DRAFT FOR PROJECT SYNDICATE: Public Health Still Needs to Be in Command
An early draft for subscribers: The bottom line for policy should still be what it was last August: needles-into-arms, as many as possible as fast as possible
The last four months have made it very clear that the globe now faces two additional disasters, together making the current plague two orders of magnitude worse than it had to be. First, the plague’s uncontrolled spread has triggered the evolution of the Delta variant, 2-3 times as virulent and 1.5-2 times as deadly as the original. Second, while global-north governments have did commit the resources to vaccinate themselves in 2021, they have not committed the resources to ramp-up high-quality vaccine production to a level that would vaccinate the globe in 2021. Moreover, they have not yet grappled with the consequences of likely erosion after nine months of both infection-acquired and vaccine immunity.
Thus it is too early to focus attention on the post-plague world economy.
Public health should be in command.
Keeping the economic engine running and avoiding a mass increase in poverty as the Delta variant sweeps its way through—those should be our economic focus right now. Restoring economies to some “normalcy” of full employment after we have achieved some combination of vaccine- and acquired-herd immunity? That is a task best delayed. We cannot know now what state the world economy will be in six months, which will determine what policies are appropriate. And it is certainly inappropriate right now to call for policies to “cool down” the world economy in order to avoid some shadowy future inflationary spiral, or some return of bond-market vigilantes. The coming of the Delta variant should be met by not cooling but warming.
Our ignorance–or at least my ignorance, and the general ignorance, for those with truly informed opinions are not broadcasting them loudly enough to get through the noise—is immense with respect to what the likely ranges are of the key numbers needed to understand the shape of the plague on a global scale. All I find I can do is look at petri dishes:
The United Kingdom serves as a first petri dish. Bad luck, incompetence, and carelessness—widespread, for Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson did not do this all on his own, even given his modus operandi of b.s.ing and lying to somehow fail upward—has gotten the U.K. to a situation in which more than 90% of residents now have detectable antibodies. Only **% have been vaccinated. This was a very expensive way to get to herd immunity: 130,000 dead, 0.2% of the population. But at least in the last wave only 3000 have died.
The well-performing countries of East Asia are a second petri dish. Their plague-spread control mechanisms are cracking under the pressure of the Delta variant. Their measures were best-in-world. It thus seems likely that these measures’ use is limited to buying time for universal vaccination programs.
Perhaps the United States is a third petri dish. The lesson here is not the British lesson that an inept government can, with the power of global-north pharma biotech behind it, can stumble into herd immunity at hideous human cost. The lesson here is not that virtually any infection-suppression régime is outmatched by this evolving plague virus. The lesson from the U.S.’s 600,000 deaths—with it looks like another 100,000 to come—is different.
We all confront the message we all have heard from Fox News and others: “Superman-President Donald Trump quarterbacked the incredibly successful warp-speed project that performed medical biotech miracles and created a highly effective vaccine against a disease that is just the flu and we should never have worn masks that, moreover, is a Chinese bioweapon funded by Dr. Fauci who constantly gave Trump bad advice about this gigantic hoax for which the medical establishment is suppressing information about the truly useful medications that fight this dangerous plague: ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and hydrogen peroxide.”
The terrifying thing—for now and for the future—is that a quarter of the American population hears this thought-salad and finds in it somewhere, somehow, sufficient reason to shy away from the extremely effective and extremely safe vaccine and run a 1% risk of death. A country In which a malevolent and cynical media can trigger such psychological fractures for a quarter of the population to wreak such damage Is likely to be vulnerable to and fall victim to even more vicious and destructive psychological hacking attacks in the future, even if they are motivated at bottom I nothing more than a desire to sell more ads.
The bottom line? It is the same as it has been last August, when the ongoing stage three trials first suggested that the messenger RNA vaccines were huge successes. The bottom line is: cut the bureaucracy and open the money spigots to mobilize as many resources as are needed to get high-quality vaccines into every arm in the world as fast as possible. Sort out the financing later. Sort out the final regulatory approval later. It has been a year since we got the news the biochemist-wizards of Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, and company really had given us the tools to beat this thing.
(Remember: You can subscribe to this… weblog-like newsletter… here:
There’s a free email list. There’s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.)
DRAFT FOR PROJECT SYNDICATE: Public Health Still Needs to Be in Command
I think it would be a great idea to vaccinate everyone on the planet in short order, but I'm curious about who would be producing the vaccine assuming the IP issues were dealt with. China and India, the two most likely producers, have been producing their own vaccines with varying levels of success. Neither has been in talks with Pfizer or Moderna with regards to licensing production of mRNA vaccines. Judging from what I've read in the journal Science and online, it isn't clear that they could build the necessary production facilities and operate at the necessary level. Alternatives would include other US or European producers, Russia, Israel, maybe Japan, but I'm not really sure of who else.
The AstraZeneca vaccine can be produced using a simpler technology and at a more modest cost, perhaps $10 for a two dose course as opposed to $30 for an mRNA vaccine. As of July, AZ has been producing the vaccine in Thailand, but is only producing 15M doses per month due to production problems. I'm guessing this will improve as the kinks are worked out, but vaccine production is hard, even for people who know how.
Absolutely agree that the vaccine must be produced in sufficient volume to vaccinate the globe. Part of the problem is intransigence of Big Pharma (and Germany) to waive IP and allow manufacture elsewhere. I well recall pharma saying it would take too long to do this, so no need. But many months have passed, the world is still far behind in getting vaccinated and it is now clear, to me at least, that this is mainly about control of IP and profits. Pfizer wanting to charge for booster shots is about putting profits ahead of wellbeing. The mentality of arms dealers.
It is also pretty clear that the shortage of workers is probably due workers fed up with low pay and being exposed to potentially hazardous situations. Not just exposure to Covid, but by customers who will hurt employees for trying to do their jobs. I have heard a lot about middle managers who are insisting a return to work in offices to maintain their micromanaging behaviors. Naturally, office real estate owners are talking their book saying there is a rush back to offices, and I am sure I have detected planted articles about lost productivity with remote work when the anecdotal experiences of those I talk to reveals the very opposite. I have no doubt that commercial real estate owners who are mortgaged to the hilt are worrying about calls on their loans as happened during the early 1990s recession in California, and again in after the Nasdaq collapse in 2000, and 2008/9.
It would really be nice to see wholesale changes in working conditions and benefits in the US, such as happened after the Black Death in Europe. US workers seem to be generally ignorant of working conditions and benefits in EU countries, wedded to the propaganda that the USA is best in everything and therefore elsewhere must be worse.