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David Abbott's avatar

Vaccines could have been approved in Spring if 2020 if we had challenge trials. Not conducting challenge trials was the single greatest institutional failure during the pandemic.

Two generations ago, our grandfathers stormed beaches, flew combat missions into heavy anti-aircraft fire and steamed across oceans teeming with Uboats to defend our country. Many were conscripted. In 2020, our government would not let healthy young volunteers take a 1 in 2000 chance of death to save tens or hundreds of thousands of people. The risk would be even lower if the vaccines worked!

Our pandemic response stank of cowardice. Early in the pandemic the courts were closed and I didn’t have much to do. I’m not the type to shelter in place, I wanted to help my country. I would have taken a job processing unemployment claims or tracing contacts or volunteered for a challenge trial. There should have been legislation to help people take “pandemic jobs” and then transition back to their regular jobs after the pandemic. I wanted to engage in useful activity, I was willing to take physical risks, and I certainly didn’t want to cower at home and watch people freak out on cable TV. I volunteered for clinical trials and wrote the Russian ambassador asking to participate in the trial of the Sputnik vaccine. Nothing came of my efforts, and I ended up dissipating my energy hiking in the few national forests that weren’t closed. The PPP paid me $20,800 to sit on my ass, so at least my balance sheet didn’t crumble.

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Doctor Memory's avatar

There’s a New Yorker cartoon that pops up a lot when economic policy is being discussed: it’s a bunch of disheveled people sitting around a campfire, clearly in some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario, and the person speaking is captioned “but at least for one brief moment we created a lot of value for our shareholders.”

The COVID-era one would need to be re-captioned “but at least for one brief minute we got to fully and rigorously apply our research protocol guidelines and medical ethics training.”

I’m old enough to have cut my teeth, activism-wise, in ACT UP, which had made the entirely correct observation that the FDA was moving at a speed determined by their institutional incentives rather than the actual needs of people dying of a horrific disease. Silly us: in retrospect our one big (if understandable) error was the assumption that things would work any differently if the people dying were “normal”.

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