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Transcript:
About 15 years ago, the dumbest politician to take the national stage up until that point was Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska and, at that time, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate. In 2009, she took to Facebook to bash the Obama Administration’s feeble attempts to provide healthcare to all Americans through the Affordable Care Act. She wrote, in part, “The Democrats promise that a government health care system will reduce the cost of health care, but as the economist Thomas Sowell has pointed out, government health care will not reduce the cost; it will simply refuse to pay the cost. And who will suffer the most when they ration care? The sick, the elderly, and the disabled, of course. The America I know and love is not one in which my parents or my baby with Down Syndrome will have to stand in front of Obama’s “death panel” so his bureaucrats can decide, based on a subjective judgment of their “level of productivity in society,” whether they are worthy of health care. Such a system is downright evil.”
The “death panel” phrase took off like wildfire, despite having no basis in reality. Nearly half of Republicans surveyed said they thought it was true, and the lie nearly derailed the ACA.
Every accusation is a confession, of course, which we knew at the time. It was no secret that the actual “death panels” already existed in the boardrooms of our nation’s health insurance giants. True single payer health insurance would save millions of lives AND dollars, but Republicans have only ever cared about which lobbyist is paying them the most money.
But everything that was just slightly hidden back in 2009 is now fully on display, because over time the Republicans have only become stupider and more shameless. And so now they’re just openly bragging about literally wanting the average American to die: they’re cutting Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, all programs that keep people alive and cost pennies compared to what we spend on, for instance, the bombs dropping on Palestinians. And now they also want us to die from COVID.
Last week, the new psychopaths running the FDA published a piece in the New England Journal of Medicine misleadingly titled, “An Evidence-Based Approach to Covid-19 Vaccination.” It’s misleading because all the evidence we have to date shows that the Covid vaccine, like all the other vaccines currently approved for use in most of the world, is safe and effective. However, the data shows that immunity begins to wane after six months, so an evidence-based approach would be to encourage everyone to get vaccinated twice per year before expected surges, with vaccines continually updated to fight the most recent mutation. And people are more likely to only get one shot at a time, so an evidence-based approach would also see them getting the combined flu/covid vaccine that Moderna was fine tuning. And of course, because we are all safer when we reach herd immunity, everyone who can get a vaccine should get one, without cost.
But none of that is in this paper. In fact, because of this paper, Moderna has shelved their otherwise successful flu/covid vaccine, telling Reuters that they don’t think they’ll get approval now.
Because in this paper, Vinay Presad and Martin Makary announced that they will be restricting access to covid-19 boosters to people over the age of 65 and those “with one or more risk factors that put them at high risk for severe Covid-19 outcomes, as described by the CDC (Figure 2). For all healthy persons — those with no risk factors for severe Covid-19 — between the ages of 6 months and 64 years, the FDA anticipates the need for randomized, controlled trial data evaluating clinical outcomes before Biologics License Applications can be granted. Insofar as possible, when approving a Covid-19 vaccine for high-risk groups, the FDA will encourage manufacturers to conduct randomized, controlled trials in the population of healthy adults as part of their postmarketing commitment.”
Here’s the thing: the Covid vaccines already went through randomized controlled trials in the population of healthy adults. It happened back in 2020, it involved thousands of volunteers, and they were so wildly successful that the TRUMP administration was able to fast track them to the general public. But even in that case, even if pharma companies could do a lightning fast RCT each year, it wouldn’t be fast enough to get the boosters into arms before the disease spikes. Plus, it would be insanely expensive, and because we do not have single payer healthcare here in the US, the pharma companies would pass that expense on to us. And while the RCT is going on, millions of people won’t have access to a vaccine that we know for a fact is safe and effective.
Presad and Makary know all of that, of course. Prasad, who now heads the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research at the FDA, is a hematologist-oncologist and a professor at University of California at San Francisco. He’s not stupid, but as The New Republic noted in a piece last week, he is a disgusting, sadistic monster. On social media, he has called public health leaders “lying…pieces of shit,” accused the CDC of lying about masks, saying that masking during wildfires “is an untreated mental illness plaguing public health,” said covid restrictions are a path to Naziism, and said “[We’d] probably be better off as a result of not having the FDA.” Where he now leads a department.
He told people, “Do not report COVID cases to schools & do not test yourself if you feel ill,” suggesting that it was better for the virus to tear through children, at a time when a thousands kids a day were being hospitalized for the disease. As bad as it was needing to keep kids home from school, it unequivocally saved many lives, of both kids and their caregivers. Prasad’s advice was basically advocating for people to die.
As public health experts have noted, Prasad and Makary also got a lot wrong in their paper, which is impressive considering how short and to the point it is. Sabina Vohra-Miller and Liz Marnik point out that their comparison of the US with other countries’ recommendations on Covid vaccines is screwed up: for most of the countries, they actually list the wrong recommendations entirely or misrepresent them. For instance, just to go in alphabetical order, they say Australia recommends that only people who are 65 years or older, or high risk, should get the Covid booster. But according to the Australian Government’s Department of Health, Disability, and Ageing, “Adults aged 18–64 years who do not have severe immunocompromise are recommended to receive a single primary dose of COVID-19 vaccine, and can consider a further dose every 12 months based on individual preference and a risk-benefit assessment.” Older adults and those who are immunocompromised can consider a booster every SIX months, which, again, is the actual science-based policy. And worth noting that none of these countries outright restricts adults from getting vaccinated, which is what the FDA is now proposing.
Vohra-Miller and Marnik also point out that Prasad and Makary are not recommending the booster for pregnant people, despite the fact that the countries they cite DO, because again, that’s the science-based policy.
So yeah, the FDA is now rotten from the top down and more people absolutely will die from preventable diseases like Covid and the flu because of it. Here’s the only good news I’ve got: that little section of their paper where they write that the only people who can get a booster are those “with one or more risk factors that put them at high risk for severe Covid-19 outcomes, as described by the CDC (Figure 2).” Here’s Figure 2. As you can see, those risk factors include asthma, smoking (current AND former), pregnancy – bit of a contradiction, there – and my personal favorites, obesity, depression, and “physical inactivity.” Wow, is it 2008 and I need to get my weed from a doctor, because boy am I feeling so depressed about quitting smoking that I can’t even get out of bed!
And yes, to be clear, I am suggesting you go out and lie if you have to. I try to stay clear of outright recommending unethical or illegal behavior here, but fuck it, they’ve declared war on you, personally, and you have every right to protect yourself in whatever way you can. Go lie your ass off if that’s what you need to reduce your chances of catching a virus that could negatively impact your lungs, your brain, your employment, your life.
