Like it or not, we live in what Margaret Thatcher liked to call the “Nannystate.” We expect the government to do much of our thinking for us, including the critical responsibility of keeping ourselves and our families safe and healthy. Given what’s happened at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration over the last few weeks, it's no wonder the American people have serious doubts about the safety of the vaccines available for everything from measles to flu.
Before COVID, the worst we had to deal with were probably the claims of a fringe movement led by minor Hollywood celebrities who claimed certain childhood immunizations caused a spike in the number of kids with autism.
Folks who took the counsel of a former Playmate of the Year instead of their child’s pediatrician probably deserved what they got. Vaccines are safe, at least safer than the alternative, and reliable. Nonetheless, to satisfy the noisemakers, drug manufacturers took steps to address what they claimed was a problem because they are sensitive to the realities of the marketplace, even if that leads people to follow the hype rather than the science.
COVID caused a breakdown of the consensus on sound science. Fear caused policymakers to close schools unnecessarily. The marketplace was shuttered, and the economy was kept afloat by unsustainable budget-busting subsidies. Something had to be done, and, thanks to Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, it was. America – and the world – got not just a new vaccine, but a new kind of vaccine, in record time, by cutting red tape and eliminating the requirements usually imposed on drug manufacturers to show their products were both safe and effective over the long term.
Then the dam broke. Anxious policymakers trying to get everyone back to work and school began demanding everyone take the shot. First responders, healthcare workers, and others who refused lost their jobs, had their reputations damaged, and were otherwise ostracized. Mandates were instituted and most everything was handled in exactly the wrong way.
Now, with that all in the rearview mirror, we have time to reflect on what went right and how we can avoid the mistakes of the past. This isn’t just about doing things correctly. It’s about restoring America’s confidence in the vaccines that keep us healthy year over year over year while creating space innovations that offer greater choice in how one receives the treatments one may desire.
Rather than behave like a benevolent big brother who’s looking out for us all, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F Kennedy, Jr., ought to recognize that his Make America Healthy Again initiative is the perfect vehicle for restoring confidence in what is and in what’s coming down the pike. The recent kerfuffle driven by one of his aides, who tried to block further testing of a new mRNA-based flu vaccine, undermines all the good he’s otherwise done tamping down vaccine skepticism.
Since he was once a leading skeptic, Kennedy is the perfect fellow to do it. With the benefit of tremendous knowledge and hindsight, he can lay out a set of principles for vaccine development that could start us down the road to renewed confidence.
The first of these would be, of course, a renewed commitment by the federal government to ensure that vaccines are as safe as possible while getting them to market in time, and to be fully clear about their limitations and effectiveness. Taking the mystery out of things not only enables broader acceptance of new vaccines and technologies but also helps address broader societal issues. It limits the snake oil salesmen still out there among us who confuse everyone for profit and glory.
Transparency is our friend. Reasonable testing needs to be conducted, with results readily available for outside scrutiny. Order the FDA to make results available on its website in a timely manner so others can see the numbers. People can make informed decisions about the level of risk tolerance necessary. The results of any tests will, of course, need to be replicated before any new vaccines are approved, at least in non-emergency situations.
Kennedy and others must strike at the medical groupthink that controls so much of today's research. New ideas need a chance to advance and prove they are safe and effective. Now is the time to encourage innovators to go beyond what has been done before and address important safety concerns.
A company called Vector Sciences claims fantastic early results from a new delivery system that uses a variant of the common cold virus, delivered via nasal spray. It doesn’t use needles and involves none of the substances that have raised the hackles of the so-called “anti-vaxers” over the last few decades. This is the kind of choice policymakers ought to shoot for when deciding what research to support.
Trump ran on a promise to Make America Healthy Again. To do that, we must change the way we look at drugs and the drug approval process. It’s taken 100 years to create the mess we’re in. It won’t take nearly that long to fix things, but only if we approach the problem with open minds.
