Thursday, January 07, 2021
How Virus Bureaucracy Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Americans
Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the media have spilled barrels of ink over mistakes by the federal government. We've heard endlessly about the failure to quickly ramp up testing, the confusion over mask-wearing and the debates over proper lockdown policy. But when the history of this time is written, the fundamental mistake made by the United States government won't be rhetorical excesses by the president or conflicting public health advice. It will be the same mistake the government always makes: trusting the bureaucracy.
We now know that the miraculous Moderna vaccine for COVID-19 had been designed by Jan. 13, 2020. That was just two days after the sequencing of the virus had been made public. As David Wallace-Wells writes for New York magazine, "the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. ... By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial." Meanwhile, for six weeks, Dr. Anthony Fauci assured Americans that there was little to worry about with COVID-19.
Fast-forward to the end of 2020. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died. Tens of thousands of Americans continue to die every week. The Food and Drug Administration has still not cleared the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which costs a fraction of the other vaccines (about $4 per dose, as opposed to $15 to $25 per dose for Moderna's vaccine or $20 per dose for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine). The FDA approval process cost us critical months, with thousands of Americans dying each day. As Dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University told me this week, "Safety is their eternal excuse. They are entirely a broken federal bureaucracy...Why did we not have a combined Phase I-Phase II clinical trial for these vaccines?"
This is an excellent question, of course. Phase I trials involve small numbers of participants, who are then monitored. Phase II trials involve larger numbers. Huge numbers of Americans would have volunteered for a combined Phase I-Phase II trial. And even after we knew the vaccines were effective, the FDA delayed. Data was collected by late October that suggested Phase II/III trials had been successful. The FDA quickly requested more results, which it did not receive until November. It then took until Dec. 11 for the FDA to issue emergency use authorization for the Pfizer vaccine. The Moderna vaccine wasn't cleared until Dec. 18, nearly a year after it had first been produced.
The disgrace continues. The government continues to hold back secondary doses of the vaccine, despite the fact that the first doses provide a significant effect. As Makary says, "We're in a war. The first dose gives immunity that may be as high as 80 to 90 percent protection, and we can probably give half the dose, as Dr. Moncef Slaoui suggested ... We can quadruple our supply overnight."
Meanwhile, states continue to be confused by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance on how to tranche out the vaccines. It took until nine days after the FDA authorized the Pfizer vaccine for the CDC to release its recommendations. Those recommendations were still complex and confusing and often rife with self-defeating standards -- even though it was perfectly obvious from the start that the solution ought to be based on age.
Americans have relied on the government -- a government supposedly comprised of well-meaning experts -- to get us through a pandemic. The government not only failed with conflicting information and incoherent lockdown policy but also actively obstructed the chief mechanism for ending the pandemic thanks to bureaucratic bloat. If Americans' takeaway from the COVID-19 pandemic is that centralized government is the all-purpose solution, they're taking precisely the lesson most likely to end in mass death in the future.
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Left media can’t admit Donald Trump was likely right on COVID lab creation
Comment from Australia
A Chinese virologist whistleblower who fled the country after leaving her job at a Hong Kong university claims coronavirus was “man-made” in a lab – and the communist nation released the virus “intentionally”.
Wait a second, this wasn’t supposed to happen. We were all supposed to believe that the COVID-19 pandemic just sort of happened when someone slaughtered the wrong animal too close to some other animal in Wuhan’s notoriously gruesome “wet markets”.
The idea that it may have been cooked up in a lab, even for legitimate purposes? The stuff of internet loonies, we were told.
Yet how things change.
Evidence is now building that in fact the coronavirus was cooked up in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, with the idea now being endorsed by US deputy national security adviser Michael Pottinger saying that there was “a growing body of evidence that the lab is likely the most credible source of the virus” — and that in Beijing, “even establishment figures … have openly dismissed the wet market story”.
This lends credence to the theory that the virus may have been created at the lab as part of legitimate scientific research that aims to cut up and recombine viruses in what are known as “gain of function” experiments designed to predict how viruses might evolve — and thus better counter their threat should that occur.
But it’s dangerous work. In 2014 a paper by scientists at Johns Hopkins University in the US called for a moratorium on such experiments, saying that “research that aims to create new potential pandemic pathogens … poses extraordinary potential risks to the public.”
You don’t say.
Now, like the credibility of doctors who used to advertise cigarettes, the preferred media narrative that no way could the coronavirus have slipped through the gates at the Wuhan Institute of Virology is falling apart.
And it hasn’t been helped by China’s response, blocking a World Health Organisation team from landing in Wuhan to investigate the pandemic’s origins.
As the possibility that the pandemic is China’s own Chernobyl, it’s worthwhile looking back at just how this theory of COVID-19’s origins has been dealt with in the leftist media.
After all, the idea that the virus escaped some lab where these things were being tinkered with, for whatever purpose, was popular with Trump and his supporters, making it automatically suspect.
Recall that before the latest round of trade sanctions and social media attacks, hawkishness on China was seen as a thing for the sabre-rattling right.
For the respectable left, it was far better to treat the coronavirus as the natural but unfortunate outcome of Wuhan’s exotic local food scene and make anyone who said otherwise out to be a war-hawk or a pariah.
To blame the communist state which, after all, was supposed to make us all wealthy while providing a counterbalance to a blustering America was unthinkable.
The [Austraian] ABC, naturally, led the charge to depict those who thought something fishy (or even batty, pardon the pun) was going on at the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a swivel-eyed lunatic or, even worse, a Trump supporter. “Coronavirus may have come from a Chinese lab, if you believe Donald Trump — but experts disagree”, sneered the headline on a piece by reporter Alan Weedon on April 18 of last year.
Ah yes, where would we be without “experts”?
A month later, after Sharri Markson reported for the The Daily Telegraph that a US State Department dossier suggested links between the coronavirus outbreak and the Chinese facility, the ABC again swept into action to shoot the story down.
“The document contained no new evidence linking the laboratory to the outbreak and instead relied on publicly available news and scientific journal papers,” the ABC’s Dylan Welch wrote.
Not to be outdone, the ABC’s Media Watch did not one but two hit pieces, one week apart, slamming the story as a “conspiracy theory” and citing condemnations of the reporting by everyone from Gareth Evans to Bob Carr.
The same pattern was repeated in leftward-listing newsrooms around the world where for the past four years Donald Trump has been Enemy Number One.
The Los Angeles Times told readers in May that “Like the virus whose origin it purports to explain, the following conjecture refuses to die: The novel coronavirus was cooked up in a Chinese lab.”
A Washington Post “fact check” (yes, really) that same month looked at the question “Was the Wuhan coronavirus accidentally released from a Wuhan lab?” and came up with the answer “It’s doubtful”.
This, as they say, is not journalism. It’s activism in plain sight, stemming from the simple equation that has governed so much of the news cycle for the past four years: If Trump says X, then not only must that X be false, it also must be driven into the ground and the earth above it salted so that nothing ever grows there again.
And it is pretty rich to see the ABC of all outlets getting all high and mighty about “conspiracy theories”.
Recall that the billion-dollar broadcaster spent wheelbarrows of cash pushing the greatest conspiracy theory of all (still taken as an article of faith by many on the left), namely, that Donald Trump was somehow an agent of Moscow.
This saw taxpayers fork out for everything from the “Russia, Are You Listening?” podcast to special three-part Four Corners humbly titled, “The Story of the Century”.
The great irony, of course, is that those on the left love to pride themselves on listening to facts and experts and what is pretentiously known as “the science”, while at the same time judging every piece of information’s worth by whether or not it serves their narrative.
There is nothing political about a lab accident; they might happen anywhere scientists are working with these sorts of viruses.
But there something deeply political, to say nothing of incredibly dangerous, about dismissing that possibility simply because it might vindicate the US president
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IN BRIEF
Well-deserved Medal of Freedom goes to Devin Nunes for "courageous" efforts to stop "plot" against Trump (Washington Times)
British prime minister imposes another national lockdown on England (CNBC)
Nearly one million excess deaths expected over next 15 years from pandemic rise in unemployment (Washington Examiner)
Google workers form union in latest show of discontent with evil tech giant (CBS News)
DC mayor calls in National Guard for Trump supporters but refused to during BLM/antifa riots (Post Millennial)
This just in: Trans women retain athletic edge after a year of hormone therapy, study finds (NBC News)
Nothing to see here... Hunter Biden email associate is on DOJ transition team (Washington Times)
Census Bureau misses year-end deadline for delivering numbers for House seats (NPR)
U.S. votes against UN budget over anti-Israel measure, lack of Iran action (Fox News)
Pelosi just proposed banning gendered terms like "father, mother, son, daughter" in the House. Yet she has "mother" and "grandmother" in her Twitter bio. (Not the Bee)
Novavax starts late-stage trial of vaccine in United States (Reuters) | UK authorizes Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine (NY Times)
New Mexico fines two churches $10,000 each for Christmas Eve services (Disrn)
ICE deports more than 185,000 illegal aliens and 4,200 gang members in 2020 (Breitbart) | ICE says arrestees had average of four criminal convictions or charges each (Fox News)
Mom and pop landlords struggle through eviction freeze (Washington Examiner)
Britain's trade agreement with the European Union enters legal force (UPI)
Portland mayor, antifa enabler now asks for federal and state help against "radical Antifa" (Disrn)
Emancipation Memorial honoring freed slaves in Boston officially removed (Disrn)
New York City shootings doubled in 2020 (Washington Examiner)
Chicago ends 2020 with 769 homicides (AP)
Massachusetts allows abortions without parental consent, codifies Roe v. Wade (Disrn) | Meanwhile, Ohio governor signs bill requiring cremation or burial of aborted babies (Disrn)
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