Three years after the last worldwide mpox outbreak, the W.H.O. still has neither officially approved the vaccines — although the United States and Europe have — nor has it issued an emergency use license that would speed access.
And the W.H.O. decided not to issue an emergency license back then because it wanted to ensure that research data was generated, he said. Authorizing widespread use would have cost researchers that essential opportunity.
The article is worth reading. It’s critical of the WHO but does include that organization’s point of view. My TLDR would be that regulators are much more concerned about approving a treatment that harms people than they are about doing nothing and passively allowing people to be harmed.
This is a little more complicated than the trolley problem because pulling the lever doesn’t cause the train to kill one person instead of five. It causes the train to go onto a completely empty track where it won’t hit anyone, but there’s a small chance that changing the train’s direction will cause it to derail and crash into a crowd of people, killing many more than five of them.
If derailing kills 50 people and the chance of derailing is 1 in 100, the average number of deaths from pulling the lever is only 0.5. But you’re going to be pulling the lever a lot, eventually one of the trains will derail, and when 50 people die do you want to be the guy explaining that the expected value of your action was positive?
What if you’re really unlucky and the train derails the first time you pull the lever? Then you can’t even point out that pulling the lever in the past saved lives.
, as well as data from studies carried out once the vaccine was deployed during the 2022 mpox outbreak. More than 1.2 million people in the United States received at least one dose of the vaccine at that time, and studies showed it provided a high level of protection against mpox.
Yet the W.H.O. did not open formal consideration of that research until last week.
Deusdedit Mubangizi, the W.H.O.’s director of health product policy and standards, said that the organization’s group of experts would meet the week of Sept. 16 to consider the submitted data, and could issue a license as early as that week if they were satisfied.
I wonder what the racial makeup of that group of experts is, or how they would react if the virus was spreading in a community that included their families. Or what is the racial makeup of the people funding this whole organization and deciding what is and isn’t some kind of “quicker than 2 years timeframe” emergency situation.
African countries have been deliberately sold dangerously defective medical products in the past (although not by UNICEF, as far as I know) and of course that was wrong, but if for that reason the WHO decides not to approve this vaccine, it doesn’t make sense to blame present-day UNICEF. They can’t change the past; they can only offer medication now.
It seems like they are erring on the side of caution to the max because it only takes one catastrophic responder for a massive medical/political/pr shit storm, given that history. There are always grifters and crisis actors waiting for their next venture
Doesn’t help that a lot of these things are damned if you do, not damned if you don’t. The incentive is just not there to take that kind of risk. There will always be unintended consequences when these solutions are imposed or offered from outside
You really didn’t read the article.
UNICEF is ready to buy and ship the vaccines but
The article is worth reading. It’s critical of the WHO but does include that organization’s point of view. My TLDR would be that regulators are much more concerned about approving a treatment that harms people than they are about doing nothing and passively allowing people to be harmed.
Somewhere a philosophy undergrad just sat bolt upright and shouted, “A TROLLEY PROBLEM! I must go, the world needs me!”
This is a little more complicated than the trolley problem because pulling the lever doesn’t cause the train to kill one person instead of five. It causes the train to go onto a completely empty track where it won’t hit anyone, but there’s a small chance that changing the train’s direction will cause it to derail and crash into a crowd of people, killing many more than five of them.
If derailing kills 50 people and the chance of derailing is 1 in 100, the average number of deaths from pulling the lever is only 0.5. But you’re going to be pulling the lever a lot, eventually one of the trains will derail, and when 50 people die do you want to be the guy explaining that the expected value of your action was positive?
What if you’re really unlucky and the train derails the first time you pull the lever? Then you can’t even point out that pulling the lever in the past saved lives.
I stand by my assessment
Deusdedit Mubangizi isn’t exactly a white guy.
I wonder what the racial makeup of that group of experts is, or how they would react if the virus was spreading in a community that included their families. Or what is the racial makeup of the people funding this whole organization and deciding what is and isn’t some kind of “quicker than 2 years timeframe” emergency situation.
There’s some weird history or something where Africans supposedly received bad medications or something to do with sterilization I think…
African countries have been deliberately sold dangerously defective medical products in the past (although not by UNICEF, as far as I know) and of course that was wrong, but if for that reason the WHO decides not to approve this vaccine, it doesn’t make sense to blame present-day UNICEF. They can’t change the past; they can only offer medication now.
It seems like they are erring on the side of caution to the max because it only takes one catastrophic responder for a massive medical/political/pr shit storm, given that history. There are always grifters and crisis actors waiting for their next venture
Doesn’t help that a lot of these things are damned if you do, not damned if you don’t. The incentive is just not there to take that kind of risk. There will always be unintended consequences when these solutions are imposed or offered from outside