Tonic

Printed May 25, 2020

Vaccines: How Much, and How Long

For the layman from the layman

Edward Jenner played a hunch. The milkmaid survived cowpox and believed that she would not get smallpox. Jenner speculated that intentional infection of cowpox could be a smallpox vaccine. The co-founder was the milkmaid and the first human trial was her son into whose willing eight-year-old arm the cowpox strain was introduced, which he survived, and in the next wave of smallpox he was unaffected. Life expectancy in the 1800s was 35 years which doubled by the end of the century because of cleaner water, better hygiene, and gin mixed with a hint of tonic.

At roughly the same time that Mr Jenner and his cast were exploring the theory of science The British Indian Army in 1825 introduced the practice of quinine infused gin to combat malaria in the Land that turned Alexander the Great around in 326 BC. Humphrey Bogart consumed a bottle a night during the filming of the African Queen in the Aedes infested Amazon of 1951. The Aedes claimed the health of his co-star Katherine Hepburn but Bogart won the Oscar for Best Actor. He thanked the Academy but it is not clear whether he acknowledged the British Indian Army.

The time and cost of vaccine development with unregulated medicine and undeveloped capital markets were not measurable though the supply chain of quinine, juniper, and rye would seem preferred.  Buddhist monks drank snake venom in the 17h century and scraped cowpox spores into torn skin for immunity to smallpox. Edward Jenner stumbled on the same approach but it took a century to formalize and eradicate the disease his cure targetted. The Spanish Flu appeared in 1918 and it was 27 years before a vaccine tested on military troops in 1945 was applied to civilians in 1946. Dr Salk and his double-blind tests in the 1950s cured polio over decades.

Academic studies estimate that vaccine development cost $200-$500 million and take 5-13 years, which implies that if a vaccine does not exist at the start of a pandemic it is destined for the inventory of the next occurrence provided the pandemic is the same. Though the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center went around the vaccine world in 78 days after receiving one sample for the Zika Virus creating 800 antibodies, tested in 20 animals which created a cure. That is the hope that springs for COVID vaccine hunters.

Is there another way 

But

Is the answer the destruction of global aggregate demand shackling the population to the echo chamber of bacterial gifts in confined households awaiting vaccine development or should there be mass migration to golf courses and climes offering UV light and exercise?

Sell em if you got em

The shackles enable capital market actors to promise the appearance of the pursuit of a vaccine that will last only as long as the unemployment checks arrive on time and rents do not come due. The actors enrich themselves at the public trough with the knowledge that the truth of their scientific promises has the same probability of success as three hundred Spartans at Thermopalyea though the Spartans fought for honor and the reckoning.

So what to make of the cousins Roosevelt polio sufferers both who shepherded the planet through the Panama Canal and a series of wars (1900s) that put the exclamation point on the Manifest Destiny gifted by Napoleon in the Louisiana Purchase (1800s) whose intended double-cross was thwarted by the decimation of French troops to Yellow Fever in Haiti leaving little choice other than to complete the sale for ten percent down and the rest in US Government paper funded by Barings Bank.

Vaccines notwithstanding sheer human will, spirit, and the US Constitution triumphed for a global architecture today in which the State of Maryland can negotiate 500,000 test kits from South Korea and deploy its own National Guard and State Troopers to secure the kits on arrival from the threat of eminent domain by the federal government and get away with it.

The contemporary timeline set by the Vanderbilt Vaccine Center that developed a Zika vaccine in 78 days has passed. The remedy will include the race to the courthouse steps with claims against well-capitalized companies alleged to have made misleading statements about developing a purported vaccine artificially inflating share prices for insiders needing to sell.

There.

The systemic remedy is about money and who gets it especially when scoundrels lied to liberate it in the first place. The promise of vaccine requires suspension of the frontal cortex questioning of how long, how much, and when. Those answers have not changed: 200-500 million 5-18 years.

Or in the better said words of a Judge in a patent dispute:

“Although the evidence of commercial success does not support a finding of nonobviousness, I still find that defendants have not shown by clear and convincing evidence that the prior art they cited would have motivated a person of skill in the art to reach the claimed formulations.”

Gin with a hint of tonic surrounded by a golf course and the Chinese Military Human Trials.

Thank the British Indian Army for not patenting the obvious