What America Lost by Delaying the Vaccine Rollouthttps://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/fda-covid-vaccine-slow-rollout-trump/621284/The first COVID-19 vaccine could arrive before Election Day, Donald Trump avowed in the summer of 2020. But government regulators wanted things to work out differently: “The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics,” he wrote on Twitter. “Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd.”
Regulators did, in fact, end up slowing the process: In the first week of September, the FDA told vaccine makers to extend their clinical trials by several weeks beyond what they’d planned, in order to gather more safety data. That effectively postponed Pfizer’s request for an emergency use authorization of the mRNA vaccine it had developed with BioNTech until after the election. The agency had been under attack from both sides: The president had wanted regulators to move more quickly, while an alarmed public-health community was pushing for the opposite. In the end, the decision to slow things down was meant to bolster the country’s waning confidence in the forthcoming COVID-19 vaccines and restore the FDA’s reputation for integrity and caution. But the move looks very different in hindsight, with full knowledge of the safety and efficacy of the vaccines and of the body count that amassed shortly after. The economist Garett Jones recently opined that Trump’s scuttled hopes to release a COVID-19 vaccine a few weeks earlier “likely would have saved at least 100,000 American lives.”
Could Jones be correct about the human scale of this decision? His colleague at George Mason University, the libertarian economist and blogger Alex Tabarrok, often writes about the “invisible graveyard”: the final resting place for all those killed by the FDA’s bureaucratic foot-dragging. Indeed, one of the more painful lessons we’ve learned about governance during this pandemic is that waiting for more data can be a leading cause of death. But just how deadly was the government’s choice to slow down Pfizer’s and Moderna’s research in the fall of 2020?
The Atlantic's article goes into the politically charged atmosphere that, IMO, drove the FDA's action that delayed EUA to Pfizer and Moderna for well over a month (= past the November 3rd election). The consequences of the vaccines being available up to 6 or 8 weeks later can be seen here, in the Daily New Cases and Daily Deaths graphs,
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ .
Distribution of Pfizer's and Moderna's vaccine began in the latter half of December, which corresponds to just before the mid-point of the winter '20-'21 cases surge and, deaths trailing cases by on the order of 2 weeks, while deaths were still increasing. How might vaccines changed that picture, particularly deaths, had they started distributing in the first half of November, a timing corresponding to the earliest weeks of that New Cases surge? A clue can be seen in the spring 2021 surge, in which New Cases increased noticeably, but Daily Deaths were falling, with a brief flattening. Whether, even early in vaccine distribution, the % of vaccinated people reduced New Cases is a complex question, but it is at least possible. OTOH, the decrease in deaths while cases were increasing is probably an effect of the vaccines.
Thus, the FDA's politically motivated 6-9 week delay probably cost lives. In my own life, had vaccine distribution started in early November, it is possible that Goobernor Noisome might have allowed people my age to be vaccinated before the end of 2020, and I might have received the first shot before being exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus ... and maybe had very unpleasant symptoms instead of a 2-week hospital stay. But the FDA helped get rid of the
Big Bad Bogey-Trump.
