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January 22 - February 1, 2024
The federal government lost trust and credibility early, by its inability to accurately convey the true scope of the hazard. The lack of reliable information on COVID’s spread, and the inability of people to access testing, degraded the integrity of the response.
Grogan and Pottinger.
If flu cases were starting to fall prematurely, past trends might no longer have been a reliable baseline.
aversion to testing was also organic inside the CDC.
Two of the biggest failures was the CDC’s overestimation of the risk of spread from contaminated surfaces, and its underestimation of the risk from asymptomatic transmission. The two errors were mutually dependent.
asymptomatic transmission has never been the driver of outbreaks.
Asymptomatic spread played an especially large role in transmission from, and among, younger people.
Matthew Pottinger and others had urged restricting travel from Europe much earlier than our March 11 ban
decline in demand for these economic products, which further erodes their supply.27
was from this article that the FDA also learned, for the first time, that only three of the more than one hundred public health labs had figured out how to get the CDC test to work.
The next day, the FDA heard that the labs were destroying the original kits,
I was the first FDA commissioner to use the platform, the first commissioner even to have an account.
In late March, the CDC went so far as to edit an article that was slated for publication in a science journal, to remove a passage inserted by a Washington State public health official that called for widespread testing at senior assisted-living facilities.
Deborah Birx convinced the Coronavirus Task Force to direct money to the CDC to modernize its reporting of the COVID hospital data, but the CDC said no.
Birx said that the government couldn’t ship scarce doses of the valuable medicine to treat estimated patients that were hypothetically hospitalized
reporting actual data on their total daily hospitalizations to a new portal that Birx had helped set up inside HHS.
hospital admission data. In an unfortunate twist, the CDC declined to work with the new data,
the data collected by the healthcare analytics company TeleTracking Technologies; the software technology company Palantir helped build and manage the database.
dominant narrative that the CDC was seeing its role obstructed and reduced by the political leadership at HHS and the White House.
the CDC didn’t want to turn over the sequencing work to outside labs; they
Some members told me that they were concerned that issuing a call to wear masks would be interpreted by people as an indication that it was safe to go out, so long as you wore a mask.
CDC was concerned that the flight personnel did not know how to properly fit the masks,
He could have couched it in a way that appealed to his political supporters while appealing to the nation to take more public health precautions.
he had agreed to do so only after finding a mask that he believed looked sharp: dark blue and emblazoned with the presidential seal.
social cohesion that made people more willing to engage in collective actions to advance societal interests.
manufacturing for some of our most important medicines to a small number of geographically concentrated sites.
To help fulfill that promise, it had created a domestic network of hardened manufacturing sites and distributed these facilities around the nation.
the CDC exerted tight control over the access to the viral samples that test makers needed and didn’t allow labs to go forward with their own tests without first getting permission from the agency.
CDC can effectively maintain a monopoly on the development and design of tests through its control over the access to viral samples and the power to determine which labs and companies are authorized to manufacture a test
Knowing how the change in blood sugar might impact that outcome is secondary to the key question we’re trying to answer.
had been fully disproved.27 A devotion had formed around the drug’s perceived benefits, which was initially promoted on Twitter by some investors and tech executives,
Privately, those around the commissioner said that the decision to issue the EUA was driven by pressure from officials at HHS,
Oracle wanted protection from liability, and that’s where the EUA came
A politically appointed agency head has a twin obligation to educate political leaders about an agency’s prerogatives and to maintain the delicate line between an agency’s core mission and the political goals of elected officials.
Trump wryly described himself as a “germaphobe”
“Most biotech companies prepare for disruptions in manufacturing by freezing and stockpiling enough of their most profitable drugs to last about two years. Why not pay these plants to use their capacity for antibody production?
unsanitary conditions, peeling paint in manufacturing suites, and inadequate handling of medical waste.
To provide protective immunity, most vaccines will try to induce sustained and high levels of circulating antibodies.
our own bodies become unwitting manufacturing plants for producing the spike.
Rather than relying on vats of cell cultures and big production facilities to make copies of the virus, making the vaccine construct with the mRNA approach could essentially be a chemical process with no animal or cellular components.
The mRNA approach could also provide a more reliable way to manufacture the vaccine in large quantities without relying on millions of chicken eggs.
Bourla wanted it that way. He was concerned that the strings attached with federal grant money could slow the process.
carelessly released when several thousand Chinese military recruits were challenged with a live strain of the virus to test an experimental vaccine.
consensus sequence for the furin cleavage site that’s already described in the scientific literature
collected on November 27, 2019,
scattered across different agencies.
