My December 3, 2020 Interview with Emma Betuel on FDA Slow-Walking the COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout

which led to

Her December 23 Inverse Article on How to Build COVID-19 Vaccine Acceptance

On December 3, 2020, I did a telephone interview with reporter Emma Betuel of Inverse, an online magazine mostly for millennials. As we had agreed, the interview focused mostly on the ways the FDA had been slow-walking the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines at least since October. I covered the evidence that the FDA was dragging its feet; what I thought its motives were (especially to avoid exacerbating public distrust of the vaccines as politicized and rushed); and why I thought it was making a mistake.

Way back in mid-October, together with my wife and colleague Jody Lanard, I had drafted a website column that documented the FDA’s early measures to delay the rollout, arguing that they constituted bad risk communication as well as bad ethics. Jody and I edited the column down to op-ed length, planning to post the long version at the same time as somebody published the short one. But nobody wanted the short one. And an expert we trusted convinced us not to post the long one either. He didn’t convince us that we were wrong (though he tried), but he did convince us that we might do more harm than good with a pre-election column accusing the FDA of intentionally dragging its feet. President Trump was busy accusing the FDA of intentionally dragging its feet, thereby exacerbating the polarization that was largely why the FDA was intentionally dragging its feet. Better to stay out of the fray.

So we ditched the column. But we kept collecting further evidence of the FDA’s dawdling. And by the time Emma asked me for an interview, weeks after Election Day, I could resist no longer. My new plan was to post the audio of our December 3 conversation at the same time as a link to her article.

Several weeks after that (and still no article from Emma), the FDA finally approved first the Pfizer and then the Moderna vaccine. Doses were shipped, and the first healthcare workers and nursing home residents rolled up their sleeves. The FDA was no longer an impediment to speedy vaccination; the rollout was securely in the hands of Operation Warp Speed. The FDA’s prior slow-walking began to feel like just an historical footnote, even to me.

Then on December 23 Inverse published “To End the Pandemic, the COVID-19 Vaccine Must Clear One Final Obstacle” – Emma Buetel’s article about the effort to convince more people to get vaccinated. That had been Emma’s preferred topic in the first place, and we had talked about it briefly in our interview, mostly in the context of my disapproval of delaying the rollout in hopes of building vaccine acceptance. Emma used some of what I’d said in her article.

How to build vaccine acceptance is obviously an important question – more important now than whether the FDA should have moved faster to get the vaccines approved.

Nonetheless, I want my historical footnote on the record. So as a Christmas present to myself, I have decided to go ahead and post the audio of my December 3 interview with Emma (mostly about the FDA’s vaccine slow-walking), along with the link to her December 23 article (entirely about how to build vaccine acceptance).

“The FDA Slow-Walks the COVID-19 Vaccine Rollout, Prioritizing Public Confidence Over People’s Lives”
  Interview with Peter M. Sandman by Emma Betuel, December 3, 2020
    Note: Link launches an MP3 audio file (7.7MB, 45 min.)

Copyright © 2020 by Peter M. Sandman

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