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by londons_explore 1111 days ago
It always surprises me how little effort we put into getting things from the lab to the people quicker.

As soon as we have compelling data some discovery (medical or otherwise) might help lots of people, it should be almost a manhattan project type effort to get it into the hands of everyone worldwide asap.
3 comments
seanmcdirmid 1111 days ago
They do fast track drugs if studies show overwhelming success, and it is no longer ethical to keep it from the control group.
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londons_explore 1111 days ago
Other areas of medecine do do things in a rush - like an ambulance breaking the speed limit to maybe save one guy. Yet we wouldn't allow breaking the speed limit when delivering a new treatment to save thousands of lives.
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pas 1111 days ago
What's really inefficient is that every trial needs to spend (hundreds of) millions on writing up the whole thing, IRBs and FDA (and additional authorities) paperwork, recruiting, data analysis, etc. while these could all be standardized. (There are companies that do this, but they are just expensive middlemen. There was a great substack (?) post detailing a lot of these, but now I can't find it.)
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frankchn 1111 days ago
There are reasons why drug approval can be slow and conservative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide_scandal
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londons_explore 1111 days ago
Yet the harm from that (10,000) was in many ways tiny compared to the harm from not deploying treatments that turn out to be good.

For example 780,000 people died of polio between 1988 and today. Yet for all that time there has been a cheap, low risk, well tested, near 100% effective vaccine (many in fact). And polio is probably one of the better cases because governments and charities have been pushing it pretty hard.

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harimau777 1110 days ago
The polio vaccine has been approved by the FDA during all of that time. Therefore, I don't understand how the deaths during that time provide evidence that the FDA should approve drugs faster.

Edit: Also, polio eradication efforts where a Manhattan project style heroic effort.

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peteradio 1110 days ago
It's hard to "dn no harm" when you yeet drugs at people based on maybe being useful.
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lm28469 1111 days ago
That's not how capitalism works though
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