Throughout the course of the pandemic, U.S. leaders have squandered:
⌛️Time
❓Trust
💰The economy
And they squandered the chance to do good science — testing vaccines in a way that serves the public interest rather than the interest of pharma companies bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
There’s no question that Covid-19 vaccines and therapies will save many lives.
But we’re not doing the kinds of scientific studies needed to determine the best vaccines and therapies to maximize lives saved. It’s not too late to change course bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Some have raised the possibility that the return to normal could be advanced if Pfizer's vaccine is given as one shot.
Though trials determined efficacy for two shots, supplies are limited and there’s some evidence that one shot provides some protection bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
A trial would be the only way to justify giving people a single shot.
The company could test the idea by picking a group of volunteers in the early rollout to get one shot, and compare them with those getting two bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Vaccines should also be tested against one another.
There’s valuable data that could be gathered quickly given that there are more than 40 vaccines in the testing stage bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Covid vaccines have many approaches:
💉Inactive virus
💉Pieces of the virus
💉Viral DNA
💉Messenger RNA
Some might be better at preventing high risk people from getting fatal cases, while others might be better for limiting the spread of the virus bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Some will be cheaper
Others will be easier to make
Some will induce fewer side effects
Others need extreme refrigeration
Some may be oral rather than an injection
The first vaccines with FDA authorization might not be the best ones for achieving immunity bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
The way clinical trials usually work, companies design their own trials within some constraints established by regulators. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
A mandatory standard might have given us much-needed information on how well those newly approved Pfizer and Moderna vaccines protect against asymptomatic infection and thereby help us all achieve herd immunity bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Testing subjects regularly for Covid-19 would have told us this, but Pfizer and Moderna didn’t collect that data.
The AstraZeneca trial did collect data on asymptomatic cases, though the trial was marred by a serious mistake with dosing bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Contact tracing subjects might even help us learn if vaccinated people can transmit silent infections to others.
The other looming mystery: How long does vaccine-induced immunity last?
The best way to learn about long-term safety is to keep the placebo-controlled trials going. But Pfizer is considering ending its trial by giving the control arm the vaccine bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Pfizer’s gesture may seem altruistic, but there’s a selfish side to it: It undercuts the ability to keep getting data and uncover less common safety issues.
The same applies to drugs that could treat Covid-19, which should have standard testing as well bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
The public is grateful for any ray of hope — even though pharmaceutical companies are getting a great bargain out of this.
They deserve some praise, but not as much as the public deserves the best possible public health campaign bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
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☄️Ellen Ripley in Alien
☄️Dave Lister in Red Dwarf
☄️Sam Bell in Moon
☄️The Expanse’s Naomi Nagata
Gritty interstellar drama would be bereft if it weren’t for engineers & their mineral-processing operations bloom.bg/34xpWes
It’s such an alluring vision that real money has been put toward it. These high profile figures all invested in space mining startup Planetary Resources Inc.:
A new debate has erupted after Citigroup announced its new sabbatical policy — 12 weeks at 25% pay for employees that have been at the bank for five years.
In the competitive world of finance, is it a career-killer to take advantage of that kind of deal? trib.al/GTdKLf6
In 2018, the average American full-time employee earned 23 paid days off a year, but only used 17 of them.
That’s six days of PTO left on the table — the equivalent of handing a week’s salary back to your employer trib.al/GTdKLf6
When you consider that the U.S. has the rich world’s stingiest vacation policies, this becomes even more depressing.
Other forms of paid leave — like family leave — also see a significant number of people leaving time on the table, especially men trib.al/GTdKLf6
In normal times, package pileups would be a catastrophe for logistics companies. But there's nothing normal about 2020 trib.al/74fyIlR
In the spring, it was toilet paper shortages. Now there's a new supply chain nightmare:
A lack of recyclable materials is causing a shortage of small boxes, the one thing that’s integral to the e-commerce industry, especially during the holidays twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…
Consumers are avoiding physical stores and expect quick shipments, so there’s an increased demand for packaging:
⏳Lead times are stretched out
🎁Consumers are buying last-minute gifts
🚚UPS and FedEx are at peak capacity trib.al/74fyIlR
Now that Bitcoin has topped $20,000 for the first time, should you shift your hard-earned cash into digital currencies?
History suggests caution should be your watchword, no matter how strong the FOMO may be trib.al/Ytoljve
Institutional investors might be starting to take cryptocurrencies more seriously.
One River Asset Management has set up a fund company that will have about $1 billion in Bitcoin and fellow digital coin Ether by early next year suggests trib.al/Ytoljve
There’s clearly serious money involved:
CEO Eric Peters told our colleague Erik Schatzker that billionaire hedge fund manager Alan Howard is buying a stake in the new business, called One River Digital Asset Management trib.al/Ytoljve