Corona-zona

  The United States—and to be fair the rest of the world, but I will focus on here—whiffed the pandemic. We ignored warnings and abandoned programs designed to give us what little preparedness that we had. We couldn't make enough PPE or medical equipment, or ramp-up testing when we needed it most. Our reward is almost a million people dead, and around 11 million people with "long COVID." There were plenty of people warning us that we were unprepared for this. Back in 2005, Bush wanted to invest in preparedness  (for a replay of the Spanish Flu), but Congress wouldn't listen. In 2014, Obama asked for money to prepare for an Ebola epidemic, cut Congress wouldn't listen. In 2015 Bill Gates did a TED talk about how we weren't ready for a pandemic, nobody listened. Then just months before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started, the Trump administration undermined a federal-level pandemic unit that had been established. Now it's looking like deja vu all over again...

Last week the Biden administration said it's planning to ramp up vaccine production capacity to produce at least a billion extra doses per year by the end of 2022. That will be done by investing in companies with experience making mRNA vaccines. I've not been able to find details about how this investment will work. I'm a little worried that this will be another case of the government investing millions in pharma companies and helping them invent things, only to have them hog all the spoils like Moderna is trying to do now. This story was framed as a response to pressure to do more for poorer foreign countries, most of which have very low vaccination rates. That makes sense, because those are breeding grounds for new variants that could travel to the U.S. and wreak havoc like Delta has done. But something else caught my eye in the announcement. White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients said : "This program would also help us produce doses within six to...