I’m happy to see that some corporations are stepping in with good corporate citizenship and leadership, especially in areas with vacuums of governance related to deregulation and defunding of oversight.
But I really do think it is sad when people trust antigovernment politicians and businesses more than constructive politicians who sincerely try to help with good government, and professionals who spend their lives honing skills and knowledge that is not just grounded in economics and profit. As a family doctor I’m biased and sensitive I guess.
People first over profits. I’m glad many businesses care about both. But by definition corporations must care about profits first to stay alive. And politicians who undermine and destroy institutions like the CDC and EPA are riding a dangerous wave of misguided populism, and will ride us to the ground.
Cheers to the corporations and businesses who are protecting people, motives and agendas notwithstanding…
Yeah, I find it far more likely that companies will respond to the staffing and productivity issues created by illnesses by simplying avoiding the need for human workers altogether.
I really wish I'd penned this. You captured my thoughts pretty well, especially the paragraph regarding 'people first over profits'. THe denigration of CDC and EPA, and attempts to derail and defund both are dangerous to our society, but appear designed to feed on long-term misrepresentation by politicians and pundits whose motives remain unclear.
Business in Florida, including schools, cannot require masking and cannot inact any Covid mitigation policies because our governor made it illegal. We will not see another mask mandate or better ventilation in schools or business here. If he could have DeathSantis would have made the vaccines illegal.
Business care about their bottom line but they don't see health care as part of that for the most part anyway. I don't trust businesses to protect workers because most business models rely on worker exploitation in the first place. Business that were considered "essential" didn't give their employees hazard pay and many were left entirely unprotected. The vast majority of restaurant workers don't even have the option for health insurance and are punished for being sick and forced to work sick.
Hospital staff aren't even masking anymore. I have taken my mom in for several procedures and I was one of the only people masking and even when they saw my mask the nurses never offered to mask themselves. It's disgusting and disgraceful.
We've sacrificed public health so that people could "go back to normal" and for the economy. All the people disabled by repeat infections and Long Covid won't be able to keep working. This economic growth comes at a cost I'm not willing to pay. Vulnerable communities can no longer safely participate in public life. I'm tired of being a hostage in my own home because I can't safely go out in public. I mask when I have to go out and due to PTSD I cannot mask for more than an hour at a time without it triggering panic attacks. I no longer see a future where I will ever be comfortable in public spaces again because high-risk and older populations have been deemed expendable.
It makes me sad and sick to see even people like yourself praising these policies that are not good for large parts of the population.
You have an anxiety disorder (and I sincerely do empathize). I'm sorry that you were lied to about the efficacy of masks and the ability of humans to control the spread of contagious respiratory viruses (we can't). There is a direct correlation between economic health and public health. It isn't an either/or. High-risk, older people will always be at higher risk from viruses and always have been.
One of the interesting events during COVID was Menards setting a mask mandate to enter the store complete with a security guard. John Menard would not usually be linked with the Fauci crowd. My thought is he and the management team looked at the numbers and didn't want their employees getting sick, it wasn't public health, it was "just business." In this quite MAGA friendly red zone there were some rather contentious interactions with the security guard but "No Mask - No Enter" prevailed.
As with all community masking in this part of the country, it's over. Part of it is that the absolute risk has dropped. In 2020 we in medical care were overwhelmed, patients died in outlying Emergency Departments because there was no room at the referral center. Covid has sorted us into four groups: those who drew a bad genetic hand and died, those who got lucky and don't get symptoms, those who survived their first bout and now have T-cells ready to reengage the enemy, and those of us who have gotten every vaccine we could. Personally, I mask at work in the hospital and on airplanes, otherwise we "party like it's 2019."
Yes and.... when business productivity drives health initiatives, babies, children, and the elderly may be underserved. How do we increase trust in equitable means and access for all community members?
Smart businesses would use their influence to push for actions that would both help their own bottom line and help the communities in which they work. For example, advocating for affordable, quality child care and senior care. The argument would be that employees “distracted” by the need to care for children and seniors are less productive. Of course, we (society) should be doing these things anyway but we’re not.
I'm personally exhausted from attending public health conferences that justify the need for public health measures based on productivity or as it was put recently by a keynote speaker, "to have a strong workforce," and "because when people are not healthy, they cannot work or contribute to society,". Eugenics thinking pervades public health doctrine and I'm so tired of it.
I would like to see local and national Chamber of Commerce join with EPA, NIH, and Public Health departments to adopt ASHRAE and enforce higher standards for indoor air for all their members. You can argue bottom line, productivity, employee recruitment and retention, reduced absenteeism, duty of care, community well-being, or just do what's right.
I endorse Dr. Jetelina’s push to engage the business community and, in particular, pushing hard to Improve ventilation in buildings visited by the public. This should include healthy building standards, periodic inspections to assure compliance, and a requirement to have prominently placed monitors, such as CO2 monitors, that show the ventilation levels in the building. This could be rolled out in phases, covering key businesses such as schools and hospitals in the first round, for example. I would also be very interested, if Dr. Jetelina has time and inclination, in an interview with Dr. Linsey Marr and Joseph Allen on this topic.
It's hard to understand that some businesses object to public health activity. Even socialized medicine. A healthier America means a more productive America. Socialized medicine would mean businesses would no longer have to pay and administer health insurance. It would also mean more mobility for the American workforce; therefore, more easily filling jobs in demand.
== big announcement of large parking lot Saturday setup for drive-thru get-your-shot. Fill out brief sheet of paper in car giving your name and contact -phone#, email, etc). Pretty fast-moving line of cars, I believe they ran out by early afternoon.
== Huge shopping center. Set up for Flu shots in the middle of the hallways. Fill out one sheet of paper giving your name and contact info.
BOth mRNA vaccines could be held at room temperature for a short period but had to be used within 24 hours (I think; it's been awhile) of reconstitution and opening.
In Oklahoma, one of the biotech firms held drive-thru vaccine clinics. We were working with an Afghan immigrant family and took advantage of this after I did some research on how long and what they'd need. Fast, efficient, and friendly. They did this for weeks and always had long lines but even with 4 of the kids and one of the parents (5 receiving vaccines), and a long line, we were through the line and out in well under an hour.
I agree with you but am trying to figure out logistics. When the workplaces of my family members have flu clinics, their employers are paying for it. My employer rents a small office in a big building owned by a non-profit that fills most of the 4 floors. They had a flu vaccine clinic a few weeks ago, but I couldn't partake because I do not work for them.
Taking in and verifying insurance credentials needs to be made much easier. Why can’t they scan your insurance card on a phone device and verify coverage instantly? This is a huge bottleneck.
I worked for a University but directly with NOAA in an Oklahoma facility. The annual flu clinic was free and open to both the Federal and non-federal personnel, and for a $25 fee to spouses and kids of same. They had some deal with one of the local hospitals.
With respect to low vaccination uptake, I wonder if part of the problem is “choice overload”? There are so many different vaccines available (flu, Covid, RSV, pneumonia, shingles, whooping cough, tetanus, etc). Just like Baskin and Robins and 31 flavors, people often retreat to “do nothing mode” when presented with so many choices.
Even within covid shots, there are many choices: Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax. With or without flu and RSV? It’s like do you want mint chip, vanilla chip or chocolate chip - oh, and what about an extra scoop of pistachio or rocky road? We’d be happy to give you three scoops today, but it might give you a stroke. (Now that Novavax is at scale, does the world need two different mRNA boosters?)
What is obvious to someone in Public Health (“Get your flu and covid shot every fall!”) isn’t always obvious to the average person.
I understand your concern about things like coercion and mandates for shots, as well as your perceived fault with efficacies. However, mandates for vaccination in healthcare made sense at the time (in fact, they still do), and mandates for the military should have been beyond question based on precedent.
Efficacy questions are a bit more interesting. For ancestral strains, efficacy, in terms of preventing serious disease, hospitalization and death was extraordinary, and that was also the case for preventing infection (we think) and illness (some may have been infected but protected from symptomatic disease). A misunderstanding arises when one thinks the intent of the vaccines was to prevent infection and transmission. A sterilizing vaccine, as is often achieved in measles, is a very rare vaccine. There's been a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about that subject and most of the open-literature and social media discussions by competent scientists have been "refuted' by misinformation, which was circulated more rapidly because it fit biases and sounded more plausible to a number of people.
The other issue was mutation of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is a rapidly mutating virus, and a virus's primary mechanism to survive is to mutate to a form that can continue to infect hosts, propagating that viral selection form. Or, in other words, the virus "learned" (or randomly evolved) to evade the antibodies created by the original vaccines, allow it to continue to infect more people. It also had to maintain a degree of virulence, so that it could actually infect and continue to reproduce in a host. A successful virus infects its hosts but does not kill them rapidly, as if it did so, its ability to reproduce would be lost.
We've seen variants, including BA.1 and of late, BA.2.86 that likely emerged from a chronically infected and immune-compromised host or host pool. The implications here are that in these cases, we are seeing a huge number of changes to the genome that can result in serious immune evasion. These require a lot more study to determine their effects. I'll note we saw more deaths with BA.1/BA.2/BA.5 than with the Delta variant but less press coverage.
Today the fact remains that those who are vaccinated are better able to avoid serious consequences of infection even with the latest variants.
Trust was lost because of misinformation and intentional disinformation, spread for reasons that baffle me. Those of us who were normally pretty good at communicating were overwhelmed with information and when we attempted to communicate what we knew at the time, with disclosure that it was incomplete and constantly changing, were attacked for being untruthful. I can say I often changed my professional opinion and position daily... or more frequently in 2020-2021, as I discussed the data and clinical cases with friends and colleagues. The amount of preprint and peer reviewed literature we reviewed was beyond imagining 10 years ago. COVID-19 is so far, the best documented outbreak in terms of peer reviewed publications ever. I've barely scratched the surface in terms of reading all the pertinent literature, but I was generally well ahead of the majority in terms of literature and peer-discussion work, and I was being told I was misrepresenting the case because it didn't conform to someone's already calcified notions of what this virus was. Even today, I read something and see my own biases shift, because I've learned something else about its behavior. In the summer of 2020, some of us were already of the strong opinion that this virus was primarily spread by aerosols for infection in the respiratory tract, but its primary adverse effects were vascular or even cardiovascular. That was not a popular position in those days, especially when one looked at what was being spread on social media and some elements of the press. Yet, that was what the evidence was suggesting to us after review of clinical cases, necropsy results and other scientists' written reports (peer reviewed, or even preprints with sufficient scrutiny).
Essentially, the political divide in this country eroded faith in Public Health. Yes, politicians were involved in that, but not in the manner you appear to be suggesting.
It’s true the Covid boosters are expensive, however, all three companies (M, P, N) have multi-billion-dollar cost structures that need to be recouped.
Moderna has increased its US market share from 36% (2022) to 45% (2023) according to their earnings call last week. Since Novavax was mostly a nothing burger last year, Moderna’s 9% gain likely came at the expense of Pfizer.
Now that Novavax is getting up to speed, surely these numbers will change. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 2024 Pfizer exits the Covid vaccine market.
Moderna "recouped" what we already paid for in Warp Speed and a nice few billions in profits. Pfizer did "recouped" their money with the German government.
Companies evaluate products on a yearly basis - did our most recent covid booster make a profit this year? Are we likely to make a profit next year? If the answer is “no,” their best move is to exit the market.
There's also a social responsibility element that has (or should) come into play. Over time, Pfizer has displayed a pretty good record on this front. I don't expect them to exit this market soon unless they sell their product IP to, say, Moderna.
I respectfully but energetically disagree with the belief that businesses will act in the public interest of their own accord. Case in point, I'm lucky enough to live in a rent regulated apartment in a city that I always wanted to live in. Why? Because my landlord gets a 421(a) tax abatement. That's pretty much the only reason. Not because it's good business (because it isn't), not because they care about their tenants (they could care less) and not because they are particularly civic minded (they aren't). Businesses are, in effect, automata that respond to a combination of stimuli - economics, shareholders, and complex systems of government incentives and penalties. No amount of sweet talking them will convince them to change their behavior - only the government will.
As for the "productivity per person" benefit of clean indoor air - is anyone naive enough to think that a private business, faced with a choice between investing in the health of their workers and replacing them altogether by artificial intelligence - that they wouldn't pick the latter? Companies care about absolute productivity, not productivity per employee. If businesses want fewer people getting sick, or absenteeism - they'll do whatever it takes to eliminate the need for any employees at all, because they'll decide that human workers are a liability. I notice that the linked video you provided was several months before AI took the world by storm - and there's no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.
Visualizing the famed revolutionary Dr. Katelyn Jetelina silently moving from floor to floor through thickets of bureaucracies, affixing revolutionary calls to end all pestilences.
What are your concerns, and which reports are you seeing that are bothering you? I'll try to help.
I've received one of the vaccines (I honestly would have to find the data to tell you which) and had no issue save a sore shoulder for several days longer than I did for the COVID booster. I'm really happy we have a vaccine and monoclonal solution with some durability. This will help both the older population and infants. These vaccines are a good development.
Gotta say, I think maybe some employers may have swung a little too far from surface cleaning, especially as people start coming back into the office - not just talking, coughing, and breathing but also eating, drinking, handling objects, pooping, and peeing. Case in point, in the early part of 2021:
- People at my office had left food at their desks in 2020, creating a rodent problem
- We now have a cockroach problem. A lot of maintenance staff left
- There are four sinks in the bathroom on my floor, but only one soap dispenser
- We do not have a cafeteria. Everyone eats out or at their desks. We recently received a stern email saying we were not to use conference rooms for personal use of any sort
I am concerned that we are sitting ducks for norovirus!!!
I’m happy to see that some corporations are stepping in with good corporate citizenship and leadership, especially in areas with vacuums of governance related to deregulation and defunding of oversight.
But I really do think it is sad when people trust antigovernment politicians and businesses more than constructive politicians who sincerely try to help with good government, and professionals who spend their lives honing skills and knowledge that is not just grounded in economics and profit. As a family doctor I’m biased and sensitive I guess.
People first over profits. I’m glad many businesses care about both. But by definition corporations must care about profits first to stay alive. And politicians who undermine and destroy institutions like the CDC and EPA are riding a dangerous wave of misguided populism, and will ride us to the ground.
Cheers to the corporations and businesses who are protecting people, motives and agendas notwithstanding…
Yeah, I find it far more likely that companies will respond to the staffing and productivity issues created by illnesses by simplying avoiding the need for human workers altogether.
I really wish I'd penned this. You captured my thoughts pretty well, especially the paragraph regarding 'people first over profits'. THe denigration of CDC and EPA, and attempts to derail and defund both are dangerous to our society, but appear designed to feed on long-term misrepresentation by politicians and pundits whose motives remain unclear.
Business in Florida, including schools, cannot require masking and cannot inact any Covid mitigation policies because our governor made it illegal. We will not see another mask mandate or better ventilation in schools or business here. If he could have DeathSantis would have made the vaccines illegal.
Business care about their bottom line but they don't see health care as part of that for the most part anyway. I don't trust businesses to protect workers because most business models rely on worker exploitation in the first place. Business that were considered "essential" didn't give their employees hazard pay and many were left entirely unprotected. The vast majority of restaurant workers don't even have the option for health insurance and are punished for being sick and forced to work sick.
Hospital staff aren't even masking anymore. I have taken my mom in for several procedures and I was one of the only people masking and even when they saw my mask the nurses never offered to mask themselves. It's disgusting and disgraceful.
We've sacrificed public health so that people could "go back to normal" and for the economy. All the people disabled by repeat infections and Long Covid won't be able to keep working. This economic growth comes at a cost I'm not willing to pay. Vulnerable communities can no longer safely participate in public life. I'm tired of being a hostage in my own home because I can't safely go out in public. I mask when I have to go out and due to PTSD I cannot mask for more than an hour at a time without it triggering panic attacks. I no longer see a future where I will ever be comfortable in public spaces again because high-risk and older populations have been deemed expendable.
It makes me sad and sick to see even people like yourself praising these policies that are not good for large parts of the population.
You have an anxiety disorder (and I sincerely do empathize). I'm sorry that you were lied to about the efficacy of masks and the ability of humans to control the spread of contagious respiratory viruses (we can't). There is a direct correlation between economic health and public health. It isn't an either/or. High-risk, older people will always be at higher risk from viruses and always have been.
It's people like you who keep people like me hostages in our own homes.
One of the interesting events during COVID was Menards setting a mask mandate to enter the store complete with a security guard. John Menard would not usually be linked with the Fauci crowd. My thought is he and the management team looked at the numbers and didn't want their employees getting sick, it wasn't public health, it was "just business." In this quite MAGA friendly red zone there were some rather contentious interactions with the security guard but "No Mask - No Enter" prevailed.
does Menards still have a mask mandate to enter? If not, why not? Don't they want their employees to stay healthy?
As with all community masking in this part of the country, it's over. Part of it is that the absolute risk has dropped. In 2020 we in medical care were overwhelmed, patients died in outlying Emergency Departments because there was no room at the referral center. Covid has sorted us into four groups: those who drew a bad genetic hand and died, those who got lucky and don't get symptoms, those who survived their first bout and now have T-cells ready to reengage the enemy, and those of us who have gotten every vaccine we could. Personally, I mask at work in the hospital and on airplanes, otherwise we "party like it's 2019."
Yes and.... when business productivity drives health initiatives, babies, children, and the elderly may be underserved. How do we increase trust in equitable means and access for all community members?
Smart businesses would use their influence to push for actions that would both help their own bottom line and help the communities in which they work. For example, advocating for affordable, quality child care and senior care. The argument would be that employees “distracted” by the need to care for children and seniors are less productive. Of course, we (society) should be doing these things anyway but we’re not.
I'm personally exhausted from attending public health conferences that justify the need for public health measures based on productivity or as it was put recently by a keynote speaker, "to have a strong workforce," and "because when people are not healthy, they cannot work or contribute to society,". Eugenics thinking pervades public health doctrine and I'm so tired of it.
I would like to see local and national Chamber of Commerce join with EPA, NIH, and Public Health departments to adopt ASHRAE and enforce higher standards for indoor air for all their members. You can argue bottom line, productivity, employee recruitment and retention, reduced absenteeism, duty of care, community well-being, or just do what's right.
I endorse Dr. Jetelina’s push to engage the business community and, in particular, pushing hard to Improve ventilation in buildings visited by the public. This should include healthy building standards, periodic inspections to assure compliance, and a requirement to have prominently placed monitors, such as CO2 monitors, that show the ventilation levels in the building. This could be rolled out in phases, covering key businesses such as schools and hospitals in the first round, for example. I would also be very interested, if Dr. Jetelina has time and inclination, in an interview with Dr. Linsey Marr and Joseph Allen on this topic.
PS: I am unable to attend the discussion, but hope it will become available for listening at a later time.
It's hard to understand that some businesses object to public health activity. Even socialized medicine. A healthier America means a more productive America. Socialized medicine would mean businesses would no longer have to pay and administer health insurance. It would also mean more mobility for the American workforce; therefore, more easily filling jobs in demand.
Five years ago when a company or campus held a vaccine clinic, it was viewed as a convenience.
But thanks to Covid vaccine mandates (no vaccine, no job/college), clinics are more likely to be viewed as threats.
It’s important to “meet people where they are,” yet offer clinics in neutral locations, i.e., places other than office or campus.
Was successful here
== big announcement of large parking lot Saturday setup for drive-thru get-your-shot. Fill out brief sheet of paper in car giving your name and contact -phone#, email, etc). Pretty fast-moving line of cars, I believe they ran out by early afternoon.
== Huge shopping center. Set up for Flu shots in the middle of the hallways. Fill out one sheet of paper giving your name and contact info.
Was this recent? They made it so easy. Great job meeting people where they are!
Shopping center flu shots are annual, I think.
Big parking lot I think was in 2021 for the first COVID shot. It occurs to me that they must have had some kind of refrigeration capability...
BOth mRNA vaccines could be held at room temperature for a short period but had to be used within 24 hours (I think; it's been awhile) of reconstitution and opening.
In Oklahoma, one of the biotech firms held drive-thru vaccine clinics. We were working with an Afghan immigrant family and took advantage of this after I did some research on how long and what they'd need. Fast, efficient, and friendly. They did this for weeks and always had long lines but even with 4 of the kids and one of the parents (5 receiving vaccines), and a long line, we were through the line and out in well under an hour.
I agree with you but am trying to figure out logistics. When the workplaces of my family members have flu clinics, their employers are paying for it. My employer rents a small office in a big building owned by a non-profit that fills most of the 4 floors. They had a flu vaccine clinic a few weeks ago, but I couldn't partake because I do not work for them.
Taking in and verifying insurance credentials needs to be made much easier. Why can’t they scan your insurance card on a phone device and verify coverage instantly? This is a huge bottleneck.
I worked for a University but directly with NOAA in an Oklahoma facility. The annual flu clinic was free and open to both the Federal and non-federal personnel, and for a $25 fee to spouses and kids of same. They had some deal with one of the local hospitals.
With respect to low vaccination uptake, I wonder if part of the problem is “choice overload”? There are so many different vaccines available (flu, Covid, RSV, pneumonia, shingles, whooping cough, tetanus, etc). Just like Baskin and Robins and 31 flavors, people often retreat to “do nothing mode” when presented with so many choices.
Even within covid shots, there are many choices: Moderna, Pfizer and Novavax. With or without flu and RSV? It’s like do you want mint chip, vanilla chip or chocolate chip - oh, and what about an extra scoop of pistachio or rocky road? We’d be happy to give you three scoops today, but it might give you a stroke. (Now that Novavax is at scale, does the world need two different mRNA boosters?)
What is obvious to someone in Public Health (“Get your flu and covid shot every fall!”) isn’t always obvious to the average person.
The problem is that people were coerced/mandated into getting shots. And experts/politicians lied about the efficacy of those shots. Trust is gone.
I understand your concern about things like coercion and mandates for shots, as well as your perceived fault with efficacies. However, mandates for vaccination in healthcare made sense at the time (in fact, they still do), and mandates for the military should have been beyond question based on precedent.
Efficacy questions are a bit more interesting. For ancestral strains, efficacy, in terms of preventing serious disease, hospitalization and death was extraordinary, and that was also the case for preventing infection (we think) and illness (some may have been infected but protected from symptomatic disease). A misunderstanding arises when one thinks the intent of the vaccines was to prevent infection and transmission. A sterilizing vaccine, as is often achieved in measles, is a very rare vaccine. There's been a lot of misunderstanding and misinformation about that subject and most of the open-literature and social media discussions by competent scientists have been "refuted' by misinformation, which was circulated more rapidly because it fit biases and sounded more plausible to a number of people.
The other issue was mutation of the virus. SARS-CoV-2 is a rapidly mutating virus, and a virus's primary mechanism to survive is to mutate to a form that can continue to infect hosts, propagating that viral selection form. Or, in other words, the virus "learned" (or randomly evolved) to evade the antibodies created by the original vaccines, allow it to continue to infect more people. It also had to maintain a degree of virulence, so that it could actually infect and continue to reproduce in a host. A successful virus infects its hosts but does not kill them rapidly, as if it did so, its ability to reproduce would be lost.
We've seen variants, including BA.1 and of late, BA.2.86 that likely emerged from a chronically infected and immune-compromised host or host pool. The implications here are that in these cases, we are seeing a huge number of changes to the genome that can result in serious immune evasion. These require a lot more study to determine their effects. I'll note we saw more deaths with BA.1/BA.2/BA.5 than with the Delta variant but less press coverage.
Today the fact remains that those who are vaccinated are better able to avoid serious consequences of infection even with the latest variants.
Trust was lost because of misinformation and intentional disinformation, spread for reasons that baffle me. Those of us who were normally pretty good at communicating were overwhelmed with information and when we attempted to communicate what we knew at the time, with disclosure that it was incomplete and constantly changing, were attacked for being untruthful. I can say I often changed my professional opinion and position daily... or more frequently in 2020-2021, as I discussed the data and clinical cases with friends and colleagues. The amount of preprint and peer reviewed literature we reviewed was beyond imagining 10 years ago. COVID-19 is so far, the best documented outbreak in terms of peer reviewed publications ever. I've barely scratched the surface in terms of reading all the pertinent literature, but I was generally well ahead of the majority in terms of literature and peer-discussion work, and I was being told I was misrepresenting the case because it didn't conform to someone's already calcified notions of what this virus was. Even today, I read something and see my own biases shift, because I've learned something else about its behavior. In the summer of 2020, some of us were already of the strong opinion that this virus was primarily spread by aerosols for infection in the respiratory tract, but its primary adverse effects were vascular or even cardiovascular. That was not a popular position in those days, especially when one looked at what was being spread on social media and some elements of the press. Yet, that was what the evidence was suggesting to us after review of clinical cases, necropsy results and other scientists' written reports (peer reviewed, or even preprints with sufficient scrutiny).
Essentially, the political divide in this country eroded faith in Public Health. Yes, politicians were involved in that, but not in the manner you appear to be suggesting.
Choices are good and "theoretically" should inspire price competition. However, that doesn't always happens, especially if demands are low.
It’s true the Covid boosters are expensive, however, all three companies (M, P, N) have multi-billion-dollar cost structures that need to be recouped.
Moderna has increased its US market share from 36% (2022) to 45% (2023) according to their earnings call last week. Since Novavax was mostly a nothing burger last year, Moderna’s 9% gain likely came at the expense of Pfizer.
Now that Novavax is getting up to speed, surely these numbers will change. I wouldn’t be surprised if in 2024 Pfizer exits the Covid vaccine market.
Moderna "recouped" what we already paid for in Warp Speed and a nice few billions in profits. Pfizer did "recouped" their money with the German government.
Moderna
https://investors.modernatx.com/news/news-details/2023/Moderna-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Fiscal-Year-2022-Financial-Results-and-Provides-Business-Updates/default.aspx
Companies evaluate products on a yearly basis - did our most recent covid booster make a profit this year? Are we likely to make a profit next year? If the answer is “no,” their best move is to exit the market.
There's also a social responsibility element that has (or should) come into play. Over time, Pfizer has displayed a pretty good record on this front. I don't expect them to exit this market soon unless they sell their product IP to, say, Moderna.
This worries me quite a bit. If companies see abysmally low booster uptake, we're in for a rough ride next season.
Correct, but we (nationally) declared an end to a pandemic that's still ongoing. There's blame enough on all sides of the political spectrum.
I respectfully but energetically disagree with the belief that businesses will act in the public interest of their own accord. Case in point, I'm lucky enough to live in a rent regulated apartment in a city that I always wanted to live in. Why? Because my landlord gets a 421(a) tax abatement. That's pretty much the only reason. Not because it's good business (because it isn't), not because they care about their tenants (they could care less) and not because they are particularly civic minded (they aren't). Businesses are, in effect, automata that respond to a combination of stimuli - economics, shareholders, and complex systems of government incentives and penalties. No amount of sweet talking them will convince them to change their behavior - only the government will.
As for the "productivity per person" benefit of clean indoor air - is anyone naive enough to think that a private business, faced with a choice between investing in the health of their workers and replacing them altogether by artificial intelligence - that they wouldn't pick the latter? Companies care about absolute productivity, not productivity per employee. If businesses want fewer people getting sick, or absenteeism - they'll do whatever it takes to eliminate the need for any employees at all, because they'll decide that human workers are a liability. I notice that the linked video you provided was several months before AI took the world by storm - and there's no putting that toothpaste back in the tube.
Visualizing the famed revolutionary Dr. Katelyn Jetelina silently moving from floor to floor through thickets of bureaucracies, affixing revolutionary calls to end all pestilences.
Cool, actually.
Could you speak to your thoughts on the safety of the RSV Vaccine?
It's so new, and some of the reports leave me a bit concerned.
What are your concerns, and which reports are you seeing that are bothering you? I'll try to help.
I've received one of the vaccines (I honestly would have to find the data to tell you which) and had no issue save a sore shoulder for several days longer than I did for the COVID booster. I'm really happy we have a vaccine and monoclonal solution with some durability. This will help both the older population and infants. These vaccines are a good development.
Got mine 3 weeks ago, and am fine. Age 82.
Gotta say, I think maybe some employers may have swung a little too far from surface cleaning, especially as people start coming back into the office - not just talking, coughing, and breathing but also eating, drinking, handling objects, pooping, and peeing. Case in point, in the early part of 2021:
- People at my office had left food at their desks in 2020, creating a rodent problem
- We now have a cockroach problem. A lot of maintenance staff left
- There are four sinks in the bathroom on my floor, but only one soap dispenser
- We do not have a cafeteria. Everyone eats out or at their desks. We recently received a stern email saying we were not to use conference rooms for personal use of any sort
I am concerned that we are sitting ducks for norovirus!!!