Abolish the FDA

The final challenge is buffering the burden of restrictions. Our research shows that the social, financial and health burden of the pandemic fuels opposition against the political system. In Denmark, high compliance and support has made restrictions softer and made them seem meaningful, lowering this burden. As a consequence, Danes have suffered less during the pandemic and perceived mass testing and coronavirus passports as tools for protecting each other.

Danes trusted government and health authorities to make responsible and competent decisions to fight the pandemic, which for the most part they did. The Danish government and authorities in turn trusted the people of Denmark to behave responsibly and follow the guidelines.

needless to say, we are the anti-Denmark with respect to such matters
 
57Brave said:
socialism ?

that is what we would hear and it would stall right then and there
Click to expand...

social trust

the opposite of social trust is an affinity for conspiracy theories and various other manifestations of distrust and paranoia

as I said we are the anti-Denmark

and it hurts us in all sorts of ways

and it is getting worse
 
btw I've been to Denmark (long before covid) a few times...it is a wonderful country...Copenhagen is maybe the most underrated city in Europe

the Danes call themselves The Happy Country
 
nsacpi said:
btw I've been to Denmark (long before covid) a few times...it is a wonderful country...Copenhagen is maybe the most underrated city in Europe

the Danes call themselves The Happy Country
Click to expand...

Denmark was only country smart enough to do an actual study on masks
 
sturg33 said:
Denmark was only country smart enough to do an actual study on masks
Click to expand...

Denmark is making the use of face masks on public transport mandatory at all hours of the day in order to halt the rising spread of Covid-19, Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at a press conference on Saturday, adding that more economic stimulus for affected businesses is in the works. The mandate takes effect Aug. 22.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...s,the works. The mandate takes effect Aug. 22.

Danes look at us and these controversies and laugh. They are just too nice and polite to do it to our face. And no, they aren't selling Greenland.
 
Last edited:
57Brave said:
as much as we have on our collective plates right now I am not holding my breath on any bureaucratic shake up of CDC.

regulations are tedious.
a streamlining of FDA is very very complicated

Like I said at first abolishing the FDA is akin to defunding the police
Click to expand...

To the last sentence…probably…but have to start the conversation somewhere
 
Oklahomahawk said:
Unless we redevelop a love for and desire for THE truth and the ability to see it when it's right before our eyes, we really don't have any hope left as a nation, regarding the FDA or anything else.
Click to expand...

Not wrong. Public trust is the root of a lot of our problems. These agencies haven’t covered themselves in glory on that front…they’ve contributed heartily to the lack of trust.
 
acesfull86 said:
Not wrong. Public trust is the root of a lot of our problems. These agencies haven’t covered themselves in glory on that front…they’ve contributed heartily to the lack of trust.
Click to expand...

I'm gonna try to put this diplomatically. But starting a thread titled "Abolish the FDA" is symptomatic of the populist burn-it-to-the-ground ethos that is the root of many of our problems. It is much more difficult (and perhaps emotionally less satisfying) to sort through various mundane ideas for strengthening our institutions and improving their performance.
 
Fortunately, we do have public-spirited people who think hard about how to improve the performance of our institutions. Paul Romer addressed some of these issues when he testified before Congress last year. I thought this was a particularly astute observation about how institutions should be set up:

One of the most useful and under-appreciated innovations in the US system of governance is the division of labor between the FAA, which makes regulatory decisions about aviation, and the National Transportation Safety Board, which is responsible for establishing the facts after any accident.

There is an inevitable tendency for an agency that has to make technical decisions to report to the public a version of the facts that supports its decisions. These agencies turn into advocates for specific positions. In the process, they lose their scientific objectivity. During this pandemic, we have seen several important instances where agencies that were responsible for difficult real-time decisions that were central to our pandemic response -- the CDC, the FDA, and the WHO -- justified their decisions by presenting the public with a biased or misleading summary of the facts.

Romer's idea is to protect scientific integrity by separating the functions of decision-maker and fact-finder. This applies in a lot of situations.
 
Last edited:
The full text of his testimony, which I think is well worth a read, can be found at this link:

https://paulromer.net/statement-for-house-budget-comittee/

The opening paragraphs:

Kari Stefansson is the founder of deCode Genetics, the firm that has been doing population scale genomics in Iceland and contributed to its successful management of the coronavirus pandemic. In a conversation about this experience, Kari said that the technology that he and everyone else in the world is using to test for the presence of the virus was developed in universities based in the US. The question he posed was why the US has been less effective than other countries in taking practical advantage of its amazing basic scientific achievements.

It is a good question. In 2019, a team at Johns Hopkins evaluated how well prepared various nations were to manage a pandemic. They concluded that the United States was the best prepared nation in the world. The United Kingdom was number two. (The results are available here.)

So the question is not simply why the US response was so inadequate, but also why the people tasked with thinking about these issues failed to anticipate how poorly we would do.

For members of the academic community, the convenient answer to this question is that blame for our failed national response lies with our political leaders. But as the warning sign at rail crossing in France cautions: Be careful. One train may hide another.
 
Last edited:
Needless to say Romer's ideas for improving things don't fit neatly on a bumper sticker such as "Abolish the FDA."
 
nsacpi said:
The full text of his testimony, which I think is well worth a read, can be found at this link:

https://paulromer.net/statement-for-house-budget-comittee/

The opening paragraphs:

Kari Stefansson is the founder of deCode Genetics, the firm that has been doing population scale genomics in Iceland and contributed to its successful management of the coronavirus pandemic. In a conversation about this experience, Kari said that the technology that he and everyone else in the world is using to test for the presence of the virus was developed in universities based in the US. The question he posed was why the US has been less effective than other countries in taking practical advantage of its amazing basic scientific achievements.

It is a good question. In 2019, a team at Johns Hopkins evaluated how well prepared various nations were to manage a pandemic. They concluded that the United States was the best prepared nation in the world. The United Kingdom was number two. (The results are available here.)

So the question is not simply why the US response was so inadequate, but also why the people tasked with thinking about these issues failed to anticipate how poorly we would do.
Click to expand...

an old Italian proverb:

“a fish rots from the head down”
///////////////////

Funny how FEMA worked then it didn't then it did
 
By the way Romer has been a very harsh critic of the FDA. Over year ago he wrote:

It might be time to review the massive damage that the FDA is doing by restricting the supply and use of tests for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Massive? With enough tests, the US could have avoided the enormous cost that this virus is imposing – at least 200,000 excess deaths and $8 trillion in lost output.

Many accounts have noted how the failure of the virus test developed by the CDC delayed the US response to the virus. The fact that has not gotten as much attention is that although the FDA promptly approved the broken test from the CDC, it took an excruciatingly long time to approve tests that actually worked.
 
Last edited:
nsacpi said:
I'm gonna try to put this diplomatically. But starting a thread titled "Abolish the FDA" is symptomatic of the populist burn-it-to-the-ground ethos that is the root of many of our problems. It is much more difficult (and perhaps emotionally less satisfying) to sort through various mundane ideas for strengthening our institutions and improving their performance.
Click to expand...

Fair enough. I see the missions of these agencies as flawed. I don’t believe the issue is we just need the “right” people in the right positions and everything will be fine. There are fundamental issues with these institutions and what we’re tasking them to do. A flat out abolishing isn’t going to happen unless we get in a time machine and elect Ron Paul. But drastic changes are needed and I’m simply submitting my opening bid.
 
btw discussion of Romer's ideas in real time can be found in our very own coronovirus thread...on these boards

along with the predictable objections from the predictable posters that massive high-frequency testing would violate "muh rights"

So yeah, our institutions deserve a lot of criticism. And a serious attempt must be made to improve them. But that's not going to save us from the paranoia and other manifestations of distrust that have come to infect this country.

We are the anti-Denmark and it is costing us bigly.
 
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/11/the-paxlovid-paradox.html

Zvi at LessWrong rounds up the COVID news including this excellent bit on Pfizer’s anti-Covid pill Paxlovid which looks to be very effective but is not yet FDA approved.

The trial was stopped due to ‘ethical considerations’ for being too effective. You see, we live in a world in which:

1) It is illegal to give this drug to any patients, because it hasn’t been proven safe and effective.

2) It is illegal to continue a trial to study the drug, because it has been proven so safe and effective that it isn’t ethical to not give the drug to half the patients.

3) Who, if they weren’t in the study, couldn’t get the drug at all, because it is illegal due to not being proven safe and effective yet.

4) So now no one gets added to the trial so those who would have been definitely don’t get Paxlovid, and are several times more likely to die.

5) But our treatment of them is now ‘ethical.’

6) For the rest of time we will now hear about how it was only seven deaths and we can’t be sure Paxlovid works or how well it works, and I expect to spend hours arguing over exactly how much it works.

7) For the rest of time people will argue the study wasn’t big enough so we don’t know the Paxlovid is safe.

8) Those arguments will then be used both by people arguing to not take Paxlovid, and people who want to require other interventions because of these concerns.

9) FDA Delenda Est.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top