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More than 600,000 people in Tricare, a health care program of the United States Department of Defense Military Health System, received emails July 17 asking if they would donate blood for research as "survivors of COVID-19."
But just 31,000 people affiliated with the U.S. military have been officially diagnosed with the coronavirus, which prompted confusion, Military.com reported last week.
"Just wondering [if] anybody [got] an email from Tricare saying since you are a COVID survivor, please donate your plasma.?? I have NOT been tested," wrote a beneficiary on Facebook. "Just remember all those people inputting data are human and make mistakes."
The mass email went to every beneficiary located near a collection point.
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In Error, Tricare Tells 600K Military Beneficiaries They've had COVID-19
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday July 28 2020, @02:00PM (13 children)
There has been a popular (and somewhat true) sentiment for many years that the FDA needlessly holds back new / innovative products, devices, treatments, etc.
The bigger / more accurate truth is: for every good thing the FDA delays on its way to use, there are ten (perhaps more) bad ones that they usually stop altogether, or at least get pulled back off the market relatively quickly after they are shown to be harmful. This can't even begin to measure the number of useless or harmful "medical" products that never even try to go to market due to the presence of the FDA.
At the onset of COVID, the administration basically announced "FREE FOR ALL!!!" and encouraged every idiot with the inclination to make COVID related tests and other products with a promise of easy access to the markets. I can see how that seems like a good idea from the perspective of a casino owner, for the rest of us - just like the marks in the casino - it's mostly bad news.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @03:03PM
When youre driven into some type of action by screaming idiots with microphones (the media) you dont always make the best decisions. So our government should ignore the media? I agree. Unfortunately, the media in this country dictates what many people believe, so to do so would be political suicide. This points out a major problem in our system. Our policy on things the media latches onto ends up being dictated by an ocean of retards, thus killing any chance at a logical and reasoned approach. Those who scream loudest are the most to blame imo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2020, @03:08PM (1 child)
And just as an analogy, how good would your code be if your boss was watching every line you wrote and yelling in your ear at the top of their lungs about each character? We elect people to run our shit and we dont give them the chance to do so because journalism is dead and its now a reality tv show. Has been for twenty years, and this is what we get. We are all doing it to ourselves because we cant deal with the power of the internet. Too many agendas. Its the ultimate commitee. And you know what they say about committees...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:14AM
That would be a bottom 1%ile manager, not the kind that I would want running the whole operation.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday July 28 2020, @10:53PM (9 children)
I'd say an even bigger/more accurate truth is that one really good thing helps vastly more people than ten bad things harm. The FDA's emphasis on preventing harm rather than helping people harms everyone in the world. Same goes for every other regulatory agency with the same biases.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:23AM (8 children)
That might be true in a marketplace free from IP restrictions, where good things could spread virally and bad things would naturally die out.
In the marketplace we have, that "good thing" of yours is only as good as the money propelling it into the marketplace - without financial backing, the best mousetraps sit on the shelves, unsold, because people are distracted by the ones that are shoved in front of their faces by the most convincing salesmen, regardless of quality.
And, as for those ten bad things, a typical "bad thing" escape kills more than a few people, or seriously harms hundreds to thousands before it gets its chain yanked. If the FDA shut down altogether (or got defunded like the WHO), those numbers would ramp up by an order of magnitude per thing, and the number of bad things making it onto the market would likely ramp up by more than an order of magnitude within a few short years. Seeing as medical mistakes already cause ~9.5% of all deaths in the U.S. - how much higher do you think that number can go before all the "great things unfairly kept from the market" by 2016's FDA policy stances can't compete with all the people dying, or worse being seriously debilitated, from stupid shit like injecting bleach, or chloroquine, or other "stable genius" ideas from the myriad of great businessmen stymied by science out there?
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2020, @02:12AM
That kind of market only sells red herring.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:25PM (6 children)
Not much different from today. Sorry, I don't buy that the public is on the verge of medical suicide and only prevented from such by the regulatory powers of the FDA.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:53PM (5 children)
You don't get out much, do you?
The FDA is not a 1960s AT&T Bell Labs quality genius organization, but... they do follow a somewhat roughly scientifically guided set of operating procedures, and when they're not being jerked around by the politicians - in the past usually shutting things down: Kessler in the mid '90s shut down ALL new device approvals as a knee jerk reaction to the breast implant rupture fiasco which lasted for ~3 years - today Trump using COVID as an excuse to crack open the sluice for anything COVID related - so, roughly 90% of the time, they are fairly consistently moving the needle toward the good side - even if the majority of individuals you deal with are either themselves annoying bureaucratic morons, or they are managed by an annoying bureaucratic moron, the agency as a whole manages to do good works.
Yes Virginia, without the FDA there would be (more) Americans drinking bleach to fight the common cold, both labeled as Clorox, and in bottles sold as: "Organic homeopathic gluten free bacterial remover, just like Grandma used to use." Plus thousands of other "little harms" that would add up to a significant increase in deaths preventable by idiot bureaucrats.
Some members of the FDA actually deserve respect, like the one who came into our office on Miami Beach with his badge and gun out on his belt. He quickly apologized and put them away, explaining that he had just come from the Colombian grocery store across the street where they had accidentally been selling soda cans filled with concentrated cocaine - the smugglers screwed up and failed to skim the "loaded" cans after import. And, yes, drinking a Refajo made with one of these spiked sodas would be pretty much instantly fatal.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:27PM (4 children)
In other words, the scientific principle of CYA. Sorry, but they get bad press for a few people dying in a medical trial. They don't get bad press for seven billion people dying prematurely because they helped slow down medical research.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 30 2020, @11:44PM (3 children)
The credo is: safe and effective.
First, do no harm. Demonstrate that your drug, device, whatever is safe to use. In the event that it is not completely safe, then the burden is to demonstrate that the potential harm is outweighed by the expected benefits.
Effective: does the drug, device, whatever do what is claimed better than placebo? Placebo is a pretty high bar, just paying attention to someone's problem is often enough to fix it, but we really don't need more placebos on the market charging money for what could be accomplished with a decent bedside manner.
You think anything that is regulated "slowed down" by the FDA is actually going to reach and positively impact even 10% of the people on this planet? You must have been smoking with Elon.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2020, @01:43PM (2 children)
There we are. No one sees the harm of opportunity cost. Everyone sees the harm from a few people dying from a bad drug.
Much closer to 100% than that. By the end of this century, I think most people no matter where they are in the world will be part of the developed world and have access to advanced medical technology. Thus, the amount of time the FDA obstructs medical progress by "doing no harm" means their lives in the future will be a little bit poorer and shorter lived.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday July 31 2020, @02:06PM (1 child)
In most cases, no one knows the value of opportunity. There's speculation, hope, guesses, estimates, but you don't really know the future.
Most of this "advanced medical technology" you are concerned with bringing to the broader masses is a bunch of over-complicated, over-priced, "value creation" that could and should be boiled down to the essence of what it does to improve patients health/quality of life, but instead is being developed to extract ever-more profit out of the sick. The "free market" is doing little or nothing to steer product development toward patient benefit.
Go find Kurzweil and do some meditative yoga while you extrapolate simple concepts into utopian images of the future. Better hurry, he's going to miss the singularity by a wide margin, and so are you.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday July 31 2020, @11:06PM
Doesn't mean that opportunity costs should be ignored just because "no one knows". And you follow it up with
Why rhetorically invoke the "free market" when the FDA makes it very non-free? I'll note a second, more recent post from a different story where you non-sarcastically observe [soylentnews.org]:
In the big picture, 1 million premature deaths a few times a century or millennium from bad medical technology, while scary when it happens, isn't as worthwhile to address as the irreversible development of better medical technology. The FDA enables the non-free market in medical technology where obvious medical advances like your "virtual cure for bulimia" can be ignored in preference to "over-complicated, over-priced, 'value creation'". They're the gate keepers that keep out ideas with too low a ROI, the barrier to entry for new advances that would upset the status quo and make our lives better.