He was told that a vaccine would be produced by Easter of 2020. He then repeated that to the press. A vaccine was produced by Easter of 2020. In fact, the RNA Moderna was ready before Easter. It just took 9 months for it to be approved as safe.
For a “red tape cutter” he sure dragged his feet on getting the vaccine to market. Of course, he was also the most “close down the border” president in the history of the USA, and even then he was still letting planes fly straight from China up until people called him on it in April of 2020. This just shows that there will never be a situation which we can truly shutdown the border, so we should just plan that viruses will cross and we will have to deal with them.
There’s one part of that article that I really want to highlight, because this needs to get actual political traction. You can make a set of vaccines that cover a broad set of viruses that are pre-tested to be safe. If one virus breaks out, you take out vax that covers its family off the shelf and tweak it to this particular virus. Then you just need effectiveness testing, which only takes a few months.
According to Florian Krammer, a vaccine scientist at Mount Sinai, you could do all of this at a cost of about $20 million to $30 million per vaccine and, ideally, would do so for between 50 and 100 different viruses — enough, he says, to functionally cover all the phylogenies that could give rise to pandemic strains in the future. (“It’s extremely unlikely that there is something out there that doesn’t belong to one of the known families, that would have been flying under the radar,” he says. “I wouldn’t be worried about that.”) In total, he estimates, the research and clinical trials necessary to do this would cost between $1 billion and $3 billion. So far this year, the U.S. government has spent more than $4 trillion on pandemic relief. Functionally, it’s a drop in the bucket, though Krammer predicts our attention, and the funding, will move on once this pandemic is behind us, leaving us no more prepared for the next one. When he compares the cost of such a project to the Pentagon’s F-35 — you could build vaccines for five potential pandemics for the cost of a single plane, and vaccines for all of them for a fraction of the cost of that fighter-jet program as a whole — he isn’t signaling confidence it will happen, but the opposite.
This would do a whole lot more good for humanity than the F-35 program, and ought to have been put into a congressional spending bill years ago.
He was told that a vaccine would be produced by Easter of 2020. He then repeated that to the press. A vaccine was produced by Easter of 2020. In fact, the RNA Moderna was ready before Easter. It just took 9 months for it to be approved as safe.
For a “red tape cutter” he sure dragged his feet on getting the vaccine to market. Of course, he was also the most “close down the border” president in the history of the USA, and even then he was still letting planes fly straight from China up until people called him on it in April of 2020. This just shows that there will never be a situation which we can truly shutdown the border, so we should just plan that viruses will cross and we will have to deal with them.
Yup, we had the vaccine the whole time. Problem was testing it.
There’s one part of that article that I really want to highlight, because this needs to get actual political traction. You can make a set of vaccines that cover a broad set of viruses that are pre-tested to be safe. If one virus breaks out, you take out vax that covers its family off the shelf and tweak it to this particular virus. Then you just need effectiveness testing, which only takes a few months.
This would do a whole lot more good for humanity than the F-35 program, and ought to have been put into a congressional spending bill years ago.