Be prepared: a COVID vaccine is coming before the election
The FDA and the CDC aren't going to ensure that it's safe or effective
The political takeover of what should be trusted government agencies is accelerating, and the media is completely incapable of covering what’s happening.
If you haven’t been paying much attention to the mess happening with the FDA and the CDC, now is the time to start getting engaged.
You can’t trust the CDC or the FDA about a COVID vaccine.
You also can’t trust the New York Times to inform you with their coverage.
The CDC will start vaccinating before the election, come hell or high water
Robert Redfield, the director of the CDC, just sent a letter to governors telling them to blow off state requirements to approve vaccine distribution sites before November 1, 2020.
Take a look at the letter. Reading it should give you chills:
The CDC doesn’t care if a vaccine is safe or effective as long as it can be distributed before Election Day.
If I sound like an alarmist, it’s because I’m really alarmed!
And you should be too!
The people who are supposed to be in charge of protecting us and ensuring that approved treatments are safe and effective don’t seem to care that much about either!
The FDA may approve a vaccine before Phase 3 trials are finished
The news that Scott Hahn at the FDA is considering approving a vaccine before phase 3 trials is incredibly concerning.
We had a brief moment of controversy a month or so ago about vaccinating people before Phase 3 trials had been complete.
There was a Forbes editorial arguing that we should distribute vaccines before the trials establishing their safety and efficacy were completed that create a huge pushback including thousands of comments on Twitter and a New York Times Op-Ed.
Steven Salzberg, the author of this controversial Forbes piece, read the critiques of his piece and did something that’s almost unheard of in the media climate of today: He admitted he was wrong:
There are several risks that I didn’t emphasize sufficiently. One is that although phase 1 and 2 trials establish safety, they don’t tell the whole story. Phase 3 also looks at safety, and because many more subjects are involved, Phase 3 can identify less-common side effects that might still be very bad. (One example is ADE, which can make a viral illness worse than it would otherwise be.) These less-common side effects are a big risk of moving too quickly.
Another risk is that of trust: as many people pointed out on Twitter, if we expand the distribution of vaccines too quickly, and then the vaccine doesn’t work, we may seriously undermine the public’s trust in any eventual vaccine that really does work. That in turn will reduce the number of people willing to be vaccinated, which could cause serious harm to public health.
Media coverage about this misleads more than it informs
Take a look at this screenshot from the New York Times website:
The headline “States Should Prepare for Possible Virus Vaccine by November, CDC Says” certainly describes what is literally happening, but it totally ignores central message that needs to be conveyed, the insidious political influence on what should be a data-driven, scientific process.
The people who run the Times should be aware that a headline is more important than the article within it.
Headlines don’t just influence whether people read an article, they also impact what information people take from the article.
When you write a headline that announces what’s happening without providing any context about what it means, you do your readers a real disservice.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when I was working in the ICU, I was truly scared about COVID, but I had hope that things would get better.
Now my fear of the virus has been overtaken by two other fears:
Fear of the way that the FDA and the CDC are betraying the trust we’ve placed in them to safeguard us during this most vulnerable time.
Fear that the media will continue to present us with information devoid of context so that the public isn’t actually informed about what’s happening.
As a wise man once said, things are worse than ever.
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