I don't claim to have extensive knowledge of the clinical trial process, but it's so disheartening to see the dismissal of the time it takes for off-label approval of drugs or the development of vaccines as some kind of big conspiracy or something.

In theatre school we learned the "cheap, fast, good" triangle. As a basic model, it works: you pick two for any given project. If it's cheap and fast, likely ain't as good as you want it to be. If it's fast and good, probably isn't cheap.

I mean yes, we need to actually fund science, and do so proactively rather than merely reactively, but nothing's going to get us around the timeline for safety testing for vaccines. And I get how fucking hard that is to sit with.

And nothing gets us around the vast amount of data that you actually need to conduct meta-analyses for clinical trials for clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness, so that we're not just making decisions based on anecdote or trials with a higher risk of bias.

Obviously, money is a huge issue. Sometimes we don't realize just how long it can take for evidence-based research to be done, especially when certain interventions have just kind of...always been around, we didn't have to live without them or wait for them in our lifetimes.

I think what gives me hope these days is knowing that there are people who are participating in vaccine trials who are also, like the rest of us, waiting. And goddamn, hoping. Hoping so much. But that there's no way around the waiting is devastating in so many ways.

What is especially devastating is that while we need lots of time for things like vaccine testing, it's the lack of care (because of this fuckshit capitalist hellscape) that means more people will die waiting than was ever necessary.

Is it time that is the problem, or is it the way that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with time as a measure of and as a condition of life itself?

(And whose lives. Obviously.)

This thread brought to you by arguing with a white woman on my FB who is like "why can EYE not just get hydroxychloroquine if I get sick, why does it need to be tested" but has nary a fucking concern for you know, disabled folks. Racialized folks. Poor folks.

Clinical trial history has been awful for marginalized folks, and severe harm has been done in the name of long-term, evidence-based studies (Tuskegee, anyone?). But throwing out the process of time-sensitive trials/clinical evaluation ALSO amplifies & creates health inequities.