Slowing the Testing
President Trump admitted at his Tulsa rally to telling his people "Slow the testing down, please!". The White House and certain 'news' hacks were quick to suggest that it was all in jest. Thankfully President Trump clarified for everyone - upon being asked if he was kidding about that comment, he responded: "I don't kid" and in his rambling response explained "...by having more cases, it sounds bad."
So there you have it, the President of the United States has stated, then reiterated, that he was in favor of limiting his nation's ability to manage the worst pandemic in living memory which has already killed 122,000 Americans and continues to infect 30,000 per day. All in the name of making the numbers sound less bad.
Good news is, as with so much else, no one listened to him and testing continued unabated.
Chinese Vaccines
Sinovac is one of the Chinese companies working on an inactivated coronavirus vaccine and has seen
positive results
in Phase 1/2. They have begun planning the Phase 3. As we mentioned recently, inactivated viruses are a long-established way of successfully producing vaccines at scale. The odds are much greater this will be able to be mass produced than the Moderna whizz-bang vaccine or indeed most of the vaccines being tested in America.
Also, the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong newspaper publishing real journalism, not propaganda)
discussed
China potentially having the upper-hand due to their use of tried and true vaccine methods as opposed to the futuristic approaches taken by America. From the article: "China...pursuing all five technical routes because it did not want to put all its eggs in one basket." Imagine that.
However, there's a big problem Chinese vaccine makers are facing. It's the fact that China has done a much better job of suppressing their outbreak than America (who hasn't?). Now how is that a problem? Well, unlike most drugs, vaccines treat healthy people. So in order to declare if it works, a certain number of people who did not get the vaccine have to get sick. Often a lot of vaccine work happens in response to an outbreak and by the time the vaccine is ready to be tested, almost no one is sick.
So America, with her vast, modern medical system combined with 30,000 new virus cases per day is actually best placed to find out if a vaccine works. Not that we should celebrate it, but it's reality.
Techies to the Rescue!
It's always entertaining to read the latest "techie attacks healthcare" iteration. Medicine is such a highly regulated and
human
industry, it's simply not conducive to Silicon Valley-generated earthquakes. But they never stop trying.
Latest is Mr. Y Combinator, Sam Altman. He was shocked that a clinical trial costs $200M, so he funded
TrialSpark
which has the goal of lowering costs and increasing the speed of clinical trials. Their model is "based on finding patients digitally, often through social media".
Social media...there's the game changer folks. Social. Goddamn. Media.
*sigh*
*head shake*
*another head shake*
*press fingers into eyes*
*big blink*
You can't make this shit up.
Does he think the 220+ Clinical Research companies competing in the U.S. aren't doing their damnedest within the rules to solve these problems? Does he think the 2159 drug companies operating in the U.S. just don't care that it costs $200M to run a late stage trial? If this were easily solvable by recruiting on social media, it would be solved already, dude - these companies are packed with smart people. Valley hubris at its finest. BioPharmGuy angry! BioPharmGuy smash!
