Urgently needed drugs developed under Operation Warp Speed are at the mercy of officials working at “bureaucrat speed.”
I rarely like the titles that editors choose for my op/eds and articles. But this title that my Hoover editor chose is way better than mine.
Here are the first three paragraphs of “Vaccines’ Last Hurdle: Central Planners,” Defining Ideas, December 4, 2020:
First, the good news. We now appear to have at least two viable vaccines with high efficacy in preventing the awful disease known as COVID-19. On November 9, Pfizer/BioNTech announced that the efficacy of its vaccine exceeds 90 percent. On November 16, Moderna announced that its vaccine’s efficacy exceeds 94.5 percent. Take that, Pfizer! Seriously, though, both announcements are great news. Let’s put those percentages in perspective. I get a flu vaccine every year without fail. Is that because the vaccine is 90 percent effective? No. At best, it’s 60 percent effective, and its effectiveness is often well below 50 percent.
There’s even more good news. Even when the vaccines don’t prevent COVID-19, they make it substantially less severe. For example, in a study of thirty thousand volunteers for the Moderna test, of the eleven cases in people who got the vaccine, no case was severe, versus thirty severe cases for people who received the placebo. It’s risky to generalize from a sample size of thirty thousand, but still, the numbers are extremely encouraging. There’s also good news for us elderly. I was talking with a healthy seventy-seven-year-old woman at pickleball last week who was delighted that she, as an elderly person, would be one of the first to get it. I just turned seventy and my wife is seventy-one, and so presumably we will be on the priority list.
But the bad news for people who live in California is that California’s state government will slow things down. This might happen in New York and in some other states also. Let’s start by focusing on California, the state I know best. California’s government will slow things down in two ways: one is intentional and the other is unintentional.
Read the whole thing.
READER COMMENTS
Dylan
Dec 4 2020 at 9:15pm
Something of a rarity for me, but I agree with almost everything in that piece. I particularly liked the suggestion of 20% of vaccines offered for private sale as something of a safety valve. Seems like a good way to balance the need to get lots of people vaccinated, which will be helped by the vaccine being free, while still allowing those with the means and the risk a way to skip the queue a little bit and let private industry work it’s distribution chain magic that government is unlikely to be able to replicate.
Where I disagree a little is on the regulatory aspect. I’m pretty confident that these vaccines are relatively safe and pretty effective, but lots and lots of people are not convinced. And we need the people who are not convinced to take the vaccine too. Notice the hubbub over the UK’s approval and Faucci saying they “rushed.” I’m sure a good reason he walked that comment back is because of the fear of what that comment would do to public perception. We’ve just done the fastest vaccine development by far and people (rightly or wrongly) don’t have a ton of faith in pharma companies to “do the right thing.” I’m not sure how much the FDA is able to change the opinions of most people, but I wouldn’t entirely rule out the idea that a slower approval could save lives in the long run by convincing more people to get vaccinated sooner than they otherwise would.
Thomas Sewell
Dec 5 2020 at 2:18am
Couldn’t the needs of the people who need to be convinced by a slower process be handled by simply allowing the vaccine out now while continuing the slower process and then later the FDA can announce that after following all the additional steps, they now believe even more strongly that it’s safe?
Why do other people have to die for lack of the vaccine while some people decide to wait a bit longer for more testing/analysis?
Jon Murphy
Dec 5 2020 at 10:38am
Alex Tabarrok has a good response to your concern. Basically, wr shouldn’t let the most fearful and scientifically-illiterate drive policy.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/12/dont-delay-to-allay-fear.html
Rob Rawlings
Dec 4 2020 at 11:36pm
Its not really clear to me why the government needs to be centrally planning the vaccine distribution process.
It is very likely that there are some positive externalities from people being vaccinated and that these are greater for some groups than others. My view is that the optimal course would be for the vaccine to be distributed through market processes , and the government should provide appropriate subsidies for those groups who the experts deem to be the greatest risk to the public if they get infected (the so called super-spreaders).
There are of course a greater group of people who provide no great risk to the public if they get infected but do have a much greater risk of dying from the disease. Assuming the market clearing price for the vaccine is not excessively high it seems reasonable to think that these vulnerable groups will prioritize buying the vaccine for themselves. However I would have no major objections (given the circumstances) in supporting the provision of subsidies to the most vulnerable if this would reduce the overall covid death toll.
john hare
Dec 5 2020 at 4:14am
I had a sudden mental picture when reading your comment that EBay distribution would probably work fairly well. My last order was a several pound hydraulic pump that got here in two days from halfway across the US. Let those afraid wait and see how many of the rest of us drop dead from the vaccine and they will have their multi-million participant clinical trial right there.
My less charitable thought is that all these government involvements are because of people unwilling or unable to access risk for themselves. I trust the fact that trillions of bottles of aspirin have been sold considerably more than I do federal approval.
John hare
Dec 5 2020 at 7:04am
Part of my peeve menagerie is people that exaggerate to make their argument more convincing. It often has the opposite effect on me and calls the rest of what they have to say into question. This time I did it. Trillions of bottles of aspirin doesn’t match a very simple population times decades times usage rate. Billions should be far closer without serious checking.
Michael
Dec 5 2020 at 7:19am
I’m a lot more sympathetic to the planning aspects of this given gthe nature of the situation we are in right now, but I think setting aside 20% of the inital doses for private sale would be fine.
I’m OK with the regulatory scrutiny here because I think releasing a vaccine that is later deemed unsafe or ineffective would be catastrophic, given the low-trust era we live in. I don’t think California having a special board is necessarily the way to go, but I think there are real costs to forcing the FDA to move faster. If the vaccines are as safe and effective as the early readouts would indicate, those costs won’t be seen.
I think a purely market based approach would lead to an initial rollout to wealthier and more urban areas, due to the limited inital supply relative to demand, the greater capacity of wealthier areas to afford market rates, and the logistically simpler storage logistics of delivering the vaccine to cites. In other words, we’d get an initial deployment of the vaccine very much skewed towards Blue America, even though we’ve reached a point where a lot of Red America is suffering just as badly if not worse. I think that type of rollout would ultimately be very politically toxic.
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