I have spoken to some of the researchers working on universal coronavirus vaccines and I’m stunned by how little help they’re getting. One described months of delay trying to find the monkeys needed for trials. You might think the U.S. government, with all its power and might, would name a point person that the teams working on these vaccines could call if they needed something, anything. Instead, many of our most brilliant virologists spend their work days trying to find lab animals and figure out how to conduct due diligence regarding manufacturing facilities.
And I have been puzzled by the Biden administration’s disinterest in building on the Trump administration’s central success: The Operation Warp Speed program that sped the vaccines into development. We could have Warp Speeds for so much more (and we are far from done with vaccines). I’ve asked this question of top Biden staffers, and I cannot say the answers I’ve heard have made much sense. ...
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The way we treated the Covid vaccines should be a model. We made their development a national priority and we ensured that the profits of those who developed them were guaranteed. But we also made sure the vaccines would be available and affordable to all Americans — we did not allow pharmaceutical companies to charge whatever they thought the market would bear, or insurance companies to pile on the co-pays. Equity and innovation are often pitted against each other in our politics. The success of Warp Speed shows what can happen when they are paired.
Ezra Klein is a thoughtful guy.
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...Vaccines, treatments like Paxlovid, improvements in hospitalization protocols and rapid testing — along, of course, with post-infection immunity — have uncoupled caseloads from death rates.
Have they? They're no longer a couple? I don't know that that's the case. How could you ever uncouple COVID-19 cases from COVID-19 deaths? What does he mean by using "uncouple", that you get the disease but don't die? I guess, in context, that is what he means.
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...Pharmaceuticals are not a normal kind of market good. If you can’t afford the flat screen TV you want, you leave the store. If you can’t afford the last-ditch cancer treatment that might give your spouse 10 more years of life, you sell anything, you mortgage everything, to get it.
Is that what most people do? I think they do. Okay...I am not going to impose my personal choices on others. This is my personal, adamant choice. If I had terminal cancer and the only options were death or "sell anything, mortgage anything" for 10 years more life I would not, NOT choose option number two. ...Don't get me started, I'll get pissed off and go on a rant...our choice, my choice.
Great article.
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Bernie Sanders used to promote an idea for creating a system of prizes to run parallel to the patents we normally use to make drug development profitable. ...The first group to develop and prove out such a drug would get a princely sum — $100 million, or $500 million, or a billion dollars, depending on the condition and the efficacy. In return, that drug would be immediately off-patent, available for any generic drug producer to manufacture for a pittance (and available for other countries, particularly poor countries, to produce immediately).
Princely idea, Bern-Bern! What do you mean he "used to" promote it?
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...the pandemic should leave no one convinced of the infallibility of our health agencies. The N.I.H. proved unable to shift focus quickly when the pandemic hit — only 2 percent of its 2020 budget went to Covid research, one study found. The F.D.A. was excruciatingly slow to approve the same rapid tests that Europe was using long before us. The C.D.C. was, flatly, a mess. Yet none of the failures we witnessed in real time led to major reforms of these agencies. That can’t be right.
No, it can't. That is fucked up is what it is.
Last week, I wrote about how much of Biden’s agenda relied on building, and what it would take to make that much building possible, at the speed it needs to happen. But Biden’s agenda is just as reliant on inventing — and just as much needs to be done to make the government a dearer friend to invention.
Still, this is an unexpectedly thrilling side of Biden’s presidency. A liberalism that is as ambitious about solving problems through invention as it is through redistribution would be powerful indeed.
Was that not a great article?
