ChristianKl's Shortform

ChristianKl

This is a special post for quick takes by ChristianKl. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.

I watched the hearings with RFK Jr. while a lot was about rehearsing existing talking points, it had a few interesting bits:

RFK Jr. is pro-DEI-requirements in clinical trials, so that drug companies have to have a certain number of various groups in their trial population. The example in the hearings was Native Americans. In case you fail to remember, DEI requirements did slow down the clinical trial to approve the initial COVID19 vaccine of Moderna.
When he was asked what he means with gold-standard science (one of his three priorities). On concrete goal he formulated was that RFK Jr. wants that 20% of NIH spending goes to replication studies.
He said that he's not against the childhood vaccine schedule and just wants more safety studies. Unfortunately, no senator asked him directly: "Given your concerns about vaccines, what changes in policy do you want with regards to vaccines?"
Elizabeth Warren made a point that RFK Jr. made a lot of money with suing drug makers. She asked him to pledge not to make money with way in the four years after he leaves office because of conflict of interests and RFK Jr. declined.
It sounded like RFK Jr. was not directly behind the executive orders in regards to the funding freezes in healthcare.
While RFK Jr. did say that he's for medicare drug price negotiation he did not speak about why the executive action to reverse some drug price negotiation was withdrawn. It's unclear what we will get on that domain in far as policy goes.

If you would want to account for biological diversity when doing drug trials you would require pre-existing conditions to be as prevalent in the population that you test in your drug trial. Saying that you have at least X percent obese people would likely give you more clinical knowledge than requiring at least X percent to be Native Americans.

Big Pharma generally selects participants to have less preexisting conditions and take less other medications than the general population. In the end FDA, requirements for drug legalization have positive advantages b... (read more)

4MondSemmel2y

Yeah. Though as a counterpoint, something I picked up from IIRC Scott Alexander or Marginal Revolution is that the FDA is not great about accepting foreign clinical trials, or demands that they always be supplemented by trials of Americans, or similar.

4localdeity2y

I expect that's about not trusting the foreigners who did the clinical trials (I have heard this)[1], and not so much about expecting that Americans are biologically different from foreigners. 1. ^ Specifically, someone with some knowledge told me that the FDA knows that there are some countries where the trials are completely untrustworthy. And that there was a political decision where they said, "If we disallow trials from some countries but not others, there will be much complaining and we'll probably be called racists", and solved the issue by disallowing trials from all foreign countries.

ChristianKl's Shortform

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ChristianKl's Shortform

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