Daniel Carpenter: belief

Transcript context

…Look, it’s the same AstraZeneca company. The British saved many thousands of lives by being prompt with AstraZeneca. Surely, we don’t think that is a mistake. We’ve had a supply constraint on the vaccine side in the United States, maybe up until now. We could have done the same, had we approved AstraZeneca. The company made big mistakes, but why penalize the people who can get the vaccine for that when, again, you could save thousands of lives? I just don’t get it. To me, actually, I’m not sure that the AstraZeneca vaccine would have been taken in the United States. You reference the Ezra Klein story. I gave a talk recently to a group in Israel and Europe on regulation, where I said the big bullet we dodged in the past year was one in which there was all this pressure, in summer 2020, on the FDA to quicken a whole set of therapies for coronavirus and COVID-19. This obviously started with hydroxychloroquine, which I think the jury is in on that now — not effective; convalescent plasma — probably very effective, but its rollout certainly didn’t help. What you see in at least two different surveys over the summer of 2020 is a pronounced drop in expressed willingness to be vaccinated, anywhere from 10 to 15 percentage points, and deeply concentrated among the young. The mathematical models would suggest that’s exactly the population you want to have vaccinated sooner or later. Why? They’re more mobile. They’re much more likely to be vectors. I’ve done some back-of-the-envelope calculations. I shared them with Ezra. I also presented them to this group. If we start to think about what’s the social value of good vaccination just for the United States, and we think anywhere in the area of 10 to 20 trillion. I know some economists who think it’s much higher. But now we think, okay, what if the vaccine . . . because you could have said this with just about any vaccine. Pfizer’s readout from its data wasn’t until November, but you could have said, “Well, why didn’t we approve that vaccine in May or June?” And you would have had, I think, a social catastrophe — tens of millions of people not taking the vaccine. It’s very consistent with those polls that, right after the convalescent plasma debacle, showed a 10 to 15 percentage point decline — and possibly greater — in vaccine confidence, and you would have lost thousands and thousands of lives that way. At the end of the day, vaccines are only as good — especially a treatment with positive externalities — vaccines are only as good as the set of population that takes them. Again, I emphasize, it’s the young that you need for herd immunity. The marginal benefit of vaccinating the young is higher for herd immunity. If we look at actual behavior, if you take the United Kingdom, which was the first to approve Pfizer, was quick with AstraZeneca, has a government that, in some ways, has a reputation for being reckless. They have arguably weaker approval procedures than the FDA. They’ve been one of the countries with the least vaccine hesitancy. They got vaccines out there. The results already are shown to be good. More people want the vaccine. They see that their uncle is not keeling over dead. Why isn’t that a better theory of public opinion — that if you get people good vaccines quickly that make them healthier, more people are going to want vaccine?…

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