Please correct me if I’m way off base here, but it looks to me like early adopters always get the short end of the stick. These days, the first in line for a product pays more in downtime and and frustration than latecomers because they act as free beta testers for the manufacturers and have significantly more trouble with hardware and software both. And not just in the tech field, although that’s the example I used; in medicine, how many times has a product been FDA-approved just to be pulled from the market for being unsafe? One wonders how it was approved in the first place, right?
I make a frequent joke that in five years we’ll be hearing the old familiar refrain, “Have you or a loved one suffered from adverse effects of the COVID vaccine? Call this number now!” but I’m actually afraid that our benevolent government will shield vaccine makers from any suits whatsoever due to the “emergency”. Of course, all this will be done for the common good, and anyone who complains or expresses concern for those injured will be labeled as troublemakers or liars. As usual, early adopters get the shaft.
Then there’s my fear that, at a minimum, certain classes deemed to be more at risk will not be given a choice. I’d say my 70+-year-old parents would qualify for that designation, and the fact that they’d both prefer to see some long-term safety studies would not even be considered, as though they’re children whose opinion on their own health and well-being doesn’t matter. As an aside, I think that’s one of the chief problems with politicians; they let their perceived authority as the winner of a rigged popularity contest lead them to authoritarianism because they feel they’ve been “chosen by the people”, rather than just being part of a corrupt machine.
But back to the FDA. Do they do their own testing on the drugs or do they count on the studies submitted by the manufacturer? And if so, what kind of oversight is there to ensure they’re not hiding evidence that the drug is ineffective or unsafe? We’re told by the FDA that, “Drug companies seeking to sell a drug in the United States must first test it. The company then sends the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER) the evidence from these tests to prove the drug is safe and effective for its intended use. A team of CDER physicians, statisticians, chemists, pharmacologists, and other scientists reviews the company’s data and proposed labeling. If this independent and unbiased review establishes that a drug’s health benefits outweigh its known risks, the drug is approved for sale. The center doesn’t actually test drugs itself, although it does conduct limited research in the areas of drug quality, safety, and effectiveness standards.”
After reading this is I must ask what independent and unbiased review is possible if the people at CDER think it’s critical that vaccines for covid hit the market as fast as possible? Is the process ever truly independent and unbiased? Who are these people and how are they qualified to judge the studies submitted by dependent and biased pharmaceutical company employees? Also, if information was omitted from the study, how do they know? Wouldn’t we all be better off if a third party did the testing? One whose paychecks are safe regardless of the test’s outcome? It just might result in safer drugs, who knows?
Another fear is that they tie vaccine compliance to access; public venues, employment, travel, maybe even your bank account. This will be chock-full of error, naturally, and the inherent crappiness of the system itself may even allow hackers to change one’s reported status just to cause chaos (vaccine doxxing? How very 2021). Not to mention that vaccines against viruses have never been all that effective at preventing infection, even after years of tweaking. At most, we can expect the vaccine to shorten the intensity or duration of an infection, but I don’t know how it’s supposed to be superior to standard treatments that have been and will continue to be developed.
As for me, I’ll demure from getting stuck as long as I possibly can.
