First, let me say get the COVID vaccine. The only way to get past this virus is either most people catch it or get vaccinated, and vaccination is preferable. So again, get vaccinated.
None of the testing and analysis has been short cut for the vaccines – the decision making and bureaucracy has instead. Gone is the the general foot dragging by the manufacturer while it tries to decide if they can make money after the cost of the testing (clinical trials aren’t cheap) and manufacturing versus what the market will turn out to be plus trying to factor the risk involved. So they tend to go slow while looking at small sets of data trying to decide if the cost of gathering larger sets of data will be worth it. And then the FDA (the government agency that has killed more Americans, even more than the VA) has it’s own ways of slowing everything down – requesting more data, making decisions at a snails pace – because they don’t care about the human toll of delay and disapproval, just the risk they approve something and somehow they get blamed for any problems with it. And even with all that depends on these vaccines they took weeks to schedule meetings or look at data that should have taken days at most.
Nothing really says failure of the government public health apparatus at all levels than these vaccines. The CDC issued guidelines for a crazy multi phased, multi tiered roll out that looks like they started with something put together over a few beers after watching “Contagion”. The plan worries about preserving societal functioning so what job you do moves you up or down in the priority list – Missouri very helpfully assigns morticians and embalmers in the same very high priority group with public health administrators and law enforcement. And then of course equity is a big thing so being homeless or in prison or a member of disproportionately affected populations puts you in phase 2. And then because we love our children Young Adults and Children are in Phase 3 along with another set of important workers. And then it must have dawned on them that COVID is nothing like the fictional virus of Contagion, so they tack on to that unappetizing hodgepodge Long Term Care Facility residents, people over 65, and people with the COVID comorbidities we’ve all come to know and hate. And then they don’t even specify a Phase 4, just leave it implied that someday they’ll get around to the rest of us.
But the fact that COVID was here for like nine months before they issued these guidelines and society is no closer to collapse due to COVID (our politics maybe) didn’t seem to dawn on them, or that our hospitals, not society at large, is what is under pressure from COVID. So despite all these wonderful charts about how COVID deaths and hospitalizations are hugely driven by age and comorbidity (basically people under 50 show very low hospitalization rates with little seasonal variation unlike all the age groups over 50, and the line for 17 and under basically hugs zero), they left in all the pointless generic virus protecting society complexity and young people. It would have been childsplay to use the data we already have to a few levels of who is at most risk of dying/hospitalization based on age and comorbidity. Number one would be LTCF residents, then something like people over 75 and people over 55 with comorbidities, then people over 65 and anyone with comorbidities, then everyone over 50, and then everyone else. That approach would both lower the death toll and relieve the strain on hospitals the quickest, and be easy to understand. It’s crazy, people under 17 should be the last people to get the vaccine, and yet they get a bump in priority.
The actual vaccination program has not gone well (at least it seems now to be better than our contact tracing efforts). First the states seemed totally unprepared for a vaccination program. Some governors would rather waste vaccine than have their priority schemes not followed. And there seems to be 20 million dose disconnect between what the federal government thinks they’ve delivered vs what the states think they’ve received. The target audience is old people, and so of course we use complex websites hastily thrown together to sign up to get vaccinated. And despite the deaths and ravaged economy, can you detect a sense of urgency in the vaccination efforts? I sure can’t. It was like the Warp Speed team had urgency and figured out how to dramatically shorten the time from development to shipment with approval and then turned it over to normal government where it has been business as usual.
Let me say one last time, unlike facial cover wearing, social distancing, lockdowns, and hand washing, these vaccines have actual clinical trials to back them up, both on safety and efficacy – so quit placing your trust in the unproven and get vaccinated.
