[ExI] vaccine dark humor

[spike at rainier66.com]

…> On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
…>Subject: Re: [ExI] vaccine dark humor

 

>…Spike, in a way I feel sorry for our political leaders.  They have been pushed every possible way, have heard advice conflicting in every detail since this started, tried to make decisions nonpolitical (and failed), and are criticized by everyone as not being strong enough, being too weak, dithering, and so on.  No matter what they did, large groups were incensed.  Not to be overlooked is the fact that their decisions involved human lives possibly lost or possibly saved.  I did not and do not envy them.   bill w

 

 

This is a good thing Billw.  I worry about anyone who did and does envy political leaders.  Ideally that should be a job few people want.  If we reduce their power at every opportunity it helps to make the jobs less enviable.

 

Perhaps someone here knows or can suggest where I might go to find out: as I understand it, the reason pharmacists were allowed to distribute the vaccines is because of an emergency use authorization.  As I understand it, this requires that there is no known alternative treatment.  But we have had anti-viral meds since forever, and they were used in previous SARS pandemics.  We don’t know if they work, I get that.

 

It looks like we made a bunch of special-case exceptions for this particular vaccine technology, then after the fact found out that it doesn’t work as well as originally thought.  With any medication there are all the tests of safety and efficacy that cost half a billion dollars, but we don’t have that for this vaccine.  Now there is no incentive on the part of the manufacturer to do any of that, a strong disincentive in fact, for as it stands, they can sell all of it they can make while assuming no liability and while making no promises of efficacy.  Any testing they do can only harm their perfect position in the market.  

 

So now… we still don’t have testing done under controlled conditions with systematic data collection, which is why after all this time the big picture is still muddled and chaotic, with pharmaceutical companies and politicians cheerfully wielding power without reasoning or accountability.

 

spike

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20211226/738dee00/attachment.htm>