131–140 of 262 posts
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`...would rather lose a lot of good drugs than approve a bad drug.` Thanks for saying this, and rightfully so! Approving a bad drug in the world where distribution channels are very well set up could have disastrous effects. We can point to things like the opioid crisis in the USA right now - a drug that is so addictive it should have never been put into use the way it was.
I don't understand the "rightfully so!" There is a real cost to not approving good drugs in order to avoid approving bad ones.
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It's 1-2 orders of magnitude more deadly than the flu. Some estimates are between 2 and 4% fatality rate for the Covid-19. Flu is 0.1%. That fatality rate average masks that it is far deadlier for the elderly and high risk patients, with as much as 10-20% fatality rate for that demographic.
Thanks for the reply. What is the fatality rate among the elderly and high risk patients for seasonal flu? (say, in the US if there are no worldwide statistics). I understand the real problem with any flu-like disease is precisely with the elderly and high risk patients. Usually, of course there are always cases of healthy people who die from a flu.
These are worldwide statistics. Breakdown is by age, but I don't recall if there's other categories.
I know Derek Lowe is an expert. However, sometimes, experts think that because things have always been a certain way throughout their career, they will always be like that. Drug development has been very conservative especially in the US for the past several decades. The FDA is all about making sure they never have a thalidomide incident and would rather lose a lot of good drugs than approve a bad drug. This is the s…
The obvious risk here is that you're combining a rush job with limited oversight, and large-scale distribution. So any mistake that would have been caught by the existing process will instead have the potential to roll into a global disaster.
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We should risk people's lives because doing otherwise may harm the economy..?
Harming the economy is also a risk to people’s lives, though.
You can take good measures that slows down the economy without endangering people's lives. Of course you can also consider social unrest to be a risk but that's another matter.
For those suggesting that a COVID-19 vaccine can somehow be fast tracked, consider what happens if something goes wrong during deployment to the population. The US has an active, very vocal anti-vax community. They've been growing and gaining ground for decades. The first sign of trouble of any kind with a new COVID-19 vaccine would result in a backlash of biblical proportions. It could be so strong as to derail any…
Vs what? a million dead? They might have some opinion on whether its worth risking a black eye for a quick vaccine.
Given that this is so similar to the previous SARS epidemic, how did that whole thing eventually end? Was a vaccine created? Did it just naturally fizzle out?
Summer hit the Northern Hemisphere.
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It didn't involve clinical trials on humans. That's the one thing that takes time in medicine and can't be optimized away. You can't do medicine without clinical trials.
You can speed up clinical trials by running larger ones at earlier stages. This risks more deaths from bad medicines, which may still be worth it in a pandemic.
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Dearh rate for sever cases is huge. We'll get the first test results at end of march/start of april. If I have 30% chance of dying I take anything that lowers the chance significantly.
Even if the side effects are cancer in a year? Strong, consistent headache? Organ poisening? Permanent weakening of immune system? ... And you would have to be very old and with strong preconditions, to have a 30% death chance with corvid-19. And then any side effects would be even more fatal.
Remdesivir has already gone through safety trials years ago, it's in phase 3 now.