The FDA’s refusal to clear abortion pills is another good example of confusion and supplication. The right knows it’s a political lever because they’ve used it.
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Demographic change only matters if you respect voting rights.
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Should I be looking forward to the cases which will test whether abatement and blight laws are enforceable in some states?
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Who is thinking in terms of demographics? Both Desantis and Abbott have clearly made the calculation that getting the presidential nomination depends on demonstrating adherence to the anti-vax anti-government anti-Democratic anti-democratic world view even to the point of killing off their own constituents. The question is whether they additionally think that there will be affirmative benefit for them in their states economically as well in a couple years.
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Remember when “a dumb hill to die on” was just an expression?
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I see, point taken.
I think that the TX Lt Gov’s infamous position that ‘we have to sacrifice grandma to keep the economy running’ reveals their economic perspective.
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If people die, they stop breathing. Stopping breathing means that they stop to produce CO2. And also they stop buying things, driving cars and make other things that generate carbon dioxide.
A lot of dead people means reducing carbon footprint without the need to stop driving gas guzzling trucks.
And given some times the corpses will transform back in petroleum, useful to make fuel.
Double win!
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Conservatives and libertarians like to pretend liberty is a suicide pact. You let people do what they want without consequence because otherwise you’re an authoritarian if you tell them not to piss in the water supply. You let everyone who hasn’t yet decided to shoot up a school or workplace have a gun because that’s just the Price of Freedom™.
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Everything is bigger in Texas, especially the jackasses.
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it will still deal with them in good faith
It even extends to legislative stuff. Repubs have no problem at all ramrodding their legislative agenda down everyone’s throat. But when people vote the Dems in hoping for more progressive policies, they inevitably try to build consensus with the Repubs, who have no problem stalling or pushing back.
Show a little backbone, guys. Really.
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Why doesn’t he just ban Covid? Wouldn’t that fix everything?
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Not quite. First, I’m not saying this is about what people will or would think. I have no illusions that my reasoning has anything whatsoever to do with why anyone else might not trust the FDA. Nor do I have any illusions that distrust of the FDA has anything to do with why people, mostly conservatives, are opposed to covid vaccination and vaccine mandates. This is about why I don’t put much stock in whether or not the FDA approves something.
It isn’t about thoroughness per se. It comes from the fact that the FDA’s mandate is to prevent harm from dangerous new drugs, and it does that very well. This is not the same as a mandate to approve drugs that would provide benefits that outweigh the risks. The latter would require a cost benefit analysis, the former only looks at one side of the cost-benefit equation.
Granted I don’t think the latter would be politically sustainable because as a society we seem almost allergic to acknowledging that all choices, including choices involving life and death, are about trading off risks against one another. But it does result in choices where it’s blatantly obvious that what you’re calling thoroughness is causing massive net harms.
A pandemic, especially early on in a wave when cases are doubling weekly, is a context where speed matters and even a short delay is more than enough to guarantee that containment measures fail and tens of thousands of people will die who might otherwise not have. The FDA is essentially not allowed to consider that fact, and has shaped the entire research culture of the industry on that basis. But even so, the FDA permits itself as much time as it wants. Approval discussions can wait until the next scheduled meeting. Review of data can wait until every last i is dotted and t crossed instead of happening as soon as it is collected and analyzed. Removing some of the traditional roadblocks that prevent almost all new vaccine development isn’t “warp speed” by any reasonable standard.
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How sick is it, that in an attempt to try to look “Presidential”, he’s willing to sacrifice the lives of his people on the altar of PROFIT.
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This. The FDA’s mandate is to prevent the approval of dangerous drugs, and every drug can have dangerous side effects in some context. No one gets called before Congress to explain why a useful medication wasn’t approved - the institutional incentive is always to deny approval, and in that sense the FDA does better than a true pessimist would expect.
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Shouldn’t what the people want matter more than what one judge or one governor want?
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Apparently Abbott thinks Texas has too many Texans.
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It’s true but it’s more of a Lynchian nightmare.
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