Just A Few Weeks Delay
NYTimes: Federal regulators could decide within a few weeks whether to allow Moderna, the Massachusetts biotech company that developed one of the two federally authorized Covid-19 vaccines, to increase the number of doses in its vials — which could accelerate the nation’s vaccination rate.
Moderna is hoping to raise the number of doses in its vials to as many as 15 from the current 10 doses, a potential 50 percent increase. The proposal reflects the fact that the company has been ramping up production of its vaccine to the point where the final manufacturing stage, when it is bottled, capped and labeled, has emerged as a roadblock to expanding its distribution.
The FDA will decide in a few weeks???! That is not quick, bold, and decisive action.
Thousands of people have already died over a few weeks delay–multiple times. It’s true that there are tradeoffs but the FDA has no special knowledge or ability to navigate those tradeoffs. Let Moderna make the decision in consultation with vaccinators on the front lines.
Thwarted markets in everything
Philadelphia health officials say they’re no longer providing vaccines to a 9-month-old start-up that has begun inoculating thousands of city residents, citing the group’s quiet switch to a for-profit entity.
“We have recently been made aware of a change in Philly Fighting COVID’s corporate status that took place without our knowledge, from nonprofit to for-profit,” said Health Department spokesperson Jim Garrow.
The move comes days after WHYY News and Billy Penn reported that Philly Fighting COVID had established a for-profit arm, and that when the group pivoted from providing community testing to performing vaccinations, it left several partner organizations in the lurch.
Here is the full story.
Markets in everything
Illicit sales of fake negative Covid-19 test results are becoming more widespread as criminals look to profit from travel restrictions imposed during the pandemic, according to Europol.
The EU’s law enforcement agency on Monday reported an increase in cases of fraudulent Covid-19 test certificates being sold to travelers. It comes as an increasing number of countries in the European Union and beyond oblige travelers to present a negative coronavirus test in order to be allowed entry, when travelling from a high-risk area.
In its latest Early Warning Notification, which Europol issues to alert EU member states of new or increasingly prevalent forms of criminal activity, the agency said the latest case of this crime had been detected in Luton Airport in the U.K., where a man was arrested trying to sell false coronavirus test results. Elsewhere in the U.K., fraudsters were caught selling bogus Covid-19 test documents for £100 ($137).
There had also been earlier reports of similar activity in other European countries.
A forgery ring at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, for example, was “dismantled” after being found selling forged negative test results to passengers, Europol said. The amount charged for the fake test documents ranged between 150-300 euros ($181-$363).
Another fraudster was apprehended in Spain for selling false negative test certificates on the internet for 40 euros, and in the Netherlands, scammers were discovered selling fake negative test results for 50-60 euros through messaging apps.
Here is the full article, via Samarth.
The effects of fluoride in drinking water
Water fluoridation is a common but debated public policy. In this paper, we use Swedish registry data to study the causal effects of fluoride in drinking water. We exploit exogenous variation in natural fluoride stemming from variation in geological characteristics at water sources to identify its effects. First, we reconfirm the long-established positive effect of fluoride on dental health. Second, we estimate a zero effect on cognitive ability in contrast to several recent debated epidemiological studies. Third, fluoride is furthermore found to increase labor income. This effect is foremost driven by individuals from a lower socioeconomic background.
That is from a forthcoming JPE paper by Linuz Aggeborn and Mattias Öhman.
Monday assorted links
The Experts are Very Worried
Here is an interview with Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine and the lead developer of a COVID vaccine being produced in India. He thinks the AstraZeneca vaccine should be approved immediately, as I have long argued.
President Biden himself announced Tuesday that we’re going to have maybe enough additional doses of the mRNA vaccines to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of summer or fall.
I’m saying, “Well, no, that’s that’s not gonna work.” Telling us “by the fall” is like telling us “when the glaciers are gonna come back down from Quebec.” I mean, that’s not adequate.
We’re going to have to figure out a way to vaccinate the American people by late spring. That’s a tall order. To beat back the virus we need to give two doses to three-quarters of the population, to 246 million Americans. That’s half a billion immunizations. To get there, we’d need a rate of immunizations two or three times higher than what’s proposed.
….We need vaccinations now.
..things have been slowed down with the AstraZeneca-Oxford adenovirus vaccine. My understanding is that the FDA insisted that they conduct a full-scale Phase Three trial in the U.S., and we won’t have results for that until April. Meanwhile, the European Medicines Agency, the EMA, is going to make a ruling on the AstraZeneca Oxford vaccine on Friday based on studies done in Europe and also probably on data from Brazil and South Africa. [The EMA authorized, AT].
Those are large, reliable studies?
Yeah….Because of these new variants, there’s great urgency here in the U.S. So I’m saying that sometimes we have to do things that take us out of our comfort zone in order to save lives. That means, rather than focusing only on the new study that we’re doing in the U.S., we also look at the dossier presented to the EMA.
As a regulatory agency the EMA is up there with our U.S. FDA. They’re the two best regulatory agencies in the world. So if they sign off, I think we should say, “Look, let’s do it. Let’s use that vaccine.”
We’ve already bought 300 million doses of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine. We’ve paid for it — over a billion dollars — so let’s use it.
…And there’s also the recombinant protein vaccine our lab has developed at Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children’s Hospital. In India they’re scaling that up to a billion doses. Nobody from the White House has approached us to say, “Hey, Peter, what can we do to bring that vaccine in.”
There seem to be blinders: All they can see is getting the mRNA vaccines. I don’t quite know what’s driving that. We have to figure out a way to bring the other ones on board.
And soon! We’re in the eye of the hurricane.
Hat tip: Jim Ward.
Sci-founder fellowship
Sci-Founder Fellowship is a program to help early career scientists start companies of their own. We believe that companies can often be the best way to pursue translational research, and not enough scientists consider this as serious option.
The Fellowship program provides an investment up to $400,000 to each founding team to get started, along with mentorship and a peer-network of other scientists starting companies to help support you.
We will mentor you — our team includes the former director of Y Combinator’s research non-profit, a co-founder of Color Genomics, and a co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences.
If you think you could be a good fit, please apply here.
Have more questions? Take a look at our FAQ.
Here is the link.
Gender and the dynamics of economics seminars
This paper reports the results of the first systematic attempt at quantitatively measuring the seminar culture within economics and testing whether it is gender neutral. We collected data on every interaction between presenters and their audience in hundreds of research seminars and job market talks across most leading economics departments, as well as during summer conferences. We find that women presenters are treated differently than their male counterparts. Women are asked more questions during a seminar and the questions asked of women presenters are more likely to be patronizing or hostile. These effects are not due to women presenting in different fields, different seminar series, or different topics, as our analysis controls for the institution, seminar series, and JEL codes associated with each presentation. Moreover, it appears that there are important differences by field and that these differences are not uniformly mitigated by more rigid seminar formats. Our findings add to an emerging literature documenting ways in which women economists are treated differently than men, and suggest yet another potential explanation for their under-representation at senior levels within the economics profession.
That is from a new paper by Pascaline Dupas, Alicia Sasser Modestino, Muriel Niederle, Justin Wolfers,
and the Seminar Dynamics Collective. Via Kris Gulati.
Sunday assorted links
1. Fauci. Compare that to revisiting the Balaji thread.
2. Why are grandiose narcissists more effective at organizational politics?
4. What is the quality of CDC software?
5. Migrants to the U.S. are much more productive than migrants to other locales.
6. Atif Mian is still caught up in the Junker Fallacy.
7. Why the South African strain may not become dominant in the U.S.
What I Have Been Reading (Alex)
The Economics of Small Things–An Indian economist in the United States offers a sweet and gentle introduction to economics drawn from his personal and professional life. I enjoyed many of the essays though I have to disagree with one–it makes a difference whether you go to the mangoes or the mangoes come to you as Tyler and I showed!
Wretched Refuse?: The Political Economy of Immigration and Institutions–Kudos to Nowrasteh and Powell for doing the work that critics of immigration have never done–that is, actually test for the effect of immigration on culture and cohesion. I can do no better than quote The Economist, “Wretched Refuse?” is… full of charts and regression analysis. It is also highly original, and takes a chainsaw to the most intellectually respectable case against immigration. No serious economist denies that when people move from poor countries to rich ones, they become more productive and their wages soar. It seems likely, therefore, that more migration would make the world much richer. However, some scholars think that too large an influx from, say, Congo to Canada would make Canada more like Congo—ie, the immigrants would import Congolese habits, and gradually make Canadian institutions more like the corrupt and lawless ones that keep Congo poor. Yet remarkably little effort has been made to test this hypothesis. Messrs Nowrasteh and Powell do so as rigorously as they can.”
The Infinite Machine–I was disappointed in this history of Ethereum. It doesn’t try to explain any of the technical details of Ethereum which is ok but it also doesn’t go into great detail on the personalities, leaving one with a journalistic history of what happened with some short glosses on the people.
The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz–As the bombs fall on London, Churchill struggles to increase the production of aircraft, to diplomatically bring the United States into the war, to hold his government together even as British forces are defeated abroad. Meanwhile his teenage daughter falls in love, his son deals with a gambling problem and divorce and his aide looks for a wife. The Splendid and the Vile is a tremendous story of Churchill’s first year in office based on meticulous research and told at a thrilling, breakneck pace. A great read at any time. A poignant and apt read now.
Causal Inference: The Mixtape–an excellent introduction to causal inference. The Mixtape marks the beginning of the DAG era in econometrics.
Why Does Teacher Quality Matter?
From Mike Insler, Alexander F. McQuoid, Ahmed Rahman, and Katherine A. Smith, here is an apparently major result:
This work disentangles aspects of teacher quality that impact student learning and performance. We exploit detailed data from post-secondary education that links students from randomly assigned instructors in introductory-level courses to the students’ performances in follow-on courses for a wide variety of subjects. For a range of first-semester courses, we have both an objective score (based on common exams graded by committee) and a subjective grade provided by the instructor. We find that instructors who help boost the common final exam scores of their students also boost their performance in the follow-on course. Instructors who tend to give out easier subjective grades however dramatically hurt subsequent student performance. Exploring a variety of mechanisms, we suggest that instructors harm students not by “teaching to the test,” but rather by producing misleading signals regarding the difficulty of the subject and the “soft skills” needed for college success. This effect is stronger in non-STEM fields, among female students, and among extroverted students. Faculty that are well-liked by students—and thus likely prized by university administrators—and considered to be easy have particularly pernicious effects on subsequent student performance.
Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Perhaps it is the high-skilled rather than low-skilled migrants who induce resentment?
(7) Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the United States over Two Centuries
By Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Elisa Jacome and Santiago Perez
Using millions of father-son pairs spanning more than 100 years of US history, we find that children of immigrants from nearly every sending country have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Immigrants’ advantage is similar historically and today despite dramatic shifts in sending countries and US immigration policy. Immigrants achieve this advantage in part by choosing to settle in locations that offer better prospects for their children. Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials
That is from the new AER.
Saturday assorted links
1. Henry Farrell reviews Mike Konczal.
2. Wombats, Cowen’s Second Law, and to the benefit of all. It is an article that keeps on surprising you.
3. Why was autocratic rule more stable in China than in Europe?
4. One guy who helped to drive GameStop (WSJ).
5. A review of the definition of market manipulation, for those of us who need it.
6. Our FDA regulatory state is failing us against Curative as well.
7. Game theory and the search for life, clever.
The EU Failed the World’s Easiest Cost-Benefit Test
From early on in the crisis I was telling governments, “this is the world’s easiest cost-benefit test” because:
The EU response:
However, the EU approach came with strings. The commission, negotiating for the first time on vital medicines, felt that EU countries would demand value for money, so it dragged out the talks to secure better prices and product liability guarantees. That meant it signed the contracts with AstraZeneca in August, three months after the UK’s contract.
Hat tip: Arthur Baker.
Addendum: On the plus side the EU has authorized the AstraZeneca vaccine. The United States should immediately do the same. Get the Baltimore factory running.
Scott Sumner on Vaccine Nationalism
EconLib: Experts in the UK have looked at the AstraZenaca vaccine and found it to be safe and effective. And yet Americans are still not allowed to use the product. So if paternalism is not the actual motive, why do progressives insist that Americans must not be allowed to buy products not approved by the FDA? What is the actual motive?
The answer is nationalism. The experts who studied the AstraZenaca vaccine were not American experts, they were British experts. Can this form of prejudice be justified on scientific grounds? Obviously not. There has been no double blind, controlled study of comparative expert skill at evaluating vaccines. We have no way of knowing whether the UK decision is wiser than the FDA decision. Instead, the legal prohibition is being done on nationalistic grounds. We are told to blindly accept the incompetence of British experts, without any proof. (And even if you believed there was solid evidence that one country’s experts were better than another, it would not explain why each developed countries relies on their own experts. They can’t all be best!)
These debates always end up being like a game of whack-a-mole. Shoot down one argument and regulation proponents will simply put forth another. Their minds are made up. You say people shouldn’t be allowed to take a vaccine unless experts find it to be safe and effective? OK, the UK experts did just that. You say that only the opinion of US experts counts because our experts are clearly the best? Really, where is the scientific study that shows that our experts are the best? I thought you said we needed to “trust the scientists”? Now you are saying we must trust the nationalists?
…what’s wrong with the following three-part system of regulation as a compromise solution:
1. FDA approved drugs can be consumed by anyone in America.
2. Drugs approved by any of the top 20 advanced countries (but not the FDA) can be consumed by anyone willing to sign a consent form indicating that they understand the FDA has not approved this product. I’ll sign for AstraZeneca. (The US government puts together a list of 20 reputable countries.)
3. Drugs approved by none of the top 20 developed economies will still be banned.
This is what regulation would look like if paternalism actually were the motivating factor. But it’s not. It’s Trump-style nationalism that motivates progressives to insist that only FDA approved drugs can be sold in America. They may look down their noses at Trump, but they implicitly share his nationalism.
I agree, of course, and have long supported Pharmaceutical Reciprocity.