Covid-19: Vax Americana

This is all true.

From what I can understand, the main advantage is that countries like India & Bangladesh have huge capacity to manufacture generic drugs which currently is not being used for Corona.

But like you say, it is not so simple as giving them the trade secrets - there needs to be specialist input into the entire process for example.

 

We had had upwards of 5k a day as little as a month ago and they'd put a triage system in place for ICU beds, our third wave was by far the worst. Maybe not bad compared to some of the US states, but entirely preventable and mostly caused by unwillingness to deal with the actual sources of transmission (in sectors where the premier's donor class are from).

The premier has been under pressure to resign due to his mismanagement of the situation (opening up when all the medical advisors were saying the opposite), and the minister responsible for long-term-care homes has been under fire for the deaths in that setting during the first two waves.

 

The Kaiser Foundation's Vaccine Monitor is a helpful site.

 

The one thing that hasn't happened yet is any concerted work on parents to convince them to get their children vaccinated. We haven't yet seen much public information clarifying the threat Covid poses to children, juxtaposed to the perceived risk of the vaccine. My guess is that this hasn't happened yet because the data for it doesn't fully exist yet or hasn't been well analyzed yet. Maybe things will improve a little bit once that changes? Maybe?

The other piece is the body of stories about kids who get hit hard by Covid. The general perception is that it doesn't hurt kids, so the cost-benefit analysis for getting your 6 year old vaccinated might not look good. But (and this would be awful) we start hearing more about grade school age covid long-haulers and the understanding of the value of the vaccine for kids might change.

This is all wishful thinking on my part, and I'm still mainly blaming the people who relentlessly turned this into a political slap fight by attacking the science from Day 1, along with the suckers who swallowed that bullshit.

 

I'd like somebody to dive into this more. I am fairly sure this is not just Tuskegee related.

 

Tuskegee is a gloss. In my previous line of work, I read a lot of studies indicating that mistrust of the medical industry among persons of color was based on personal, day-to-day interactions with healthcare professionals that generated the perception that there were two standards of care, with privilege as the dividing line.

 

When I was working in Memphis, Tuskegee was brought up on a regular basis when talking about vaccines and shots and the like. Not constantly, but also by the students. It surprised me how informed many of them were about those trials (and I don't just mean that it occurred).

But for other things, I was also wondering if there was any cross over from how they were treated in day-to-day life beyond the doctor's office.