The Simple Math of FDA Delay

Two to three thousand people a day are dying from COVID. Thus anything that delays rolling out a vaccine has a very high cost in human lives. People want to deny this, perhaps because it is so horrifying. I get a lot of pushback when I say that FDA delay is deadly. Let’s dispense with a few objections. It is true, of course, that the people who are dying today can’t literally be saved by a vaccine today but they could have been saved had they been vaccinated four or five weeks ago and similarly projecting forward.

Another response that many smart people tell me is that a vaccine can’t be rolled out immediately so even under the best scenarios you couldn’t save that many people immediately. That’s true but irrelevant. Since a lot of people are getting this wrong, I want to show this in a simple model using pictures. Red is for deaths. Green is for life. Suppose two thousand people are dying from COVID a day as in panel 1. Let’s for the sake of the simple model assume that you could deliver a vaccine to everyone on Day 1. You would then save 2000 lives a day going forward for however long the pandemic would have lasted as shown in panel 2. If you delay by one day then two thousand people die who would have lived without the delay, as shown in panel 3. Pretty obvious so far.

Now assume that the vaccine can’t roll out to everyone immediately. For the sake of this simple model let’s assume that on day one you can only vaccinate half the population. By doing so you save 1000 lives on day 1 and 2000 lives every day thereafter for the length of the pandemic. That’s the fourth panel. Now suppose we delay the vaccine rollout by one day. 2000 people die on Day 1 but you save 1000 on Day 2 and 2000 on Day 3 and every day thereafter for the length of the pandemic. How many people were killed by the delay? Compare the 4th and 5th panels. 2000 exactly as before! The slow ramp up doesn’t change the number of deaths caused by delay it just spreads them out over different days. You can adjust the ramp so that it occurs over 10 days or 30 days. Doesn’t change much on the delay margin unless you delay for so long that the pandemic is close to being over.

What could matter is if delay increases the speed at which you can ramp up. I doubt that this is true. We were ready to go with millions of doses in late October (guess why?). (In fact we had a vaccine in January and millions of doses around March-April.) We won’t really be better prepared tomorrow than we are today. It’s learning by doing that matters. See the point Tyler made earlier about economic time versus calendar time.

As Tyler noted, this is hardly the final analysis but many people are not even conceptualizing the problem correctly and this is a good place to begin.

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