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Citation? I thought the bottleneck was FDA approval, with mass production starting alongside Phase 2 success.
Do you smoke? (Or purposely do something else that can ruin your body on a roughly 20 year time scale.) I don't find this argument persuasive - even accepting "consequences 20 years out" at face value, "consequences 20 years out" isn't dispositive of "prevention best done now."
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/
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Steve Sailer is the one who keeps harping on the vaccine delay most, including a retrospective recently. Not the most persuasive source to cite, but he does cite his own sources and doesn't seem to be making up any facts, just adding speculative but more-plausible-than-the-official motives. The official story is that pharma companies did hold back the analysis of their vaccines until right after the election, but only because it's okay to violate experiment protocols when you're kinda feeling super nervous.
Pfizer announced 90% effectivity in a preliminary analysis of their Phase 3 trials on November 9, announced the analysis was finished on November 18, applied for FDA approval on November 20, and got the Emergency Use Authorization on December 11.
Certainly the FDA taking 3 weeks to approve was as unhelpful as Pfizer delaying for 2 weeks, but both decisions probably killed thousands in the end.
Of course, the real bottleneck was the FDA, because we could have saved tens or hundreds of thousands more lives if not for decisions like "Forbidding the human challenge trials we could have done in April", "Not jailing the people who did the forbidding and then doing human challenge trials in May", etc. But letting people die in large numbers because of mindless authoritarianism is part and parcel of modern society, whereas letting people die in less-large numbers because you want to hide information from voters feels like a new low.
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COVID-19 vaccines: history of the pandemic’s great scientific success and flawed policy implementation The FDA and companies delay vaccine trial until after the US election
Further discussion 25:35 from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of the Covid Vaccine (with Vinay Prasad)
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Multiple companies announced the completion of their vaccines immediately after the election.
This feels like the health equivalent of street racing, motorcycle driving, skydiving, and shooting up heroin. And then worrying about smoking as a health risk. I'd tell someone with those problems to go ahead and smoke if it gets rid of any of their other terrible habits.
I'm also aware that we can basically do massive climate change on the cheap whenever we want. Sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere or a massive sun shade in space are orders of magnitude cheaper than carbon emissions reduction.
Which ones? Weren't Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson all in Phase 3 by the time the election happened?
And it'd be better to begin geoengineering now than to wait 20 years, wouldn't it?
Yeah all of them announced completion of their vaccine literally the day after the election.
Not really. Depends on the discount rate and the cheapness of various solutions. Basically do the geo-engineering when it makes sense from a cost benefit perspective.
I've been given links about the controversy of the data collection period.
A stitch in time saves nine - does anyone here know of models of what geo-engineering would be needed at different points in time?
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https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/10/19/1010646/campaign-stop-covid-19-vaccine-trump-election-day/
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Assume that it works, why would it? It's not as though the climate has become intolerable, or will be 20 years from now?
If there were no consequences of climate change until a known point in time and geo-engineering would be an immediate success, there would be no advantage to implementing geo-engineering prior to the known point in time at which consequences would occur. Do you expect geo-engineering to be an immediate success?
Yes? I've seen numbers run that for somewhere in the high ten figures you could have planes spraying enough particulates to counteract any reasonable amount of added CO2 -- it's not hard, and wouldn't take long.
Now that you mention it, doesn't it usually make more sense to see whether something is actually a problem or not before taking extreme measures to correct the possibility that it might become a problem ~50 years from now?
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