Zeynep Tufekci: evaluation

Transcript context

…Even if you reject human challenge trials — so the vaccine information is presented, and then it’s three weeks to schedule a meeting at the FDA and have a final decision. The offices are all locked in cold over a four-day Thanksgiving weekend. I asked many people who are experts in the area. They all assured me it could be done in less time than three weeks. Yet it took three weeks, because what is it? It just takes that long to schedule the meeting? Or there’s too much status maximization in the bureaucracy? How do we fix that problem, which seemed to recur at many different stages? I don’t know the details of that particular one, but with something like vaccines — the reason I’m cautious is that, once again, there’s a thing — it’s not vaccines but vaccination that saves lives. The slightest screw-up in vaccines can undermine confidence, and even if they’re approved and they’re scientifically solid, if you overlook something or if there are some unexpected things, that can be dramatic and terrible. I’ll give you an example that I can’t figure out right now, which is, why haven’t we gotten the full authorization? Right now, they’re still functioning as EUA [emergency use authorization]. That is both causing people to think it’s experimental because it’s still emergency, and it is holding back some of the necessary things, like mandates, because which employer is supposed to say, “It’s an emergency thing, and it’s not fully approved, but I’m forcing you to do it”? That doesn’t seem to make sense. I’m just looking at it and thinking, we’ve vaccinated in this country no more than 100 million people. We’ve vaccinated a billion around the world. We have a very good idea of the safety profile, and it’s better than most vaccines that are approved. So why are we waiting for the full approval? I have no answer to that one. I tried to do the most charitable reading: maybe with the approval — the initial emergency one — maybe it could have been 10 days instead of three weeks, maybe a week difference. I don’t really know. I don’t have background information, but I’m just looking at the full approval, and I don’t understand. I think there’s something that Trump’s presence has obscured, which is, there’s a malaise in the Western scientific, public health, economic governing our institutions. There’s something not functioning very well, but because we are fairly wealthy nations with an enormous amount of inheritance, we can get by. We have a lot of science. We have a lot of scientists. We have excellent universities. We have a lot, but I feel like we’re almost the second generation or even the third generation that’s still spending the inheritance. Since we started so rich, it’s hiding the deeper problems. Trump’s year made it look like it was all Trump, but I’m looking at Western Europe, and they didn’t do that great either. In fact, they’ve done terrible, relatively speaking. I feel we haven’t really gotten our heads wrapped around how we do risk assessment, how we move, as you say, fast when we need to move fast, especially for things like masking, of which downsides are very little. If you found out they were useless, you can change it next month, and you didn’t lose anything. But we don’t do it. There’s something we haven’t completely come to grips with, and the pandemic’s urgency has, perhaps, acted like a stress test. It’s shown us the problems, but it’s still ongoing, so we haven’t sat down and said, “Let’s think about it because this is not good.” I think that’s job number one. perhaps, acted like a stress test. It’s shown us the problems, but it’s still ongoing, so we haven’t sat down and said, “Let’s think about it because this is not good.” I think that’s job number one. After the pandemic gets calmer, which will happen pretty soon — it’s going so fast that it’s going to end relatively soon — we should sit down and say, “This wasn’t just Trump. We screwed up a lot of things, and we also have revealed a lot of cracks in our institutions, and it’s time to try to fix that.”…

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