For 80 years, we’ve been home to some of the world’s greatest medical researchers. We have produced eight Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine. Yet a vaccine for a coronavirus should never have been Plan A for anyone as a way out of a pandemic. Pinning a nation’s freedom and economic prosperity on the rapid development of a safe and effective vaccine is like planning to breed another Phar Lap to win the Melbourne Cup. It might be possible, but even with our outsized endowment of medical research talent, it’s still not very likely, it would take a long time, and at the end, you may find that instead of a thoroughbred all you’ve got is Drongo, the horse that had 37 starts and never won a race.
Slowly, the true believers are being forced to contemplate the prospect that their ‘get out of jail’ card might be a chimera. At the ABC, the health and well-being reporter published a forlorn article this week entitled, ‘A coronavirus vaccine is what our hopes are pinned to, but what’s the plan if we don’t get one?’ Former Labor minister Craig Emerson penned an op-ed in which he still prayed fervently that we’d find the holy grail — a vaccine to induce a V-shaped recovery — but admitted that we should be working on Plan B in case a preventive shot or cure proved elusive.
It is extraordinary how little thought has been given to an effective cure. In part that’s because the only drug, other than ivermectin, that has shown promise as a prophylactic, an anti-viral and in dampening down Covid’s fearful cytokine storm is hydroxychloroquine, which has been demonized both by Big Pharma and by US Democrats. It is now an article of faith on the Left that it doesn’t work, despite remarkable results at some of America’s leading hospitals and support from Ivy League academics. Indeed, it has become a slur. Paul Krugman, economist at the New York Times and Nobel Laureate beloved of leftists, damned President Trump’s payroll tax cut as ‘the hydroxychloroquine of economic policy,’ and ‘quack medicine’ from ‘a pitchman hawking snake-oil policy from his Country Club.’
[-] i8wu | 1 points | Aug 23 2020 14:53:12
For 80 years, we’ve been home to some of the world’s greatest medical researchers. We have produced eight Nobel Prize winners in physiology or medicine. Yet a vaccine for a coronavirus should never have been Plan A for anyone as a way out of a pandemic. Pinning a nation’s freedom and economic prosperity on the rapid development of a safe and effective vaccine is like planning to breed another Phar Lap to win the Melbourne Cup. It might be possible, but even with our outsized endowment of medical research talent, it’s still not very likely, it would take a long time, and at the end, you may find that instead of a thoroughbred all you’ve got is Drongo, the horse that had 37 starts and never won a race.
Slowly, the true believers are being forced to contemplate the prospect that their ‘get out of jail’ card might be a chimera. At the ABC, the health and well-being reporter published a forlorn article this week entitled, ‘A coronavirus vaccine is what our hopes are pinned to, but what’s the plan if we don’t get one?’ Former Labor minister Craig Emerson penned an op-ed in which he still prayed fervently that we’d find the holy grail — a vaccine to induce a V-shaped recovery — but admitted that we should be working on Plan B in case a preventive shot or cure proved elusive.
It is extraordinary how little thought has been given to an effective cure. In part that’s because the only drug, other than ivermectin, that has shown promise as a prophylactic, an anti-viral and in dampening down Covid’s fearful cytokine storm is hydroxychloroquine, which has been demonized both by Big Pharma and by US Democrats. It is now an article of faith on the Left that it doesn’t work, despite remarkable results at some of America’s leading hospitals and support from Ivy League academics. Indeed, it has become a slur. Paul Krugman, economist at the New York Times and Nobel Laureate beloved of leftists, damned President Trump’s payroll tax cut as ‘the hydroxychloroquine of economic policy,’ and ‘quack medicine’ from ‘a pitchman hawking snake-oil policy from his Country Club.’
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