Views from the Outside

 While the Trump administration was very aggressive at vaccine development and approval, the administration was more than willing to let the FDA stand in the way of any potential treatments.  The FDA actually banned some potentially effective treatments, which never made sense to me. In my mind, a treatment is far more valuable than a vaccine, and I suspect a lot of people feel the same way.  I don't have a survey to prove what people think, but I have numbers to make my case and I suspect a lot of people intuitively feel the same way. To start, let's say that I have two groups to 100 people who each has an equal change of some Bad Thing happening to them, but it hasn't happened yet.  The Bad Thing could be catching a virus or getting cancer or anything else.  Now let's say that I have a Prevention that will reduce the risk of the Bad Thing.  That could be a vaccine or a Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention or diet and exercise or anything else, and I give the P...

 I am going to take a break from the rona rant for a logorrheic post about the requirements for justice to have been done.  And specifically the requirements for a victim to feel that justice has been done. I want to take the case of Jeffrey Epstein as an example.  Jeffrey Epstein was a accused of running a massive underaged female sex-trafficking ring.  Specifically, he would find teenaged (post puberty) girls and employ them as ... I don't know what to call them.  They frequently refer to themselves as "sex slaves" but that doesn't sound right to me, as Epstein apparently paid them pretty well (at least the ones that I've read about and were featured on various podcasts).  "Prostitute" doesn't sound right either because prostitution implies maybe more willingness than these girls possessed.  "Victims", for sure.  Anyway, these girls were available for sex and according to the story, Epstein would make these girls available for his high-po...

 In early 2020 as the virus was raging but people still didn't know how long it would be with us or what the total impact would be, then-President Donald Trump announced "Operation Warp Speed" which would speed up development and production of vaccines against the virus. Operation Warp Speed had a few components to it The FDA would be strong-armed into actually doing something to improve the lives of Americans, rather than its normal role of preventing sick Americans from getting the help they need. The Government would pre-purchase millions of doses of any promising vaccine as a way of encouraging companies to put the effort into developing it. Since the vaccine was purchased with public dollars, the vaccines would be free to all eligible Americans. All of this would happen before the end of the 2020. This program was met with immediate skepticism.  Normally, the development of a vaccine takes years.  Even accounting for the fact that the FDA would get out of the way, de...