Dissident Veteran For Peace

In late March of 2020 I wrote:

A 2016 report published by the National Academies repeatedly raised concerns about the SNS inventory and the logistics of distributing it in an emergency. The chair of the committee that prepared that report, Dr. Tara O'Toole, presciently told NPR in 2016:

"We have drastically decreased the level of state public health resources in the last decade. We've lost 50,000 state and local health officials. That's a huge hit," says O'Toole, who wishes local officials would get more money for things like emergency drills. "The notion that this is all going to be top down, that the feds are in charge and the feds will deliver, is wrong."

My point is that the inability and failure in the US to implement the successful model of South Korea to tamp down COVID-19 via widespread testing, contact tracing, and isolation of the exposed or infected was born of a longstanding failure of the values and priorities of the bipartisan political establishment and by the servile dependency and doltish complacency of the American people who keep electing them.

Almost a year to the day after I published that Health Affairs has published "US Public Health Neglected: Flat Or Declining Spending Left States Ill Equipped To Respond To COVID-19". The article is behind a pay wall so I haven't read it. The abstract says:

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted concern about the integrity of the US public health infrastructure. Federal, state, and local governments spend $93 billion annually on public health in the US, but most of this spending is at the state level ... Although overall national health expenditures grew by 4.3 percent in this period, state governmental public health spending saw no statistically significant growth between 2008 and 2018 except in injury prevention. Moreover, state spending levels on public health were not restored after cuts experienced during the Great Recession ...

Axios reports: "The study found that public health spending dropped from $80.40 per capita in 2008 to $75.83 in 2018." It's worth pointing out that these figures understate the drop in public health spending. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI Inflation Calculator that $75.83 in June 2018 "has the same buying power as $65.85 in June 2008". Due to inflation, to maintain roughly the same per capita level as the 2008 public health spending would have required spending $92.59 per person in 2018.

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Last month I wrote: 

... I consider it grotesquely unethical for government officials, vaccine manufacturers, and public health and medical professionals to conduct what is essentially a massive experiment* on hundreds of millions of people using relatively new vaccine technologies—mRNA and adenovirus vector vaccines—especially during a global pandemic. I am aware of no reason why Congress and health professionals couldn't and shouldn't have insisted that Operation Warp Speed funds be spent on conventional attenuated virus or viral protein vaccines.

In a June 24, 2021, article titled "The mRNA Vaccines Are Extraordinary, but Novavax Is Even Better" Hilda Bastian reports in The Atlantic:

... the hype around the early-bird vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna has distorted perception. Their rapid arrival has been described in this magazine as "the triumph of mRNA"—a brand-new vaccine technology whose "potential stretches far beyond this pandemic."... It was easy to assume, based on all this reporting, that mRNA vaccines had already proved to be the most effective ones you could get—that they were better, sleeker, even cooler than any other vaccines could ever be.

But the fascination with the newest, shiniest options obscured some basic facts. These two particular mRNA vaccines may have been the first to get results from Phase 3 clinical trials, but that's because of superior trial management, not secret vaccine sauce. For now, they are harder and more expensive to manufacture and distribute than traditional types of vaccines, and their side effects are more common and more severe. The latest Novavax data confirm that it's possible to achieve the same efficacy against COVID-19 with a more familiar technology that more people may be inclined to trust.

Bastian continues:

... the success of the Novavax vaccine should be A1 news. The recent results confirm that it has roughly the same efficacy as the two authorized mRNA vaccines, with the added benefit of being based on an older, more familiar science ... Some of those people who have been wary of getting the mRNA vaccines may find Novavax more appealing.

The Novavax vaccine also has a substantially lower rate of side effects than the authorized mRNA vaccines ... Based on the results of Novavax's first efficacy trial in the U.K., side effects (including but not limited to fatigue) aren't just less frequent; they're milder too ... Side effects are a big barrier for COVID-vaccine acceptance.

Bastian concludes:

But here's what we know today, based on information that we have right now:  Among several wonderful options, the more old-school vaccine from Novavax combines ease of manufacture with high efficacy and lower side effects. For the moment, it's the best COVID-19 vaccine we have.

Unfortunately, we don't have the Novavax vaccine yet and, as far as I know, Novavax hasn't applied to the FDA for emergency use authorization yet.

Labels: COVID-19, government, health, medicine, science, technology

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U.S. support for partition of Palestine ... can be justified only on the basis of Arab and Jewish consent. Otherwise we should violate the principle of self-determination which has been written into the Atlantic Charter, the Declaration of the United Nations, and the United Nations Charter – a principle that is deeply embedded in our foreign policy. Even a United Nations determination in favor of partition would be, in the absence of such consent, a stultification and violation of UN's own charter.

Source: A "top-secret memorandum under date of October 15" [1947], by Gordon Merriam, Chief of the US State Department's Division of Near Eastern Affairs, as quoted in Evan M. Wilson, Decision on Palestine: How the U.S. Came to Recognize Israel (Hoover Inst. Pr. 1979), p. 99.

Labels: history, Israel, law, Palestine, quotations