I’m not into politics but as a person this is not good leadership. These people are not sharing in the sacrifices they demand. Ante up if you’re going to play with people’s lives and livelihoods to this extent.
There could be some limitations in sampling. Multiplex respiratory panels at Stanford that come up negative for everything... what does that patient look like?
It’s not a cakewalk for the elderly. I think some patients would want to remain communicative with loved ones rather than fade away unconscious over weeks.
We should be upfront about the odds of a full recovery and allow room for thoughtful discussion around patients’ wishes. The frenzied environment of ICUs during a pandemic isn’t conducive to this, so we need to be deliberate and talk about it as a country. The “job one is saving lives” rhetoric may not be best for patients and their families.
The mortality rate of ventilated COVID-19 patients could be 80% [1]. I get that we don’t want people to die, but at what point is this standard intervention just cruel? It feels like we should have a serious discussion about palliative care.
I’m not an expert, but I’ve worked with the FDA. In my experience they’re pretty reasonable and motivated by mission. I suspect it’s simply really hard and risky to come up with new therapeutics and make sure they work in a reasonable amount of time. Diminishing returns.
I don’t know anything about the generic drug marketplace. I’d guess the issues are more complicated than what you describe. The FDA’s mandate is safety, not anticompetitive practices.
One surprising takeaway from working with our regulatory consultants is that apparently many actors try to game the crap out of the FDA’s processes. The FDA is really the only wall between shenanigans and consumers.
That’s awesome. Reminder that for some people nothing will work. I’m diagnosed DSPD; I feel like the laundry list of life changes folks tout contributes to a lack of understanding and empathy for legitimate medical issues.
It’s not clear the force size you suggest would result in a stable equilibrium. You’re missing one key justification: the ability to dissuade future military competition. A defense force the size of Spain’s would face substantially more threats given the value of US targets and interests, so we’d then need to increase spending. It’s hard to predict what that world would look like. In the past it wasn’t great. Outspending everybody else from the get-go works.
There’s something fascinating about the previous comment. A knee-jerk rejection of the scale. I immediately suspected that commenter hails from somewhere in Europe. The scale is way different here, and in online communities that is often lost as people talk past each other. I think when solving problems there is benefit in thinking about what happens at several different scales.