Shapiro
Trust the bureaucracy – this is the same mistake the government always makes. And they did it again during the development and distribution of the vaccines.
In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the media spilled barrels of ink over errors by the federal government. We have endlessly heard of the failure to test quickly, the confusion over wearing a mask, and the debates over proper lockdown policies. But if the history of this time is being written, the fundamental mistake committed by the U.S. government is not rhetorical excesses by the president or conflicting public health advice. This will be the same mistake the government always makes: trust in the bureaucracy.
We now know that the wonderful Moderna vaccine for COVID-19 was designed by 13 January 2020. It was just two days after the order of the virus was announced. As David Wallace-Wells writes for New York magazine, ‘The modern vaccine design lasted one weekend … When the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and sent to the National Institutes. Health for the start of its Phase I clinical trial. “Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci assured the Americans for six weeks that there was little concern with COVID-19.
Fast forward to the end of 2021. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died. Tens of thousands of Americans 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 has cost us critical months, and thousands of Americans are dying every day. As dr. Marty Makary of Johns Hopkins University told me this week: “Safety is their eternal excuse. They are completely a broken federal bureaucracy … Why did we not have a combined Phase I Phase II clinical trial for these vaccines? not?”
This is, of course, an excellent question. Phase I trials involve a small number of participants, who are then monitored. Phase II trials involve larger numbers. Large 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 slowed down. Data were collected by the end of October indicating that Phase II / III trials were successful. The FDA quickly requested more results, which it only received in November. It then took until Dec. 11 before the FDA issued an emergency use permit for the Pfizer vaccine. The Moderna vaccine was only cleared on December 18, almost a year after it was first manufactured.
The shame continues. The government go ahead to inhibit secondary doses of the vaccine, despite the fact that the first doses have a significant effect. As Makary says: “We are at war. The first dose provides immunity as high as 80 to 90 percent protection, and we can probably give half the dose, as Dr. Moncef Slaoui suggested. Our stock overnight. ‘
Meanwhile, states are still confused by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to dispense the vaccines. It took up to nine days after the FDA approved the Pfizer vaccine for the CDC to release its recommendations. These recommendations were still complex and confusing and were often full of self-defeating standards, although it was obvious from the outset that the solution had to be based on age.
Americans relied on the government – a government presumably made up of well-meaning experts – to get us through a pandemic. The government has not only failed with conflicting information and incoherent lock-in policies, but also the main mechanism to end the pandemic, thanks to bureaucratic boom. If Americans take away from the COVID-19 pandemic that the centralized government is the everyday solution, they are taking exactly the lesson that is likely to end in mass death in the future.
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Ben Shapiro is a graduate of UCLA and Harvard Law School, host of The Ben Shapiro Show and editor-in-chief of DailyWire.com. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers ‘How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps’, ‘The Right Side of History’ and ‘Bullies’.
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