National Review
Biden must stop blaming Trump and act to fight the pandemic
At current rates, the new Biden administration is on track to oversee an additional 250,000 coronavirus deaths and an additional 15 million infections in the first 100 days. The Biden camp responded to this catastrophe with a full court press to blame the Trump administration. I would be the last to challenge charges of incompetence directed at the way the Trump gang handled the pandemic. But the ball stops Biden now, and interpreting the disaster as someone else’s fault will simply not be enough. Fortunately for Biden, there are actions that his government can take now that can save hundreds of thousands of American lives and possibly millions around the world. Let’s start with vaccines. The FDA – after a delay that was, under the circumstances, extremely excessive – approved two vaccines for use in the United States. The Pfizer vaccine was developed with company money. The development of the Modern vaccine, however, was funded by the United States government, which means that we taxpayers have the rights to it. So why are we limiting your production to Moderna? Moderna is a very innovative company and deserves many credits for developing a highly effective vaccine against COVID-19 in two days in January 2020. But within the $ 1.3 trillion a year pharmaceutical industry, Moderna stands out as one pygmy among the giants. In 2019, Moderna’s total revenue from the sale of medicines was $ 187 million. In contrast, the top 20 American pharmaceutical companies, starting with Roche with $ 48 billion in 2019 revenue and continuing to Biogen with $ 11.3 billion, collectively have Moderna’s production capacity thousands of times. To give an example, Merck, which has given up its own vaccine development effort, alone has more than 200 times the modern drug production capacity. Instead of waiting months or years for little Moderna to produce its – or rather, ours – vaccine in sufficient quantities to meet the emergency, the Biden administration should license it to Merck and all other qualified companies that can produce it. , and place large orders. There are additional vaccines that could be made available quickly: the heavy $ 40 billion / year Johnson & Johnson launcher has one, as does the average $ 23 billion / year AstraZeneca. Safety tests on both vaccines were completed months ago. However, the FDA is still dragging on to approve them for use. In the case of AstraZeneca, the FDA’s insistence on spending another three death-filled months on a test involving 30,000 people before giving approval is particularly irritating, as the AstraZeneca vaccine has already been given to more than 1 million people in the UK. In addition to vaccines, there is the question of testing. Any pandemic can be ended – even without vaccines – if the carriers can be isolated. Rapid tests are now available that can identify COVID carriers in 20 minutes. If all American workers were tested once a week, we could send all carriers home, isolating the virus and keeping businesses open. This would require testing 20 million people a day, or 30 million a day if it were done just five days a week. This plan is well beyond the capacity of official test sites, which, in full operation, are doing an average of about 1 million tests daily. But employers could easily manage it, testing all their employees every Monday morning and sending anyone who has a positive result home (or to an official testing site for confirmation) around 9 am. It is true that such a program would not catch every case, but to end a pandemic, all we have to do is identify enough carriers to reduce the likelihood that the average carrier will infect another person to less than 1.0. Unfortunately, the FDA has ruled out using rapid test equipment. Rather than banning employer-driven testing, the Biden administration needs to lead it and expressly encourage all employers to undertake testing efforts. If necessary, the government can even subsidize them; paying 10 million companies $ 10,000 each to buy test equipment would cost just $ 100 billion, a small fraction of the $ 1.9 trillion that Biden proposed in his COVID relief package. But, with or without a subsidy, every entrepreneur I know would be quick to implement such a program as soon as it was authorized, because the cost of an infection in the workplace is much higher. At a time when the virus is turning into forms that may be able to bypass existing vaccines, it is necessary to establish a second line of defense that can work regardless of the effectiveness of the vaccines. President Biden: You have the public’s goodwill, a press that supports you with enthusiasm, a totally disorganized opposition and a situation that requires real leadership. The means to end this pandemic are in your hands. You can blame Trump for another quarter of a million deaths or you can avoid them. It’s your choice.