As I write this on December 17, the US Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee is meeting to review a COVID-19 vaccine developed by biotech company Moderna. Likely outcome: The panel will recommend approval of the vaccine to FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen M. Hahn.

My question: What took so long, and why?

As David Wallace-Wells reports at New York magazine, Moderna completed design of its vaccine on January 13 — only two days after the virus’s genetic sequence was released to the public by Professor Yong-Zhen Zhang of Shanghai’s Fudan University and before any US cases of the virus had been confirmed.

By May, Phase I clinical trials had established the vaccine’s apparent safety.

Seven months later, we’re finally about to get the vaccine (as well as one by Pfizer, approved earlier in December and based on the same “messenger RNA” approach).

Yes, the FDA’s brief is to approve drugs based on two standards: Safety and efficacy.

And yes, more time spent testing for both safety and efficacy produces more trustworthy results.

But federal, state, and local government officials have been telling us, since at least as far back as March, that the COVID-19 pandemic is an emergency, and most people seem to agree with the claim.

In an emergency, we do things we normally wouldn’t do, the immediate circumstance being so dire that we’re willing to accept risks we usually wouldn’t accept. Getting through, and out of, the emergency is the most important thing. Business as usual goes out the window.

That’s what government always tells us when it wants to do something on an “emergency” basis. In the case of COVID-19, governments seized broad powers to shut down whole sectors of the economy and place untold millions of Americans under de facto house arrest though those Americans were accused of no crime.

Business closures. Capacity limits. Mask mandates. Travel bans. You name it, there was nothing governments weren’t willing to do to address the emergency.

Except give up any of their own power.

At every step, the US medical response to COVID-19 has been constrained by “you must first ask if it please the Crown” considerations. Not just with respect to vaccine development, but even to the long-accepted practice of “off-label” prescribing of existing drugs —  for example,  hydroxychloroquine, FDA-approved  since 1955.

COVID-19 has killed more than 300,000 Americans , more than 2/3 of them since the end of May, by which time the Moderna vaccine was deemed safe.

How many of those deaths might have been avoided if FDA had allowed Moderna to begin selling, and health providers to begin administering, the vaccine six months ago?

And when, if ever, will foot-dragging regulators be held responsible for those avoidable deaths?

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

In Joe Biden’s “Emergency Action Plan to Save the Economy,” the president-elect proposes to “[f]orgive a minimum of $10,000 per person of federal student loans.”

Wait, some protest. That would be a subsidy for the more well-off, at the expense of the less well-off. They have a point.  “[D]ebt relief overall, the New York Times notices, “would disproportionately benefit middle- to upper-class college graduates … especially those who attended elite and expensive institutions, and people with lucrative professional credentials like law and medical degrees.”

In truth, I don’t have a big problem with student loan forgiveness.

Student loan debtors have a better case than most for relief. They spent their entire young lives being told they absolutely must go to college, and then got lured into borrowing money to do so precisely because the loans were “guaranteed” by the government, please don’t read the fine print. They got caught in a long con, put over on them by Big Government, Big Finance, and Big Education.

I’d rather see “forgiveness” done by treating student debt just like other debt in bankruptcy proceedings than just automatically writing it off and billing the taxpayers. If Donald Trump can escape the consequences of his poor business judgment no fewer than six times through bankruptcy, surely student borrowers deserve one bite at that legal apple.

But let’s talk about the “poorer people subsidizing wealthier people” complaint. “The majority of student debt,” Kevin D. Williamson notes at National Review, “is held by relatively high-income people, poor people mostly are not college graduates, and those who attended college but did not graduate hold relatively little college-loan debt, etc. ”

Student loan debt is hardly unique in that respect. Due to life expectancy differentials, low-income black males subsidize the retirements of “middle class” white women through the Social Security system. The primary beneficiaries of food stamp and school lunch programs are large farms and agriculture enterprises, not poor families and students. “Defense” spending is partly corporate welfare for contractors and partly a “workfare” jobs program for, mostly, “middle class” youth.

The main function of the state is to redistribute wealth from the productive class to the political class. That’s inherently an upward redistribution, and the “middle class” is half-fish, half-fowl: Partly productive class, partly a hodgepodge of political constituencies well-positioned to grab a share of the grift as bribes for their continuing support.

The difference between most of those “middle class” constituencies and student loan debtors is that, whatever their economic class, most of those debtors were young and naive when they were drawn into a scam that was really about funneling big money to banks and schools, not about equipping them for success.

We, their elders, enjoy no such excuse.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“2020: The Worst Year Ever,” reads the cover of Time magazine’s December 14 issue.

“There have been worse years in U.S. history,” admits author Stephanie Zacharek, but not, to her way of thinking, since World War Two.  Between a heavy hurricane and fire season, police violence and the accompanying protests, a circus of a presidential election, and a global pandemic, Zacharek opines, none but the oldest among us can remember a year nearly as bad.

Just how bad a given year was is, of course, a matter of opinion, but Zacharek’s opinion on 2020 strikes me as overwrought in a way that’s becoming increasingly typical of whiny American poor-us-ism.

Lately it seems everything has to be described in a superlative manner. Natural disaster. War. Police violence. Political craziness. You name it, we just can’t seem to accept that it’s part of a continuum. Everything absolutely, positively must be the mostest or the worstest of its kind, ever.

I don’t remember World War Two. I don’t even remember 1968. But that particular year lived on in our collective memory strongly enough, for long enough, that I remember (and sometimes still see) the shudders of those who lived through it.  Some high points:

In January, nearly 400 people died and thousands were injured in an earthquake in Sicily. North Korean forces seized the USS Pueblo. The Tet Offensive began in Vietnam.

In February, police killed three students at a civil rights protest in Orangeburg, South Carolina.

In March, American troops murdered somewhere between 350 and 500 unarmed civilians at My Lai in Vietnam.

On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots ensued.

In May, seven weeks of mass unrest began in France and at least 46 tornadoes struck At least 46 tornadoes struck ten US states in one night, killing dozens  and injuring thousands.

In June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles, California.

July saw the first recorded cases in the 1968 H3N2 flu epidemic, which killed somewhere between 1 million and 4 million worldwide and as many as 100,000 in the United States (no, not as many as COVID-19, but the population of the US was less than 2/3 what it is now). It also saw four days of rioting in Cleveland, Ohio after a four-hour gun battle between police and the Black Nationalists of New Libya left seven dead.

In August, more than 200 died in an earthquake in the Philippines, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, and police rioted at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, abducting and injuring hundreds.

In October, soldiers opened fire on a protest in Mexico City, killing between 350 and 400, and 30 years of “The Troubles” kicked off after police in Derry, (Northern) Ireland,  truncheoned civil rights protesters.

Yes, 2020 has been a pretty crappy year, but let’s try to keep a little perspective here. There’s never been a year that some people didn’t think — at the time — was the worse year ever. And even if you can’t think of a single good thing about 2020 right now, I can point at least one out for you: It’s almost over.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY