Matthew Yglesias -- "Approve the AstraZeneca vaccine! Yes, their trial was messed up. But it clearly works."

 We will need to more about this.

Meanwhile, there is a plant up and running in Baltimore manufacturing a vaccine that was developed by an Oxford University research team in partnership with AstraZeneca. It’s cheaper and easier to manufacture than the mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna. The World Health Organization’s expert panel says the vaccine should be used in adults of all ages. Given that the United States has access to a considerable supply of more effective mRNA vaccines, I would be more cautious than them and continue vaccinating seniors with the Pfizer/Moderna products but start letting non-seniors who are impatient for vaccination get AstraZeneca’s shot.

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I do all that throat-clearing because spending last week arguing on the internet made it clear to me that a lot of the people pushing back against fast approval of the AZ vaccine are fundamentally process-trusters who are out here to defend the FDA qua FDA, which I think is leading them to miss the forest for the trees.


For example, nobody on epidemiology Twitter seems to believe that the United Kingdom or European Union regulators are making a huge mistake by authorizing the vaccine. And that’s not because epidemiology Twitter is blind to events occurring outside the United States. People who were very critical of Sweden’s “herd immunity” approach to Covid, or the UK’s absurd initiative to pay people to go eat in restaurants have not been criticizing governments on the other side of the pond for using the AstraZeneca vaccine.


Dr. Anthony Fauci, the patron saint of Trust The Experts sentiment online, has talked about the AstraZeneca vaccine a bunch and is not expressing doubts about its safety and efficacy.


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For better or worse, the current vaccination effort is not some kind of all-hands-on-deck thing where every qualified person is giving out shots. And while the AstraZeneca vaccine appears somewhat less potent than the mRNA vaccines, it only requires normal refrigerator levels of refrigeration to stay viable. This means it could be delivered to pharmacies and doctors’ offices around the country, and given to people under 65 through those distribution channels in just the way we do flu shots. Retail chains could even contract with pharmacies to have personnel come into the store and vaccinate their staff.


We normally do 2-3 million flu shots per day during peak vaccinations without any kind of emergency mobilization. That would be a game-changingly large increase in vaccine throughput.


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Biden would do well to be a little less literal in his “learning the lessons of 2009” and instead remember the point about urgency.

Unless someone at the FDA can explain to him in a compelling way that they have actual doubt about the safety and efficacy of the vaccine — as opposed to quibbles about the process or a scientific interest in seeing data from a better-designed trial — he should install a commissioner who’s prepared to authorize it for emergency use on the basis of the existing data. A regulatory system designed to protect us from profit-seeking quacks peddling fake medicine is a perfectly reasonable idea, but it doesn’t apply to this situation, and it’s not the job of political leaders to make that wide-ranging assessment.