Elizabeth Rosenthal:
In all, it took nine months after the first case was detected in March 2013 before Princeton students could be immunized and nearly a year before they had completed the two-shot course, and that happened only after extraordinary interventions from the Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration to allow the vaccine into the country.
By the end of the outbreak, seven more students had contracted the disease on the Princeton campus, and a student at another university died after contact with Princeton students. In a second outbreak involving four students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a lacrosse player had to have his feet amputated.
The episode highlights a drug approval process in the United States that experts say does not always take into account public health needs. Regulators typically do not seek out new treatments, but wait for pharmaceutical companies to apply for approval of new products. Drugmakers weigh their estimates of sales potential against the high costs of application. And that calculation is often more fraught in the United States than in other countries, in part because American regulators are historically loath to grant approval based solely on foreign trials, so they require expensive new studies.
Sarah Kliff, similar problem, different virus:
The ongoing Ebola outbreak in West Africa is the deadliest in history, with more than 500 dead and hundreds more infected. The particular virus in this outbreak, known as the Zaire ebolavirus, is the deadliest type of the disease; it has killed 79 percent of those infected in previous outbreaks.
This isn't how an Ebola outbreak has to work. Researchers have devoted lots of time to building a vaccine that could stop the disease altogether — and according to Daniel Bausch, a Tulane professor who researches Ebola and other infectious diseases, they're making really significant progress.
Bausch says that the obstacle to developing an Ebola vaccine isn't the science; researchers have actually made really great strides in figuring out how to fight back against Ebola and the Marburg virus, a similar disease.
"We now have a couple of different vaccine platforms that have shown to be protective with non-human primates," says Bausch, who has received awards for his work containing disease outbreaks in Uganda. He is currently stationed in Lima, Peru, as the director of the emerging infections department of Naval Medical Research Unit 6.
The problem, instead, is the economics of drug development. Pharmaceutical companies have little incentive to pour research and development dollars into curing a disease that surfaces sporadically in low-income, African countries. They aren't likely to see a large pay-off at the end — and could stand to lose money.
special CDC-linked containment unit MT @jenhab: Emory University Hospital in Atlanta expects to get an #Ebola patient
http://t.co/...
— @JoanneKenen
More politics and policy below the fold.
Patrick Caldwell:
The House GOP fell into chaos and bickering Thursday afternoon, when House Speaker John Boehner yanked a pair of bills from the floor at the last minute. The House was supposed to have an easy final day of work before members jetted home for their five-week summer recess. But Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), starring in a cameo role as Speaker of the Tea Party, sabotaged Boehner's best-laid plans.
The GOP leadership had originally intended to pass a limited spending measure to bolster border security and immediately scoot off, leaving the final tricky decision-making to the Senate. But the tea party wing of the House—inspired and encouraged by Cruz—revolted against Boehner and refused to go along with the spending bill. The House border-security measure would have appropriated $659 million in emergency spending, far less than the $3.7 billion that President Obama had requested. But it was still too much for many GOPers and it lacked the hardline, anti-immigration reform provisions many Republicans craved. With House Democratic leaders discouraging their members from voting for the GOP's bill, Boehner was left scrambling this week to pull together a majority, and he needed votes from the strident group of right-wingers who have been a thorn in his side since 2010. Those tea partiers don't want to give any extra money to the president. Boehner wasn't going to win their support without offering them some large barrels of carrots.
Igor Bobic:
Following reports that Central Intelligence Agency employees improperly accessed computers used by U.S. Senate staff to investigate the agency, Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) on Thursday called for the resignation of John Brennan as CIA director.
"After being briefed on the CIA Inspector General report today, I have no choice but to call for the resignation of CIA Director John Brennan," he said in a statement. "The CIA unconstitutionally spied on Congress by hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers. This grave misconduct not only is illegal, but it violates the U.S. Constitution’s requirement of separation of powers. These offenses, along with other errors in judgment by some at the CIA, demonstrate a tremendous failure of leadership, and there must be consequences."
.@CIA broke into Senate computer files. Then tried to have Senate staff prosecuted. Absolutely unacceptable in a democracy.
— @RonWyden
Maggie Haberman:
Andrew Cuomo is having the roughest stretch of his political career since flaming out of the New York governor’s race in 2002. In the years since, he’s developed a reputation as a hard-charging corruption-buster who’s often seen as a top-tier presidential prospect.
The mess is almost entirely of his own making...
“You can’t actually have everyone in the world hate you,” said one New York Democratic operative. “That was true with Eliot, true with Christie, and certainly true with Andrew.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/...
Tom Ricks, defense and security reporter, on moving left:
I am puzzled by this late-middle-age politicization. During the time I was a newspaper reporter, I didn’t participate in elections, because I didn’t want to vote for, or against, the people I covered. Mentally, I was a detached centrist. Today I remain oriented to the free market and in favor of a strong national defense, so I have hardly become a radical socialist.
But since leaving newspapers, I have again and again found myself shifting to the left in major areas such as foreign policy and domestic economic policy. I wonder whether others of my generation are similarly pausing, poking up their heads from their workplaces and wondering just what happened to this country over the last 15 years, and what do to about it.
The things that are pushed me leftward began with the experience of closely watching our national security establishment for decades. But they don’t end there. They are, in roughly chronological order
Adam Gopnik on toughness:
Barack Obama is not a tough guy. Everybody rolls him. He’s a wimp, a weak sister; he won’t stand up for himself or his country. Vladimir Putin, a true tough guy, blows planes out of the air, won’t apologize, walks around half-naked. Life, it seems, is like a prison yard, and Obama cowers in a corner. “It would be a hellish thing to live with such timidity. … He’s scared of Vladimir Putin,” one Fox News contributor said about the President. But this kind of thing is not confined to the weirder fringes: Maureen Dowd pointed out a while ago that former fans of Obama “now make derogatory remarks about your manhood,” while the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page runs a kind of compendium of “weak sister” pieces every morning, urging the President, at one point, to make more “unambiguous threats”—making unambiguous threats evidently being the real man’s method of getting his way.