The Russian Vaccine
Nobody appears to have any evidence that the vaccine is either dangerous or ineffective. What people are complaining about is a lack of evidence in the other direction, both because the Russians have not been publishing information on their research and because it is being brought out prior to the usual stage three testing. My conclusion, assuming as seems likely that Putin has or could hire competent people to develop a vaccine, is that it will probably work and probably not have serious side effects.
My basis for that is what I have read about the other vaccine projects. It seems clear that everyone else is being very careful, unwilling to bring out a vaccine until they are virtually certain of both effectiveness and safety. A vaccine that has passed the stage two testing is probably safe and probably effective, but probably is not sufficient.
Insisting that you have to be certain a drug is safe is good rhetoric but bad science, since safety is not an option. To see whyy, consider the case of Diethylstilbestrol (DES), a fertility drug that turned out to produce medical complications in the daughters of some of the women who had taken it. The complications took a minimum of ten to twelve years to appear and the most serious, a form of cancer, appeared, according to varying estimates, in between one in 250 and one in 10,000 of the daughters. In order to be sure a drug did not have such an effect it would be necessary to give it to something upwards of a hundred thousand pregnant women then wait fifteen years or so and do extensive analysis of the medical problems of their children. Applying that standard to protecting against every long-term risk one could think of would make the production of new medical drugs very nearly impossible.
The current global death rate from Covid is about six thousand a day, so each month by which the introduction of a virus is delayed costs about 180,000 lives. That, plus other costs associated with the pandemic, should be set against the risks of introducing a vaccine earlier, when we can be less certain of its safety and efficacy. I do not know enough about the risks of vaccines that have passed the stage one and stage two tests, how serious and how likely they are, to judge whether the caution exhibited by everyone except the Russians would or would not pass a cost/benefit test, and I doubt that current policies are based on any such calculation. But, given how cautious everyone else is being, I doubt that the risk of serious side effects is as much as 25%. If I am correct, the odds are that Putin's decision will turn out to be correct ex post, whether or not it was correct ex ante.
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