12/23/2023 0 Comments Having an aha moment![]() ![]() A month earlier there was zero chance the vaccine wouldn't be approved. But you have to run trials and analyze the data, and that takes time, we said. Conservatives (mostly) could hardly shut up about how the FDA was a broken agency and there was no excuse for its sludge-like approval of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. Am I being harsh? You damn well bet I am, and it's because the public reaction to the original vaccine approval pissed me off so much. More to the point, though, is that everyone who's not an idiot already knew about the tradeoff between speed and safety. ![]() This is the same logic that's driving the fast approval of the Omicron boosters. It is assumed (correctly) that since the basic vaccine is safe, every possible combination of the vaccine against various strains of the flu is also safe. Now, we live in a world where ongoing booster mandates in some localities would oblige citizens to take a medicine that was never tested on humans or forfeit their access to public accommodations.įirst off, Dougherty is wrong: Every year we all get flu vaccines that have never been tested on humans. The faster that medicines are rolled out, and the less oversight they receive, the more room you have to make for public mistrust and doubt.Ī very short time ago, it was nearly unthinkable to approve new vaccines without human trials. But there is another side to the story, which is trust. They viewed the slow pace of the regulators as an impediment to discovery, innovation, and iteration. There was a libertarian and conservative vision of how the FDA should operate: more liberally, and faster please. There’s a catch though: These boosters have been tested only on mice, not on humans. Michael Brendan Dougherty fills us in on the FDA's rapid approval of the Omicron boosters: We now have booster shots aimed at the Omicron strains of COVID-19, and suddenly conservatives are realizing there's a downside to their endless yammering about how the FDA moves too damn slow.
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