A couple of things. The cases at the hospital are declining. One of the four hallways that we staffed to handle COVID patients was closed this week because our number of patients fell.

The second, and more interesting to me, piece of information came to me last night. I was having a couple of beers with a some military pilot friends of mine. They were telling me the story of the mandated vaccine. The President declared that, since the Pfizer vaccine was now approved by the FDA, he was mandating that all military members get the vaccine.

The military, being the efficient government agency it is, doesn’t have enough of the Pfizer vaccine for the military to get vaccinated. So they solved it by forcing the military to get the Moderna vaccine. You know, the one that isn’t approved.

Categories: COVIDMilitary

6 Comments

tfourier · September 19, 2021 at 11:22 am

FYI the Pfizer vaccine is not approved the same way all those other vaccines you got were approved. A 505(b1) approval. The German version got a BLA “approval”. An approval to manufacture and distribute. Thats all. The US version, the one that is being used, is still under EUA.

And given how the control group was abandoned during the early Phase II trials it would have to start Phase II all over again. To get actual 505(b1) approval.

So no vaccines have completed the 505(b)1 approval process. None. Which is a 4 to 6 year timeline. Because thats how long it takes to actually collected accurate clinical trials data. Some very basic math is involved.

    Mike_C · September 19, 2021 at 7:11 pm

    Thanks for the info — I didn’t know that. I thought the Pfizer Jab was fully approved, but they were *administering* the EUA version supposedly because “we don’t have enough of the FDA-approved version to go around”.

    I think it’s also the case that if one of several competing “therapies” is fully FDA approved and the others are under EUA then it becomes illegal to administer the EUA ones. So if a fully-approved Pfizer version was available in the US it would screw the competing pharma companies, since their products would no longer be legal to administer. It would also leave Pfizer itself stuck with however much of it’s EUA-only stock that it would have to either eat (or sell in some less picky country).

    To protect the profits of both Pfizer and its competitors it behooves everyone (except the man on the street) to keep all the Jabs EUA for now.

joe · September 19, 2021 at 3:51 pm

my brother had to get the shot last week…he’s a year short of retiring…he didn’t want to get it but didn’t have a choice…

    Brian_E · September 19, 2021 at 6:27 pm

    He had a choice, just a difficult and unpleasant one. For all those affected – I sincerely hope and pray that taking the shot won’t ultimately be more expensive than loosing their employment and/or their retirement.

T · September 19, 2021 at 6:49 pm

Your anecdote kind of illustrates one origin of the saying “close enough for government work”.
“Close enough” meaning close enough to whatever the Untersturbahnfuehrer or Zampolit said needed to be done.

Jonathan · September 20, 2021 at 9:31 am

Somehow, I’m not surprised at this idea of “good enough for us to meet our metrics”.

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