Vaccines: What Next?

Opens December 8th 2020, the day after Pearl Harbor Day, citing a New York Magazine article by David Wallace-Wells titled Had We Had a Vaccine the Whole Time.

Moderna designed its vaccine two days after receiving the genome in January from a brave and punished Chinese leaker, so the December-approved vaccine is identical to January's, meaning a cure sat waiting through the whole pandemic.

Moderna's two-day vaccine design inspired Mount Sinai's Florian Krammer to write a Cell preprint titled Pandemic Vaccines: How Are We Going to Be Better Prepared Next Time, mapping how pre-spending about 3 billion dollars could make any pandemic vaccine in three to four months.

He has never seen anything as politicized as coronavirus, from hoax claims to worst-thing-ever, and society probably overreacted, a debate that will rage for a decade while politicians scapegoat their predecessors.

Being better could have prevented most of the 250000 dead and 200000 more by April, with CDC data showing 92 percent over 55 with pre-existing conditions and fewer than 100 US child deaths.

The real issue is not the death toll, roughly 10 times influenza, but post-covid syndrome debilitating millions for years as the new Gulf War syndrome, with lungs like a bomb went off and permanent heart and brain damage.

10 percent of those who lost smell to anosmia had not regained it nine months later, a permanent disability removing the joy of food, while Remdesivir got emergency authorization yet RNA vaccines could not be entertained earlier.

Warns globalization and synthetic biology mean pandemics every 10 to 20 years, citing the Andes virus, a hantavirus variant with a 32 percent fatality rate and airborne spread barely contained in South America.

Asks whether society should wait 12 to 36 months for a vaccine if someone combines Ebola's lethality with measles' contagiousness at a 70 percent fatality rate, since a malicious small group could engineer that within two decades.

As a libertarian he cares that mask-wearing and social distancing not become the permanent new normal, since handshakes and hugs are gone and people now view each other as disease vectors.

Many believe the Wuhan virus is man-made while virologists say there is no evidence, but the origin next to the very lab studying SARS is suspicious, and if not this one then the next.

The world faces three tasks from this wake-up call, the first getting back to the old normal of hugs and handshakes, since the FDA's 53-page Pfizer report means approval on the 10th and every vulnerable American vaccinated by April, so the public must demand normalcy and not let new politicians scapegoat the old, using Krammer's roadmap that costs the price of an aircraft carrier.

Urges studying nations that handled it well like Taiwan and Vietnam, with Taiwan suffering only seven deaths despite 20 million hyper-urbanized people, proving an equivalent response is possible without destroying the economy.

Warns the next pandemic in a decade or two will not have a 0.3 percent fatality rate but 10 or 15 percent because it will likely be man-made, urging everyone to read Krammer and the New York Magazine article.

Plans to contact the paper's author plus senators and congressmen to structure a vaccine bill, or crowdfund the few-billion-dollar response, since the only reason vaccination was slow was bureaucracy.

The American way is to succeed where government fails, as private entrepreneurs built SpaceX after a floundering space program, so the people can innovate and fundraise to prevent the next pandemic thanks to BARDA and Moderna since the 2003 SARS epidemic.

The biggest reason people resisted masks was not disbelief in the pandemic but fear of a government permanently changing life with no accountability or goalposts, as with Biden's announced 100 days of masks.

Demands goalposts and metrics for declaring mission accomplished, since 14 days to slow the spread became nine months, and says society must have an uncomfortable conversation about the acceptable-risk threshold.

Asks what lethality number justifies lockdowns, since society accepts 50000 flu deaths a year, and says if the government will not name it this is about control not public health.

He will take the vaccine after seeing the FDA's 53-page data showing 80 percent had mostly mild side effects with statistically unconnected deaths, though four Bell's palsy cases in the vaccine group are worth watching.

Conspiratorial thinking about the placebo group comes from a government that has decided it is okay to lie, like the Soviet Union, making people unable to discern fact from fiction or quantify acceptable risk.

The world is too complex for any one human and can only be parsed through institutions, so losing faith in institutions means losing the ability to understand the world and manage risk, the biggest lesson of the pandemic, while the elite quietly seek to strip freedoms and hand them to a few.

There is a small window to provide a counter-example by responsibly ending the pandemic, demanding metrics, and buying an insurance policy cheaper than a city subway to prevent the next one, then rebuilding institutional trust.

The entire point of blockchain, not price, is restoring trust where it is absent, since you use a database if you trust people but need code to keep people honest when you do not, so the industry must leverage trustless technology to restore faith in institutions or face the worst century in human history.