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If limited to using drugs for formally "FDA approved indications" many medical problems can't be treated as nothing is so approved. For conditions failing first line therapy even fewer options will be available. Adding more indications is not only expensive, it's cost prohibitive for the numerous conditions that aren't super common. Letting drugs prove safety initially for one condition and then let doctors use them for others as they see fit lets many more conditions, and people, be treated. Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine had far better proof they were safe, pre-Covid, than any of the new vaccines and drugs that subsequently came out for Covid. Yet prior to Covid's arrival both had plenty of lab evidence suggesting they might work. Some of that developed out of looking for treatments for the earlier scary brief coronavirus outbreaks, SARS and MERS. They were the most logical potential quick fixes available. Given a pandemic's worth of potential guinea pigs, who wouldn't be scared to participate in a trial of such safe drugs, emergency well controlled trials with them could and should have been promptly conducted with far less than the boundless funds eventually spent on Covid. The results should have been available well before even Operation Warp Speed could have produced brand new treatments. If such trials provided proof War Speed methods could upped their production to meet demand quicker than it could for the new treatments. I was posting here that we should do such at that time.

Although there were some privately produced series that quickly seemed to show efficacy, the government funded ones were slow and appeared to be designed to ensure failure and it's taken the government a notably long time to admit they might have worked. Why that happened is a big question as it still doesn't make sense under pre-existing medical and scientific standards. The only proposed explanations which may fit is that a quick fix wouldn't have left a crisis, which some deemed politically useful. And which wouldn't let big pharma make a mint off of hypothetical new treatments. But even that potential mint shouldn't have blocked prompt studies and potential use of the old drugs. The new drugs and vaccines, under existing law, either had to go through (A) ordinary FDA approval process, too slow to solve the alleged emergency. Or they could be approved quicker, with limited testing and minimal big pharma potential liability, so long as the government could (B) claim no other treatments were available. Trashing the old drugs and using plan B gave Big Pharma its mint.

What should have happened is plan C. Congress declares the emergency is too big to depend on either old drugs or potential new drugs as fixes, we needed the option for both. And writes new laws so that bold old drugs and new rapidly developed ones could be tried, with enough incentives for Big Pharma to try to find them. Congress could and should have acted for such a big emergency as quickly as it did to impeach Trump. Instead it did nada, deferred everything to the executive branch, the panicked germaphobe, normally anti-government, head of which chose to trust the readily available government 'experts.' So used his small government skills to rapidly produce their big government desired outcome.