National overview
Biden must stop blaming Trump and take action to combat the pandemic
At the current rate, the new Biden administration is on track to oversee another 250,000 coronavirus deaths and another 15 million infections within the first 100 days. The Biden camp responded to this disaster with a press in the Supreme Court blaming the Trump administration. I would be the last to dispute accusations of incompetence aimed at dealing with the Trump gang of the pandemic. But the money now stops at Biden, and turning the disaster around as someone else’s fault will simply not be enough. Fortunately for Biden, there are actions his government can take at the moment that could save hundreds of thousands of American lives and possibly millions worldwide. Let’s start with vaccinations. The FDA – after a delay that was severely excessive under the circumstances – approved two vaccines for use in the United States. The Pfizer vaccine was developed using cash from the company. However, the development of the Moderna vaccine has been paid for by the US government, which means that we, the taxpayers, have the rights to it. Why then do we limit production to Moderna? Moderna is a very innovative company and deserves a lot of credit for developing a highly effective two-day vaccine against COVID-19 in January 2020. But within the $ 1.3 billion a year pharmaceutical industry, Moderna stands as a piggy among giants. . In 2019, Moderna’s total revenue from drug sales was $ 187 million. In contrast, the top 20 U.S. pharmaceutical companies, with Roche having revenue of $ 48 billion in 2019 and continuing to Biogen at $ 11.3 billion, collectively thousands of times the production capacity of Moderna. To take one example, Merck, which has given up its own vaccine development effort, has on its own more than 200 times the production capacity of Moderna vir Moderna. Instead of waiting months or years for small Moderna to produce its or more vaccine in sufficient quantities to satisfy the state of emergency, the government of Biden must license it to Merck and every other qualified enterprise that can manufacture it and place large orders. do. There are additional vaccines that can be made available quickly: the $ 40 billion a year hit Johnson & Johnson has one, as well as the $ 23 billion a year weight of AstraZeneca. Safety tests on both of these vaccines were completed months ago. However, the FDA is still reluctant to use its approval. In the AstraZeneca case, the FDA’s insistence on spending another three full months on a test involving 30,000 people before it is approved is particularly pleasing, as the AstraZeneca vaccine has already reached more than 1 million people in the United States. Kingdom was given. there is the issue of testing. Any pandemic can be closed – even without vaccinations – if carriers can be isolated. Quick tests are now available that can identify COVID carriers within 20 minutes. If all U.S. workers are tested once a week, we can send all service providers home, by isolating the virus and keeping businesses open. To do this, 20 million people a day or 30 million a day must be tested if it is done only five days a week. Such a plan extends far beyond the capacity of the official testing sites, which perform an average of about 1 million tests daily. But employers could easily do that by testing all their employees every Monday morning and sending anyone who is positive home (or to an official testing website for confirmation) by 9 p.m. to end a pandemic, we only need to identify carriers to reduce the likelihood of the average carrier infecting another person to less than 1.0. Unfortunately, the FDA has ruled out such use of rapid testing equipment. Instead of banning tests led by employers, the administration of Biden should lead them, and encourage all employers to test. If necessary, the government can even subsidize them; a small fraction of the $ 1.9 billion that Biden proposed in its COVID lighting package would cost $ 10 million businesses $ 10,000 each to buy test equipment. But with or without a subsidy, every businessman I know will set up a program as soon as it’s allowed, because the cost of an infection in the workplace is so much greater. At a time when the virus is mutating into forms that may be able to transcend existing vaccines, it is essential to draw up such a second line of defense that can work regardless of the effectiveness of vaccines. President Biden: You have the will of the public, a press that supports enthusiastically, a thoroughly disorganized opposition and a situation that requires true leadership. The means to end this pandemic are in your hands. You can blame Trump for another quarter of a million deaths, or you can prevent it. The choice is yours.