Atrios makes a good point about vaccines.

He says he won’t be first in line for a vaccine and for good reason:

I do think the combination of Covid denialism and the anti-vax movement has led to a too strong backlash from the rest of us. One doesn’t have to be an anti-vaxxer to have some concerns about a rushed vaccine development using a new approach (above my pay grade).

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My point is not that people should be overly concerned about vaccine safety, but instead that it isn’t being ANTI-SCIENCE or DANGEROUS DENIALISM to not think a couple of press releases means the problem is definitely safely solved.

(If anyone is interested in how an mRNA vaccine works, let me know. I’ll see if I can dig up some resources that make it easy for the layman to understand. I won’t describe it myself since those kinds of posts tend to go over like lead balloons.)

Yes, pharma does not produce drugs and vaccines out of the goodness of its heart but in this case, it doesn’t want to further tarnish it’s already bad reputation, especially with the new Biden administration and David Kessler on Biden’s task force. Kessler was notorious for killing drugs in their cradles. Maybe he had a point, maybe not. I do know that it ultimately cost pharma companies billions of dollars in the end and lead to severely truncating the careers of myself and many thousands of the other small molecule discovery investigators in NJ.

I salute our FDA overlords. We really need them. But I’m not at all concerned that pharma will get by Biden’s people with a pass. That being said, we have a real public health emergency and if we can keep people out of the hospital with even just partial responses, we should probably get the f#%^ing vaccine.

I’m concerned with side effects and safety. I hope they got enough n’s. I’m going to be looking to Kessler for some guidance and insight here. I realize that Trump’s people are going to keep the government hostage until the bitter end but that doesn’t mean that Biden’s task force won’t be able to evaluate the data that Pfizer and Moderna has. Kessler is certainly capable of saying whether the safety data meets his threshhold. If he’s giving the green light, even if the new FDA administrator hasn’t been approved by Congress, get the shot.