Pfizer vaccines not shown to be safe

One thing the story highlights is that the 'independent' safety evaluators were not so independent. Why don't we do what the Ancient Greeks did when faced with a politically contentious process--let foreigners do it for us? The ancient Greek city states often contracted out the work of designing a constitutions to non-citizens. Why don't we do the same with drug safety decisions? 

We could just use the recommendations of foreign countries like Germany, Japan, or Israel. They can't be more corrupt than our bureaucracies. And we would save a lot of money. All these massive domestic bureaucracies produce is a list of things approved and not approved. The list is available publicly. Just use their list. It's free. 

What do we gain from having it done domestically? We can haul them before Congress and threaten to cut their funding, which (the cutting) never ends up happening. By doing away with the domestic bureaucracies we could fire our bureaucrats and save billions of dollars along with thousands of lives. 

 The old man and the mountain

This is a fable in Chinese where an old man, annoyed by having to walk round a mountain to get to his fields, resolves to remove the mountain. A old wise man (whom I recall being portrayed as a confusion scholar, though I cannot find confirmation of it now) tells him he is foolish. The old man reposts that the wise man in foolish, because he will have sons who will in turn have sons who will continue his work, while the mountain has no way to get bigger. And so, victory over the mountain is only a matter of time. 

It is kind of like Pascal's wager applied to generational projects. Any probability of God existing multiplied by the infinite good of eternal life is a proper bargain. So any project, multiplied by the infinite power of generational effort, is doable. 

Sometimes you read Western foreign policy experts say that we look 5 years out while the Chinese have a time horizon of 10 or 20 years. They are clueless.