Covid Dashboards
Was only a matter of time before a website started rating all the Covid dashboards for US colleges and universities. You might say they created a Covid dashboard dashboard. Now we just need a competitor to spring up and BioPharmGuy will be forced to enter the fray and create our own Covid dashboard dashboard dashboard to determine who is the best of the Covid dashboard dashboards.
Azar the Czar
In an attempt to assuage the public's fears of political interference with vaccine approvals, the FDA came out with a guidance on the guidelines they will follow in approving a Covid vaccine.
The day before, Alex Azar, the Health & Human Services chief, (under which the FDA sits) asserted his authority over the FDA's ability to make rules and declared they will henceforth all require his personal approval.
Certainly whoever at FDA came out with the new vaccine guidance meant well and they were conducting their job as they have done for years. But if you think that guidance will stand up to the unprecedented political pressure being heaped onto the FDA right now, you will likely be disappointed.
It's becoming more evident by the day that if any drug company submits a Covid-19 vaccine to FDA for approval it will receive an emergency use authorization no matter what. That is the antithesis of the whole reason for the FDA's existence and is both sad and scary.
The worst part of this whole FDA politicization is if a vaccine is found to truly be both safe and effective, there is a much, much greater proportion of the population from both sides of the political aisle who will not trust that judgement and not get vaccinated. It's literally the last thing we needed. Yet here we are.
Hypocrisy Overload
Confirmed by multiple news sources that a PR official who has been with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 13 years was an anti-Fauci online troll.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but referring to his own boss as "attention-grubbing and media-whoring Anthony Fauci" as well as a "mask Nazi" meant things were not gonna end well for this dude. It's one thing to offer your opinions, it's another to attempt to annihilate your own employer's credibility.
He 'retired' immediately after the news broke.
FDA diagnostic listing
The FDA is keeping track of detection limits for nasal/nasopharyngeal swab-based Covid tests. They list the sensitivity of all as you scroll down to Table 2 here. The nasal tests are way more sensitive than the saliva-based ones.
Trials in Trouble, Unless...
As a result of the pandemic, clinical trials are in deep trouble according to Phesi. They say cancellations are piling up and costs will spiral out of control if companies fail to become more data-driven. As luck would have it, yes, Phesi does happen to offer the very services that would help clinical research companies mitigate these issues. How serendipitous!
