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But what's considered life saving? Say a person has a condition that is chronic and deteriorates their heart over time. Untreated, it will lead to heart failure but this could take years. Treatment is an insanely expensive medication or some kind of invasive procedure that has to be done periodically. Insurance, in its arcane wisdom, decides they don't want to pay for it. Eventually the person ends up in the ER with a heart attack. The heart attack is treated but not the underlying condition. The patient is just sent home. This is a fake example because I'm not a doctor but very easy to imagine something similar playing out. The medication treatment is not "life saving" because the patient was able to live for years without it, therefore it clearly was not that vital, right?
When you think about it, it's similar to the debate about covering "preventative" measures, including counseling on diet and exercise. Some people think it's absurd, but I would argue that by not covering preventative and maintenance types of treatments early on, they're creating much more serious problems down the road.
Oh no, you're bang on target. I'd know, being both because I'm a doctor and because my dad has a heart condition that behaves more or less exactly like this. It would likely be cheaper to get a brand new heart than attempt to cure it with medication.
Depends a great deal on the costs and benefits of the prevention and maintenance! Screening not only costs money, but if it involves, say, ionizing radiation, you will cause new cancers once you scale to hundreds of thousands of people. NICE in the UK does painstaking evaluations, and insurance companies definitely have their own systems, if not nearly as open to scrutiny. It is difficult to make a blanket statement, in some cases, it genuinely is better to wait for a disease to manifest before acting on it.
I would've thought Parliament had enough C.S. Lewis fans to avoid this name.
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Ugh this is one of the biggest issues with large scale medical interventions like vaccines. Yes your vaccine can be perfectly safe for plenty of sigma but if you give it billions of people some weird shit is going to happen!!!!
I am regularly dismayed by the Motte's average epistemics when it comes to things like vaccination. Some of the takes I've seen post-covid had me pulling at my hair.
The mRNA vaccines? The ongoing moratorium on government funds for the same? Where does the stupidity end?
The rest of the world is not devoid of competent doctors or statisticians, the COVID vaccines are highly imperfect and not that important for young, healthy adults or children. There is no concerted effort to suppress a spree of cardiac myopathies or weird clotting/autoimmune disorders that needs buy-in from the governments of the other 7.5 billion people on this globe. When promising cures for things like aggressive pancreatic cancers are caught in the cross-fire, I am tempted to order a gun, or, in this country, a sharp gardening implement.
And yet public health officials keep pressing for COVID vaccines for young, healthy adults and children.
Maybe there isn't such an effort ANY MORE.
Are they? Or is that just marketing, because the mRNA producers are looking for applications that sound really good? What I find when searching for that is particularly unpromising -- it's a personalized mRNA vaccine to be used after surgery. Even it works, it'll be eleventy-billion dollars a dose, and you still have to have the surgery.
Sure, but what do I have to do with that? As it stands, the side effect profile from the jab is so minimal that the harm is negligible, even if that's the case for the benefits in that age group. If the government was mandating that every human alive take a dose of a single spoonful of sugar, it wouldn't be the best for diabetics, but it wouldn't kill them either.
Sigh. If there was a concerted effort at any point in time, it would have to have been a pan-national cover up of frankly astonishing proportions. If civilization was that good at organization, we'd have a Dyson sphere by now.
I have worked in two countries adding up to probably 1.5 billion people and change. There was no coverup there, you can take it from someone who worked in a COVID ICU and ran the vaccination programs. The UK grabbed onto the same Moderna and Pfizer vaccines used in the US at about the same time, India opted to use a different mRNA made by Gennova, but AstraZeneca's and another indigenous "normal" vaccine came first.
The sheer scale it would take to run cover for significant mRNA vaccine related adverse effects.. In that many countries, over such a long period of time. It's ludicrous.
https://www.mskcc.org/news/can-mrna-vaccines-fight-pancreatic-cancer-msk-clinical-researchers-are-trying-find-out
Pancreatic cancer consistently gets a podium finish in World's Worst Cancer To Get competition. A cousin of mine, now long gone, proves that. Every patient I saw admitted with it in the Oncology ward weren't there to bid me goodbye when I quit my job. Even the best existing treatment only ensures a 13% five-year survival rate. You die very badly, in a lot of agony.
So fucking what if it's expensive? Drugs tend to get cheaper over time. It is not an intrinsic property of mRNA vaccines that they must be expensive and personalized, they can be spammed by the shipload when circumstances demand.
I only raise this as a specific example of a highly promising treatment that is now derailed by the sheer stupidity of US politics. There are more, and there would be even more if funding wasn't cut. This isn't merely eating your seed corn, it's using it as fuel for the fire during a heatwave.
You're still defending it, that's what you have to do with that. And I disagree; the typical flu-like symptoms from the COVID vaccines are already not "negligible".
We had a pan-national shutdown of a vast array of normal activity. Civilization is clearly that good at organization; Dyson spheres are just harder. That said, the myocarditis coverup was clumsy by comparison and mostly consisted of public health officials lying a lot.
Yes, which is why it's good marketing for boosters to claim any given new technology has a chance of curing it.
Yeah, that's the attitude that's making health care costs rise.
This isn't a single drug, it's a specific new drug for each patient.
It IS an intrinsic property of this pancreatic cancer treatment that they must be personalized.
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I try and keep in mind that (in the U.S. for sure) the PUBLIC HEALTH apparatus absolutely did some shady business and doctors were complicit. This killed a ton of trust.
MRNA vaccines had legit concerns when they were being forced on everyone and I knew plenty of docs (including liberals) who had concerns initially for politics came into it.
Vaccines have always been a tough topic as far back as the Salk/Sabin days lol.
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