Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Could not more agree with you, @robert_zubrin.

https://twitter.com/robert_zubrin/status/1331600315838185473

Except in one matter: I don't know the details, so I'm open to being persuaded otherwise if the evidence suggests it, but I doubt the insistence that the trials involve more minority subjects was owed to "political correctness."

In the US, the disease *very* disproportionately kills people of African, indigenous, and Latin American heritage--and disproportionately spares those of Asian heritage. We have some very good, educated guesses about why:

probably it's because the former are represented disportionately in high-risk jobs, and tend to live in more crowded homes; the latter come from cultures where mask- wearing when ill is the norm. But we don't *know* that, for sure.

There's still a lot we don't understand about this virus. But it's well known that certain ethnic groups are more vulnerable to specific diseases; we *don't* know for sure that the risk has no genetic component. Blood type is a risk factor--type O seems to offer some protection.

It's extremely rare for anyone who isn't of Ashkenazi heritage to have Tay-Sachs disease. Sickle-sickle cell disease is much more common among those of African heritage. So it's *really important* to have a racially diverse group of test subjects.

It's *not* just an exercise in box-checking. We absolutely have to know that the vaccine offers the same robust protection to Black minorities as it does to Asian ones before we can say, "Amazing, the vaccine works! Go forth, take it, and be free!"

I don't think that interruption was inappropriate. It's remarkable that the study's designers didn't think of that to begin with. We're fortunate that someone in the Trump Administration had the rare competence to think of it.

Also, strictly speaking, you can prove many drugs to be "safe" if your sole measure is, "Do you get sick right away after taking it?" By that measure, cigarettes would be perfectly healthy. We can find out if a vaccine causes immediate, negative side effects quite quickly:

but it's certainly theoretically possible that the negative effects would develop later. Though the risk of developing GBD from the 1976 flu vaccine was absolutely miniscule, it did exist, and symptoms typically came on two or three weeks after being vaccinated--or longer.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…. That was notable, of course, because H1N1 failed to become a pandemic. Had it done so, the risk (to an unvaccinated person) of contracting GBD from the flu itself would have been much higher than the risk of contracting it from the vaccine.

Given the lethality of this pandemic, the vaccine would have to be pretty damned dangerous for it to be worse than the disease. But it's glib to say that we know for sure, right away, that it poses no long-term negative effects at all. We can't know.

It's the sort of thing that anti-vaxxers latch on to--"See! They're lying to us!" It's better to be honest: We *have* screwed up vaccines in the past, and once, with deadly consequences: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

But we're very unlikely to have screwed this one up, for reasons that would take me longer than a tweet to explain, and most importantly, the risks of the disease are massive and manifest, so it's well worth the unknown, but probably nugatory, risks of the vaccine.

"Sickle-cell disease," not "Sickle-sickle cell disease."