(2021-04-09) Zvi M Covid0409 Another Vaccine Passport Objection

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 4/9: Another Vaccine Passport Objection. As people take more risks and the new strains dominate, we’ve settled into about a 10% week over week growth in positive rates, but due to vaccinations death rates continue to decline.

Vaccination rates have stalled out in America, but at 3 million shots a day, which will still get us there pretty soon. Unless something unexpectedly makes our situation worse, we should reach the tipping point on vaccinations within a month or two

The Numbers

I am confused by the continuing decline in test counts. It’s faster than the rate of new vaccinations, and the number of cases isn’t declining. I haven’t seen a good explanation. Seems like an important piece of the puzzle

Vaccinations were not prioritized perfectly, but they were prioritized well, and they protect even better against death than infection. It makes sense that deaths continue to decline

Vaccinations

Risk to the Unvaccinated

If you are not vaccinated, the current level of risk out there is much higher than the graphs and charts naively imply. On top of that, the cost of getting Covid now is much higher than it was earlier

Did the FDA Get One Right?

Two weeks ago, I noted that the FDA hadn’t even approved Emergent to make the J&J vaccinate, and that this was holding up production

Then the week afterwards, the world learned that Emergent had put ingredients for the AstraZeneca vaccine into a batch of Johnson & Johnson vaccine, running the entire batch of 15 million doses

It’s hard to argue against the claim that if someone refuses to give someone else approval to do something, and the next week they massively screw up doing it, and also it turns out they’ve had similar (if I presume less dramatic) issues in the past, that the refusal to approve has to look at least somewhat reasonable

Did the FDA’s refusal to give approval to Emergent prevent a disaster?

I have not seen any details on how the error was noticed, so we can’t be certain of the counterfactual, but my very very strong prior is that this error gets caught in all worlds

My model says that’s not how the FDA is even trying to prevent this mistake when it withholds approval. The FDA’s strategy for withholding approval is to force Johnson & Johnson to use a better manufacturer using better procedures

What is interesting is that this didn’t happen. That’s the part that’s still baffling me.

By tying everyone’s hands and delaying things across the board, and generally constraining the range of possible actions and actors, my guess is the FDA made this disaster more likely. They definitely made it more of a problem, because without them we’d be way ahead of the current schedule for vaccine production across the board. Certainly ‘catching this’ does not justify the red tape they’ve thrown over vaccines and also everything else.

In Other NewsCovid 4/9: Another Vaccine Passport Objection

As people take more risks and the new strains dominate, we’ve settled into about a 10% week over week growth in positive rates, but due to vaccinations death rates continue to decline.

Vaccination rates have stalled out in America, but at 3 million shots a day, which will still get us there pretty soon. Unless something unexpectedly makes our situation worse, we should reach the tipping point on vaccinations within a month or two

The Numbers

I am confused by the continuing decline in test counts. It’s faster than the rate of new vaccinations, and the number of cases isn’t declining. I haven’t seen a good explanation. Seems like an important piece of the puzzle

Vaccinations were not prioritized perfectly, but they were prioritized well, and they protect even better against death than infection. It makes sense that deaths continue to decline

Vaccinations

Risk to the Unvaccinated

If you are not vaccinated, the current level of risk out there is much higher than the graphs and charts naively imply. On top of that, the cost of getting Covid now is much higher than it was earlier

Did the FDA Get One Right?

Two weeks ago, I noted that the FDA hadn’t even approved Emergent to make the J&J vaccinate, and that this was holding up production

Then the week afterwards, the world learned that Emergent had put ingredients for the AstraZeneca vaccine into a batch of Johnson & Johnson vaccine, running the entire batch of 15 million doses

It’s hard to argue against the claim that if someone refuses to give someone else approval to do something, and the next week they massively screw up doing it, and also it turns out they’ve had similar (if I presume less dramatic) issues in the past, that the refusal to approve has to look at least somewhat reasonable

Did the FDA’s refusal to give approval to Emergent prevent a disaster?

I have not seen any details on how the error was noticed, so we can’t be certain of the counterfactual, but my very very strong prior is that this error gets caught in all worlds

My model says that’s not how the FDA is even trying to prevent this mistake when it withholds approval. The FDA’s strategy for withholding approval is to force Johnson & Johnson to use a better manufacturer using better procedures

What is interesting is that this didn’t happen. That’s the part that’s still baffling me.

By tying everyone’s hands and delaying things across the board, and generally constraining the range of possible actions and actors, my guess is the FDA made this disaster more likely. They definitely made it more of a problem, because without them we’d be way ahead of the current schedule for vaccine production across the board. Certainly ‘catching this’ does not justify the red tape they’ve thrown over vaccines and also everything else.