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I'm sorry you're being downvoted. The testing disaster killed far more than this vaccine approval delay has killed and it's infuriating that nobody seems to car

I'm sorry you're being downvoted. The testing disaster killed far more than this vaccine approval delay has killed and it's infuriating that nobody seems to care. They shut down testing back when we needed it most, allowing us to pretend there was no spread in the US for far too long: https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/27/coronavirus-testing-seattle-bill-gates-fda/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/05/27/coronavirus-testing-seat... They spent far too long before approving any kind of at-home testing and to this day have not approved most rapid testing. Three weeks ago the EUA was submitted, so three weeks ago there was an entire team of people at pfizer who had reviewed all the data and were confident FDA would approve the application, but somehow nobody at FDA was part of that set of people. In any reasonable process that application would have contained no new information, if it contained any new information they were not communicating closely enough. I understand spending a few days doing some final checks on the data before approving. Three weeks, however, is suspiciously long. It's possible they were in fact doing important work which could not possibly have been done before the application was submitted, but nobody seems able to articulate what that important work actually was.

refurb 6y ago
A shitty test with 60% accuracy can make things worse than they already are.. People are making decisions based on results that are right barely half the time. I don’t blame the FDA for saying “no”. I love HN who is normally vehemently anti-business (with good reason) suddenly flips and says “well Pfizer said the vaccine was ok, isn’t that good enough?” No. It’s not good enough. The reason we spend billions per year on the FDA is because we want an independent, critical and evidence based body making decisions on drugs given to hundreds of millions of Americans. I mean, hell, Trump was bullying the FDA (which was stupid) and HN seems to be arguing for that exact thing.
- brian_cloutier 6y ago
  There probably exist universes where a shitty test would make things worse. How are you so sure we're in that universe? And how are you so sure that the unapproved tests are so shitty that you're not at all curious whether the FDA made the right choice? Nowhere in my comment did I say the FDA should just take Pfizer's word for anything. I'm also not sure why you're trying to use Trump's actions as evidence here. "Trump did a thing and therefore doing that thing was the correct action" is an argument which requires some justification.

refurb 6y ago

A shitty test with 60% accuracy can make things worse than they already are.. People are making decisions based on results that are right barely half the time. I don’t blame the FDA for saying “no”. I love HN who is normally vehemently anti-business (with good reason) suddenly flips and says “well Pfizer said the vaccine was ok, isn’t that good enough?” No. It’s not good enough. The reason we spend billions per year on the FDA is because we want an independent, critical and evidence based body making decisions on drugs given to hundreds of millions of Americans. I mean, hell, Trump was bullying the FDA (which was stupid) and HN seems to be arguing for that exact thing.

brian_cloutier 6y ago
There probably exist universes where a shitty test would make things worse. How are you so sure we're in that universe? And how are you so sure that the unapproved tests are so shitty that you're not at all curious whether the FDA made the right choice? Nowhere in my comment did I say the FDA should just take Pfizer's word for anything. I'm also not sure why you're trying to use Trump's actions as evidence here. "Trump did a thing and therefore doing that thing was the correct action" is an argument which requires some justification.