Coronavirus Attacks the Lungs. A Federal Agency Just Halted Funding for New Lung Treatments.

[elleng]

'The shift, quietly disclosed on a government website, highlights how the Trump administration is favoring development of vaccines over treatments for the sickest patients.

The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, is tasked with administering money to companies developing treatments, tests and vaccines for public health threats.

When the coronavirus kills, it attacks the lungs, filling them with fluid and robbing the body of oxygen. In chest X-rays, clear lungs turn white, a sign of how dangerously sick patients are.

But earlier this month, the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA, a federal health agency, abruptly notified companies and researchers that it was halting funding for treatments for this severe form of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.

The new policy highlights how staunchly the Trump administration has placed its bet on vaccines as the way to return American society and the economy to normal in a presidential election year. BARDA has pledged more than $2.2 billion in deals with five vaccine manufacturers for the coronavirus, compared with about $359 million toward potential Covid-19 treatments.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/health/coronavirus-lung-treatment-funding.html?

[TreasonousBastard]

1. In another thread on this I mentioned that pulmonary edema is common with other...

maladies, like pneumonia and plain ol' seasonal flu.

Only in the Trumpian Bizzarro world does it make sense to kill off funding for treatments.

[elleng]

2. 'Generous' to call it Bizzarro world.

[BComplex]

3. So he's just going to let people drown in their own lungs?

Am I reading this wrong?

[Igel]

5. Mostly.

There are many sources of government funding, not just one. Those are unaffected. (There's also non-government funding.)

Even the NYT's star bioethicist's "everybody deserves a piece of the pie" probably fails all sorts of moral and political tests if you change the criteria a bit. Not sure he'd have been quoted if this was early April and hydroxychloroquine was up for funding.

This doesn't strip out previously assigned funding but suspends awarding new funding. There are a number of tests/trials funded by BARDA that were previously funded but haven't yielded results.

I'm sure that a lot of new, novel treatments were thought up. But I've seen how grant seekers work, in science/engineering, education, and humanities. A new funding source is proposed, and researchers sit around and try to figure how they can advance their projects under the aegis of the new possible funding, spinning their research to qualify. Do psycholinguistics? Sure, I can find some way to look at equality and discrimination--but along the way the data collection really feeds the attempt to determine how speakers of a variety of languages deal with the entirely theoretical consideration of low or high attachment of prepositional phrases.

Remember when the hESC business was a big political football? One of the criteria for receiving hESC funding was that none of the equipment funded for research using approved hESC lines could be used for research with non-approved hESC lines.

[BComplex]

6. I just learned more from you than you probably know.

That was an awesome answer! Thanks, Igel!

[Buckeye_Democrat]

4. So it's best to just avoid "Covid lung" or "Trump lung" then.