Tag Archives: regulation

Drug Approvals

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Dr Henry Miller, ex of the FDA where he founded the agency’s Office of Biotechnology, had some thoughts on how to speed up vaccine approval procedures in his Wednesday op-ed. They’re good ideas; although many of them only niggle around the edges of a long-ish procedure.

I have an additional idea.

Allow doctors to broadly prescribe the vaccine—or any drug—once it’s been shown to be safe. Such drugs should be clearly marked, and the patient clearly advised, that while the vaccine has been shown to be safe, it hasn’t been shown to be effective.

This would vastly broaden the subject base for assessing effectiveness, and so greatly accelerate the assessments, and it would put what turns out to be effective drugs into the hands of doctors and patients much sooner.

Patients that get what turns out to be ineffective—but safe—vaccines will be no worse off than they would have been had no drug been permitted yet.

The market place should determine what should be available as effectiveness or ineffectiveness of particular vaccines becomes widely known rather than leaving the decision solely to government bureaucrats, no matter how well-intended they might be.

“This is about a public health crisis”

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That’s what Progressive-Democrat Governor Laura Kelly, ruling in Kansas, said about her Executive Order barring churches and church-goers from gathering in groups greater than 10 folks after a Federal judge enjoined her (temporarily) from enforcing her diktat.

More completely, she said,

We are in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic. This is not about religion. This is about a public health crisis.

Because religion and public health have nothing to do with each other, or maybe because they stand in opposition to each other.

I’ll set aside the Constitutional argument for the injunction and for eliminating the EO altogether. This is about a Progressive-Democrat’s refusal to recognize the well-documented research that comfort and support are major factors in fighting any disease, whether from boosting an immune system or from fighting a disease in progress. Strengthening the mind, helping build and maintain the emotional strength necessary to keep resisting, to keep fighting, a disease is a critical component in that resistance, that fight.

Religion plays a central role in that support. Isolation, which includes limiting group sizes, is antithetical to that. Denying free access to emotional support, to the succor available in churches, synagogues, mosques, is antithetical to that.

Any doctor knows this. Any man of the cloth, whether minister, priest, rabbi, imam knows this. Any parishioner knows this.

Only a Progressive-Democrat governor ignores this.

Too Polite to Say

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In an interview on Monday night’s The Ingraham Angle and cited by Fox News, Congressman Jim Jordan (R, OH) had this about the House Progressive-Democrats’ obstructionism and abuse of the present Wuhan Virus situation to push their own progressivism:

[H]e has spoken off-the-record to some congressional Democrats who want to get back to work but are held in line by party leadership.

The Congressman is too courteous. If those Progressive-Democrats really are being held back, it’s not by Party leadership. It’s by their own cowardice.

Full stop.

Seizing, Sharing—Just Gimme

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New York Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) has discovered that there is quite a bit of medical equipment (ventilators, for instance) scattered around the State that is going unused. He intends to…take control of…that equipment and “reallocate” it and is issuing an Executive Order to facilitate the process.

A reporter asked him whether he was serious about the matter and really was going to seize the equipment. Cuomo objected.

“First of all, don’t use the word ‘seize.’ I didn’t use that word. It’s a harsh kind of word,” Cuomo said….
“It’s a sharing of resources[.]”

Right. And Willy Sutton was only insisting that the banks share resources.

In truth, though, the State does have, under our Constitution’s Takings Clause of and Supreme Court rulings, authority to take the property, given just compensation is made. Cuomo intends that, although what he’ll offer is an open question.

Within all of that, it’s just stupid to quibble over the label applied to the taking. Government snatches, often for an agreed good cause; pays something for it; and it’s done. The quibble is just Cuomo’s CYA effort, made the more silly by the lack of need for it in the present circumstance.

The Coming Wuhan Virus War

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Daniel Henninger worries about the next Wuhan Virus war (he refers to it with the more press’ saccharine, more politically correct label, “coronavirus” war).  This is a political war between the American Left and the rest of our American nation.

In the course of his piece, though, he had a couple of remarks that I’m not sure he really understood.

A federally led policy is appropriate in a national crisis like this.

Indeed, but federally led, not centrally led.

But once it passes, the issue will be whether to revert to the freest private economy we had in a generation or whether deeper, explicit social direction and economic protections by the national government are justified.

This depends entirely on whether Americans in general understand the difference between “federal government” and “central government.” That’s a distinction Progressives, Progressive-Democrats, and their “education” divisions of teachers unions have been working so hard for so long to muddy.

We’ll need to turn out in force in the coming election to prevent Progressive-Democrat destruction. Yes, that’s part of the war which worries Henninger—but the answer to Progressive-Democrats’ divisiveness and destruction cannot be, at this crossroads for our nation, simply to turn the other cheek or otherwise ignore attacks on our freedoms and our personal responsibilities.