(2022-05-12) ZviM Covid 5/12/22 Other Priorities

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 Covid 5/12/22: Other Priorities. There is zero funding for dealing even with the current pandemic, let alone preventing the next one. The FDA not only is in no hurry to approve a vaccine for children, the new highlight is its focus on creating a dire shortage of specialty baby formula. Covid doesn’t kill children, merely causing governments to mandate they not get to have their childhoods, but 40% of formula being out of stock is a much more directly and physically dangerous situation

Executive Summary
Case numbers up, although death numbers still down.
FDA causing specialty baby formula shortage crisis.
Still no funding for anything pandemic related.

The Numbers

Will all these extra cases translate into either new forced prevention measures or a major surge in deaths?

So far the answers to both questions are solidly no, which is great, but we won’t get many new deaths from the cases jump for another few weeks, so it’s too early to know on that front.

The Federal Funding

Even the $10 billion (reallocation of previously allocated Covid funds) compromise fell through. Zero funding.

Coronaviruses, and other potential future pandemics, seem important. It seems important to prevent them. Congress disagrees.

**Of all the studies we did, a large percentage of the value came from one study that cost $10 million, and which was privately funded....mostly (according to Herper) from Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.

Lately I’ve been looking into the more general question of ‘what in-some-sense-realistic policy changes might do the most good on the margin?’ much of which is extremely difficult to quantify and therefore to prioritize. Early in the pandemic, being allowed to learn key facts about Covid-19, or being allowed to develop and deploy helpful things like tests, treatments and vaccinations in reasonable time, would have saved millions of lives and trillions of dollars, and prevented or minimized many massive life disruptions across the board. At this stage, how high a priority these questions have depends on how likely that is to happen again how soon.

Physical World Modeling

Recovery from Omicron variant infection may produce narrow antibodies in a way that vaccination (or the combination of Omicron and vaccination) don’t, perhaps leaving people vulnerable to new variants. Vaccination still a very good idea.

Paxlovid has a strange problem. If you don’t deploy it quickly enough, it will be ineffective. If you deploy it too quickly, your body might not have time to develop its defenses, and then sometimes Covid rebounds afterwards

It’s still only about 2% of cases, but it does happen, and it raises the possibility that resistance to Paxlovid might evolve

Shooting fish in a barrel department presents The FDA’s Extreme Innumeracy. Once again, the J&J vaccine is being limited due to blood clot concerns, where those concerns are size epsilon.

Prevention and Prevention Prevention Prevention

Think of the Children

The younger ones still aren’t legally able to be vaccinated

It’s very scary to hear things like ‘we will probably authorize’ if it is as good as adult vaccines against Omicron. How close a bullet did we dodge with the extreme effectiveness of the vaccine against the original strain? If the vaccine was first developed now, would we even approve it?

In Other News

Many people don’t know about Paxlovid. Many doctors don’t know about Paxlovid, or don’t offer it, or when the patient explicitly asks tell them that they don’t need it and refuse to prescribe it.

Yes, any given patient is highly likely to be fine either way, but this is the opposite of traditional defensive medicine, which makes me wonder. Suppose you tell a patient that is eligible for Paxlovid they ‘don’t need’ Paxlovid, and then they get a severe case of Covid. Would they be able to sue? I notice how I’d be inclined to find if I was on the jury.

Formula For Dying Babies

There’s a shortage of specialty infant formula. Half of all types are unavailable

An infant formula plant shutdown triggered by two infant deaths has created a new nightmare for some parents:

One of my good friends looked into this a bit and isn’t buying that the shortage could be caused by shutting down this one plant. This article’s primary contribution is that the supply chains were already strained before the shutdown due to demand fluctuations on top of supply issues in the wake of the pandemic. It’s certainly a large contributor, and it’s possible without the shutdown we wouldn’t have a problem.

We went out of our way to ensure that the supply of baby formula couldn’t compete against American dairy farmers, and, well, whoops

I don’t get why even people who generally sound even more infuriated about this than I do, like Scott Lincicome, still produce sentences like this first one: These regulatory barriers are probably well-intentioned, but that doesn’t make them any less misguided

Well-intentioned? If your goal is profits for a politically connected set of rent seekers, sure. If your goal is anything else, I notice I am confused what these intentions are and how they could be defined as falling under this category of ‘well.’

Then we created a system whereby a large portion of all formula is heavily (as in >90%) subsidized from a legally mandated single-source, which happens to be the single source that got shut down

guess who is once again going to cause children to not be able to get nutrition and potentially die from that? That’s right. The FDA. Who shut down the plant after two deaths. Then kept it closed, citing ‘health code violations,

One solution would be to import formula from the highly dangerous Europe and Canada, but as noted above that’s not permitted.

*Meanwhile, what is law enforcement up to?

In a separate incident last year, Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) bragged in a press release about seizing 588 cases of baby formula that violated other FDA regulations. The seized formulas were made by HiPP and Holle brands, which are based in Germany and the Netherlands, respectively. Both are widely and legally sold in Europe and around the rest of the world.*

So things they are not going to allow while doing ‘everything in their power’ to fix the problem they themselves are causing include: Letting anyone enter the market, letting known-safe formulas approved elsewhere into the USA, waiving procedures of any kind beyond ‘minor labeling issues’ or letting the Abbott Nutrition plant resume production or any at-scale distribution on any known time scale.

Tariffs Delenda Est, longstanding but never-highlighted group member, especially when they’re on things like specialty baby formulas and solar panels we’re now going to build less of than we were under the Trump administration thanks to worries about retroactive 240% tariffs, no really

Earlier, it turns out… there may not have ever been a contaminated product at all? The worst blow came in February, when Abbott Nutrition recalled formula made in its Sturgis, Mich., plant. Two babies who drank formula from the plant died of bacterial infections, and others were hospitalized. Although bacteria wasn’t found in the samples they drank, Abbott announced the recall as a precaution.