Posted on 08/07/2014 8:59:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
President Obama hedged on an ethics question about whether Africans should receive the same experimental drug that put two Americans stricken with Ebola on the path to recovery, telling reporters at the conclusion of the U.S.-African Leaders Summit that efforts to rein in the disease should focus on prevention instead.
But as the epidemic grows within West Africa, the Arab world saw its first possible Ebola death as a businessman in his 40s returning to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from Sierra Leone died two days after being admitted to King Fahd Hospital with symptoms of viral hemorrhagic fever.
Saudi Arabia had already banned pilgrims from affected countries from making the hajj to Mecca. Arab News reported that officials there retraced the businessman’s steps and are now monitoring people he contacted before checking into the hospital.
Two American healthcare workers who were aiding Ebola victims in Liberia were gravely ill before receiving the experimental serum, ZMapp, which had only been tested on animals by San Diego company Mapp Biopharmaceutical. They are now recovering at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.
“I think we’ve got to let the science guide us,” Obama said at a press conference this evening when asked if the FDA should fast-track approval and perhaps save lives in Africa as well. “And you know, I don’t think all the information is in on whether this drug is helpful.”
Nigerian officials are reportedly interested in acquiring the drug. The doctor who treated American Patrick Sawyer, a Liberian government official who died in the country after flying into Lagos, is now ill with Ebola and eight other cases are confirmed or probable.
The World Health Organization announced today it would convene a panel of medical ethicists next week to discuss if the drug should be used on others and who should receive it.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
You obsess over hanging onto whatever amount of Ebola drug we already have, yet you seem completely disinterested in the idea of producing more.
Why?
Is it because Obama expressed no interest in helping those countries that are caught in the epidemic—some are already calling it a pandemic—and an equal lack of interest in either producing or increasing the production of the drug?
I.e.: are you searching for ways to make Obama look ‘right’/good?
I called you on post 17 because you were incredibly wrong, now you want to change topics and get chatty and talk about stuff in an effort to cover up what you said.
I already posted on the correction that needed to be made, post 17 was stupid.
You have not answered a single question I ask you. No, the answer to every question on the subject of Obama & Ebola is not “post 17”. Sometimes you actually need to think. The only thing wrong with my prior posts is that you have misunderstood every single one of them. But that is no excuse for you never, ever answering a question. I don’t ask them rudely or snarkily. I ask good questions politely. And you tap dance madly away from every single one.
How about for once answering a question simply and honestly? You can start with my penultimate post.
Btw, if my prior post was as stupid as you claim, someone else would have called me on it. When you are the ONLY person who ‘catches’ something like that, and then you obsess about it pathologically, the problem is you, not the post.
The company released 3 vials of serum. It’s been said to take about 6 weeks to produce 2 liters of product - which is further refined down to an unknown quantity. For all we know that refined quantity is the 3 vials. Or maybe it’s 10 vials. Funding and pending trial parameters would have dictated what quantity the company had “on-hand” to continue research.
The viral protein growth, extraction and refining process is proprietary property of private individuals. It doesn’t belong to the USA or to Obama. . Obama can’t say “we” are ramping up production because “we” don’t own the product or process.
We don’t march the Army into privately held companies and seize intellectual property and/or product without compensation - yet. That may be a hard concept to grasp in communist, socialist or dictatorial countries, but that’s how the world turns in the USA (except when it comes to our ranchers, farmers and small miners).
When the anti-viral is released, it will be under ‘emergency study’ conditions. That means tracking every patient for long-term effects. Caution will rule the day and while caution may cost more lives in the short-term it may save millions of lives in the longterm. Even the shelf price is impossible to fix at this point. And, who pays the tab? The US? The world? the inventing company?
Researchers in America work on cures for several diseases that primarily affect Africa. They don’t need to do that. There’s no ebola in the USA. Scientists could concentrate on things that affect Americans, but these scientists chose to try to help people outside of the USA.
We should be celebrating American ingenuity, celebrating that, once again, freedom and free thought - and capitalism - has led to private individuals undertaking independent research. And if it is a cure, a complete gamechanger for an entire continent peopled with primarily one ethnicity.
Instead, America is being trashed (and by definition those very researchers) as racist, elitist and greedy. Why is that? Science is not instant-coffee on demand and neither is America.
As for "explaining", you are dealing with people in fear of their lives. Don't expect rational behavior. If they engage in wholesale slaughter of whites, then cut them off. No further assistance of any kind. It wouldn't be the first time. Zimbabwe comes to mind.
Are sure you addressed the right poster? None of what you wrote applies to anything I’ve said.
“As for “explaining”, you are dealing with people in fear of their lives. Don’t expect rational behavior.”
When people are in fear for their lives they look for someone to blame.
The more irrational they are the more irrational their acts against those they blame. That’s what leads to slaughter.
Same thing could happen in this country. It’s not as likely as in a 3rd world country, but it could happen.
The more it gets out of control I expect the other countries that aren’t affected yet to start shooting those crossing their borders from the countries that are affected.
I am certain I am addressing the ‘right poster’.
Please go back and read your posts 29, 36, 40, 53, 57, 68, and 81. Then read mine. I believe I gave clear and reasonable responses to your questions and concerns.
I had already found the answers, on my own, to the questions I raised in 29, 36, 40, and 53. As to the rest, you evidently think that Obama arranging an emergency ‘grant’ to a laboratory is state control? Really? Sorry; that is too much of a stretch for me. Also, are you equating criticism of Obama w criticism of the US? I assure you, Obama is not the USA. It is quite possible to criticize him w’out criticizing the country.
You need to be more specific. You wrote an extremely long post and never once said specifically how it applied to what I had written. You know, it’s possible to actually talk with a poster, not just lecture. If you were unclear on something I have written, you could ask. But to assume I want Obama to raid a private company & steal their product—that is going too far. I never suggested it, nor did the thought enter my mind.
I’m sick to death of people on this thread misrepresenting what I’ve said. It’s time-consuming and irritating. Please read my comments more carefully. There is no virtue in misrepresenting a fellow conservative.
Here is the answer I found re: the questions I had posed early in the thread:
‘And now some are asking this question: If the drug did help missionaries Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol, whose conditions appear to be improving, could the same drug be given to the hundreds of people dying of Ebola in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea and Nigeria?
What would it cost? What are the ethics of distributing a drug that had never been tested on humans in foreign countries - even if medical authorities could persuade people to take it? And how fast could it be done?
“Two months,” said Charles J. Arntzen, a professor at the Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University, who has collaborated for the past 15 years with Mapp Biopharmaceutical, the small San Diego company that produced the experimental serum given to the two Americans. “Maybe they could do it in a month. If they were [already] planning on it, I’m sure they could produce 10,000 doses in a month.”’
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3190141/posts
Was I lecturing? Ok, maybe a toosh about cheering for American scientists and ingenuity. Guilty as charged on that.
I don’t know how much more specific you want me to be. A government grant is still not going to move mountains. It takes 42 days for the vegetative stage, which is only one of many steps. Each step involves the labor of specialized experts. Where are all the extra experts going to come from?
Let’s use a hypothetical of “10,000 doses”. When do we address the ethical questions of who gets it first, or which country gets it first, or tribe, or which age, or sex gets it first? One dose limit or multiple doses? Shouldn’t those questions be answered before wholesale production begins, if it even begins?
thank you for the link. You missed this part from the NIH which also works with Mapp:
“Anthony S. Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was more cautious in an interview on CNN on Tuesday. “It is not easy to make this serum,” he said. “The number of doses that are available right now, today... is less than a handful.”
Fauci is talking real time. Arntzen uses ‘maybe’ and ‘if’. Was Mapp ‘planning’ on producing large quantities? If they were still waiting approval for narrow-scope human trial, why would they? Isn’t that putting the cart before the horse?
Obama’s white side is Racist.
Odumbo, the Expert on Everything, not just your average 57-states-stupid guy.
By prohibiting propranolol for seven years while the approval process ground on (and while the drug was legal in Europe) and then proudly proclaiming that it would save 10,000 lives each year after the approval, the FDA tacitly admitted to causing some 70,000 deaths in the interim. But, not a day in jail nor a dollar in fines, of course.
There’s already a drug that’s available for sale in Japan as an flu drug.
It’s been shown to stop ebola in the lab.
It’s way less expensive than the serum and is available in pill form.
Why aren’t we being told about this drug in our MSM?
‘Was I lecturing? Ok, maybe a toosh about cheering for American scientists and ingenuity. Guilty as charged on that.’
Here’s the part of the lecture that sucked the most:
“Instead, America is being trashed (and by definition those very researchers) as racist, elitist and greedy. Why is that? Science is not instant-coffee on demand and neither is America.”
So was this aimed at me or not? I asked you about this very thing, and you assured me that, yes indeed, the entire post was directed at me. So you are lecturing me not to trash America and American scientists/researchers, and not to call either one racist, elitist and. greedy.
Except, of course, that I haven’t done any of those things and don’t need a smarmy lecture to prevent me from so doing. Whatever other skills you may possess, your people skills are a big fat zero.
& btw, if you think either science or America is “instant-coffee on demand”, that is your problem. It isn’t mine. But, since you claim it is my problem, cite the exact quote that proves it. No, not some general reference to ‘posts 17, post 17, & post 17’. The exact, specific comment I made, complete with quotes & a cite, proving that I believe science & America are ‘instant coffee on demand’. [Man, am I sick of these childishly erroneous accusations. One would think anybody & everybody would have something better to do that falsely accuse another person.]
There is so much more. But first let’s see how you handle the above. I confess I’m losing patience with this exercise. You evidently want me to take your comments on experimental drug development seriously, but you can’t get one detail right when it comes to your characterizations of me & my posts. If the issue is credibility, how can you imagine you have any, when you are so fundamentally mistaken about the few simple comments I made yesterday?
But again, let’s see what you have to say to the above. Then I can decide whether it’s worthwhile to move on.
Thank you for acknowledging in your post 90, that my post 87 did indeed adress your questions/concerns raised in posts 29, 36, 40, and 53. I am glad to be helpful and that you “found the answers” you were looking for. Did you find out anything different and new?
You complained in post 90 that I wrote ‘an extremely long post” and asked that I “talk with a poster, not just lecture” (although I did ask questions in my post). You chose to critique intellect and “virtue”, much like a post to a different Freeper, who’s intelligence and even ethnicity was questioned (post 59)
But, in response to your complaint, I then made two subsequent posts, intentionally short, and intentionally embedded with leading questions inviting debate of the topic. Both invitations were ignored.
Instead, in your post 98, a red herring is presented as the most pertinent topic: my editoral comment is called ‘smarmy’ and issue is taken that it shouldn’t be part of my post. But while it was a generalized comment, it was also based on the whole of your own posts, as noted below for your convenience. I stand by my editoral comment as inclusive and relevant.
As if to prove me right, your post 91 actually validates what I said, including the ‘science isn’t instant coffee’ part. Although there were two quotes at your link, one urging caution, and stating there was no on-hand supply, you chose the second, “IF” one to uphold the position you’ve taken throughout the thread. That is, to support your underlying argument that “if” “they” wanted to, “they” could produce X number units in a month (’cause here, this guy right here says so) and that “we” don’t care, or ‘we’re’ not doing it already because it’s “Africa.”
Consider your post 30, “withholding it,” juxtaposed against the quote in post 91, or post 91 against post 57 and 68 or even post 81 “no interest in helping”.
Your line of argument is very clear throughout the thread just as my argument for caution and more time is very clear.
If you would like to debate medical ethics, I will be happy to talk to you. But I have no time for Alinsky-based diatribes. May God bless you and bring you peace.
Here are you own posts within the thread, leading logically to your argument climax in post 91..
Post 17: :”African” deaths....content to play ‘god’ & allow people... to die like plague rats.
Post 30: “we...could not spare any for Africa? Is that the official reason for withholding it?”
Post 40: “You have no idea who much anti-Ebola serum has already been made. You haven’t a clue how long it takes to make more.”
Post 48: “.... So you want to hoard them. Fine.”
Post 57: “Did he say, ‘We are ramping our production up to full capacity, and as soon as we safely can we will share out anti-Ebola serum with Africa’? Because the above is what a person who cares would say & do.”
Post 59: “Did he say he was taking this action precisely so that, ASAP, we could share this experimental drug with those hardest hit by the epidemic?”
Post 68: Cold, aloof, disinterested, unengaged sociopath: “It’s ‘Premature’ to Fast-Track Promising Ebola Drug, Share with Africa.”
Post 81: “...no interest in helping those countries that are caught in the epidemic..”
Post 91: ““...If they were [already] planning on it, I’m sure they could produce 10,000 doses in a month.”’
“Thank you for acknowledging in your post 90, that my post 87 did indeed adress your questions/concerns raised in posts 29, 36, 40, and 53. I am glad to be helpful and that you “found the answers” you were looking for. Did you find out anything different and new?”
No, I never acknowledged that your post addressed my questions. By the time you posted I already had the answers to my questions. They came from a fundamentally superior source to you: an individual who has spent the last 15 yrs actually working with the lab in question & assisting in the development of the Ebola drug. He knows far more about the production capabilities of this lab than you do. After I found such primary information, I was uninterested in secondary or tertiary speculation.
So once again you are mistaken. Your reading comprehension level makes it all but impossible to discuss anything at all with you. It is a seminal problem.
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