from mutations in the receptor binding domain. The potency of vaccines focusing on other areas should be agnostic to these variants and be highly effective.
These new vaccine technologies offer enormous promise for human health far beyond the Covid—19 crisis.
That would be excellent! I wonder why they didn't focus on other areas first? I'm guessing it's harder for some reason. I know universal flu vaccines trying to target the slower changing parts of the virus have had trouble; maybe this is similar. If someone can make an effective vaccine based of a slower-changing region of the spike protein–or another protein in the viral shell–maybe we'll be closer to a pan coronavirus vaccine.
I've gotten the impression that a lot of science was slowed over the past year due to the pandemic. But hopefully the biomedical side of things got a good kick in the pants that will pay dividends for a long time to come.
“Yes Minister;” I loved that show. After reading your comment, I checked. It’s available on Amazon Prime. The next time it snows, I plan to binge watch all 28 episodes. Thanks for reminding me.
Maybe we need a remake with U.S. and French characters.
I have been thinking about how to respond to this article for the last 24 hours and haven't been sure what to say so I am going to take a different strategy which is to suggest what I think I "will" happen and why.
What I think will happen is Biden will do the bare minimum he can to avoid looking completely ghoulish and blame everything on Trump and Trumpism. Why is he going to do that? Well that is what all the political incentives in our current political system are(not just in the US but in Claire's France and Owen's Canada too). How many people who voted Biden last time are going to vote Trump in 2024 in a Trump vs Biden re-match? Or more specifically how many Cosmopolitan Globalists will vote Trump next time? Not many even if Biden only does a "fair" job of rolling out the vaccine? True I can imagine there will be one or two prominent Biden supporters who might go Trump next time that the media will make hay about but the political boundary lines fairly or unfairly have already been drawn. Again all of this is amoral and ghoulish to boot but if you are actually asking me what I think WILL happen this is it and largely due to are present societies political incentives.
The second issue that I hope will be explored in Part IV is I think anti-vax sentiment is very real and has a large degree of overlap with support for Trump and Trumpism. So Biden has to either convince a part of the population who thinks he is illegitimate to take the vaccines or use the full force of state power to make them. Again I wouldn't get my hopes up too high on this front
Again sorry to be such a pessimist but this is unfortunately where I see this going. I will also point out this is not the first time a US President has used inaction as a means to sandbag his political opponents. Franklin Roosevelt did this all the time and did it in part to get the US into World War Two which nowadays is considered a good and necessary thing.
I'm chomping at the bit for the final installments already.
Congratulations on an excellent article. There are many good suggestions in this installment of the series just as there were in the previous installments. Sadly, it is a virtual certainty that few if any of the suggestions itemized by the Cosmopolitan Globalists will ever be enacted. It’s a shame really, because if the Cosmopolitan Globalists were running the FDA and EMA, the pandemic might actually be brought under control.
The people actually calling the shots, the government bureaucrats and their allies in the academic community who sit on the powerful advisory boards of the regulatory agencies, true to form, are behaving like little more than languid sybarites.
They feel far more allegiance to the bureaucratic norms (which don’t work that well even in normal times) than they do to solving the biggest global emergency since the Second World War. The bureaucrats who’ve risen through the ranks into senior decision-making positions have gotten where they are by worshipping at the altar of a sclerotic approval process, not smashing that altar to smithereens.
There’s an irony here that Claire Berlinski in particular will, I suspect, hesitate to acknowledge. She wants President Biden to take charge, bypass the bureaucratic nonsense and lead the world out of the crisis. Does that sound like President Biden to anyone who has paid attention to his career?
President Biden as well as his entire political party (along with most members of the GOP) has spent decades accreting that bureaucracy. It’s as massive and inefficient as it is because that’s what Democrats have encouraged in every election since World War II. That’s also what cosmopolitans and globalists have encouraged; it’s part and parcel of their ideology. As for the EU; it’s even worse.
Call it the administrative state or the deep state; the label doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is ill-suited to address the current crisis and the idea that Joe Biden, a man with deep reverence for this bureaucracy would walk away from doesn’t pass the smell test.
There was one person who might have told the bureaucrats at the FDA and CDC (and to a lesser extent the NIH) to take a flying you know what; his name was Donald Trump. No one can be sure of what Trump would have done and he surely wouldn’t have tried to lead the world out of the crisis. But he would have been far more likely to overrule the bureaucrats (who he couldn’t stand) than Biden is. Perhaps this might have helped lead the United States out of the pandemic and set a good example for the rest of the world. Even those with Trump Derangement Syndrome should, if they are honest, admit that Operation Warp Speed (championed by Trump) was the most successful American endeavor since the Apollo Mission. Of course, had Trump been re-elected and if he had followed the recommendations outlined in this essay to a tee, the bureaucrats, the academic community, the press and Democratic politicians would have accused him of being anti-science. In fact, our hosts, the Cosmopolitan Globalists would probably have accused him of being anti-science. The real problem is that making bureaucrats and academics the sole arbiters of what scientific fact is, insures that the prejudices and bigotries of those communities sets the final agenda. Call it by it’s real name; the autocracy of the “experts.”
Unless I missed it, one issue the article didn’t address in depth is the durability of protection offered by the various vaccines. If the durability of protection is short or the vaccines need to be tweaked for new variants, it may be necessary to inoculate people periodically, perhaps yearly. Over years or decades (until the patents of the vaccines expire-which is continuously extended if vaccines are adjusted to protect from new variants) the companies will make lots of money. $6 billion to compensate the companies for appropriating their IP doesn’t even come close.
There’s another reason that fair compensation for the IP attributable to the vaccine will need to be far greater than the author anticipates. The valuable IP is not in the genetic coding for spike protein; it’s in the vector. In a certain way, the companies see the Covid vaccines as a loss leader. Whether it’s the polyethylene glycol for the Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer vaccine or the various adenoviruses used by Janssen and AstraZeneca, it’s the delivery devices for the antigen that matter.
These companies all see the possibility of replacing all vaccines currently available (dead and attenuated virus vaccines) with this new technology. Lots of money to be made there. Then there’s the annual flu vaccine and the potential possibility of a universal flu vaccine. If one or more of these technologies could be harnessed to an antigen that provided universal protection from flu, that alone would be worth far more than $6 billion.
Then there’s the grand prize; it’s what Pfizer, Moderna and many others were working on long before Covid came along; the possibility of vaccines against various forms of cancer. That’s why the mRNA vaccines we’re fortuitously ready to role when Covid came along; companies were perfecting the technologies to immunize against cancer. Asking these companies to forgo IP for Covid or to accept compensation far less than a cancer vaccine would be worth is a sure fire was to stop biomedical innovation dead in its tracks.
Most people who like to accuse people of Trump Derangement Syndrome seem to be his supporters or apologists. I can't help but feel that TDS has two poles. The traditional pole of people who cannot stand him, the other who will excuse almost any statement or behavior by the former president. TDS is used at least as often as not as a low effort dismissal / ad hominen.
Have you ever seen an old show called "Yes Minister"? Basically makes fun of the bureaucracy, you'd probably enjoy it. I found it both hilarious and pretty accurate myself.
You raise a good point too that we've briefly touched on a few times in the series. That liberal democracies, by and large, have failed miserably at putting together a coherent and effective response to the pandemic. Not entirely, take Operation Warp Speed for example, or consider countries like South Korea, or New Zealand. But overall, China has done better than we have in many ways. That's worrisome as they present an alternative to liberal democracies.
We didn't talk about how long protection might last in this one, but I'll certainly mention it when I do the one on distribution and logistics. So far what I've seen seems encouraging. That immunity lasts at least 6-8 months, with indications it could last for years. The biggest problem is likely to be mutations like the South African one. But those will become less common once we greatly reduce the number of people catching Covid. Less people, less viral particles, less mutations. Hopefully it doesn't necessitate an annual shot, but I guess we'll see.
Compensation is tricky...Moderna at least has already given the go-ahead for other companies to make it's vaccine for the duration of the pandemic. As you say, the technology had been worked on for years prior to this. That also means it's unlikely Pfizer and Moderna would maintain a monopoly on working products with this technology for long anyways. There are a number of ongoing efforts to make additional mRNA based vaccines right now, and their success has given things a massive boost.
I think as long as it was understood that this is a unique situation, I think the impact on innovation would be minimal...but even if the appropriate compensation was 20 or 30 billion, it's a drop in the bucket to past and proposed pandemic spending.
“ There are a number of ongoing efforts to make additional mRNA based vaccines right now, and their success has given things a massive boost.” (Owen Lewis)
You’re right about that. The really good news is that some of the other vaccines (both mRNA and adenovirus) are looking at other antigen targets to inspire immunity.
The current crop of vaccines focus on the receptor binding domain (the tip of the spike protein that cleaves to the ACE2 receptor thus facilitating the entrance of the pathogenic part of the virus into the cell). Many of the vaccines under development target other regions of SARS-CoV-2.
This is quite promising because many of the variants that we are currently worried about result from mutations in the receptor binding domain. The potency of vaccines focusing on other areas should be agnostic to these variants and be highly effective.
These new vaccine technologies offer enormous promise for human health far beyond the Covid—19 crisis.
That would be excellent! I wonder why they didn't focus on other areas first? I'm guessing it's harder for some reason. I know universal flu vaccines trying to target the slower changing parts of the virus have had trouble; maybe this is similar. If someone can make an effective vaccine based of a slower-changing region of the spike protein–or another protein in the viral shell–maybe we'll be closer to a pan coronavirus vaccine.
I've gotten the impression that a lot of science was slowed over the past year due to the pandemic. But hopefully the biomedical side of things got a good kick in the pants that will pay dividends for a long time to come.
“Yes Minister;” I loved that show. After reading your comment, I checked. It’s available on Amazon Prime. The next time it snows, I plan to binge watch all 28 episodes. Thanks for reminding me.
Maybe we need a remake with U.S. and French characters.
I think there's a sequel, "Yes, Prime Minister" that I haven't seen yet. Going to have to look that up.