Thread by @ezraklein

First episode of my new podcast is up! It's with @Vivek_Murthy, co-chair of Biden’s coronavirus task force, and you can listen to in full here. But I want to pull out some of what he told me in this thread. nytimes.com/2021/01/26/opi…

I asked him whether the FDA was being too conservative on approving rapid, at-home testing (Hi @MichaelMina_lab!). “I do think we've been too conservative,” he said. “I do.”

“There's a difference between public health/surveillance testing and diagnostic testing…The FDA to me speaks to our failure to think broadly enough about the kind of testing that we needed.”


Encouraging! Hopefully they can change that, quickly.

We spent a lot of time on the chokepoints in the vaccine rollout. Murthy did not think supply was going to be the problem. He seems confident that supply will scale quite a bit in the coming weeks. But personnel and funding are big issues.

I asked him why we didn’t have more vaccination sites going 24/7 and that’s where he focused: states need more money, and there need to be personnel who can vaccinate folks. But we need to do it. “COVID is not sleeping, it's not turning off at 5:00 PM,” he said.

I asked him about half-doses of Moderna for younger people, which showed good results in early data. “The dosing structure is an area that absolutely merits study, but it doesn't merit adoption,” he said. He’s worried that immunity could fade quickly.

Johnson & Johnson, he said, would be a “game changer,” due to how much easier it is to store and transport, and it’s single-dose. You could get “primary care doctors across the country involved in distribution.” We’ll see data from their trials next week.

We talked about a bunch of other vaccine possibilities and design regimes, but his main point was when we have so much supply that’s not making it to people, we don’t need to focus on altering dosing. We need to focus on distribution.

One thing you really hear in this conversation: The Biden admin, unlike the Trump admin, doesn't think vaccines will solve all their problems. Particularly in these coming months, testing and masking are huge.

"I think we should have more clear standards around masks," Murthy said.

I asked whether the government should just be producing the right masks and sending them to everyone.

"I think so. I think that it is again, a relatively low cost investment for the government."

There’s a ton more in the whole pod — on vaccine skepticism, on the new strains, on the legislative strategy, on what you can safely do once vaccinated, on how to improve masking, on how to improve testing, and on and on. Subscribe and listen: nytimes.com/2021/01/26/opi…

Also, Vivek and I were on video for some of this and sometimes when people say you look like someone, it falls apart when you see them. Not here. We make similar facial expressions. It's creepy.