By  Lyn Redwood, RN, MSN

The New York Times explains how the government poured $18.5 billion into experimental, fast-tracked vaccines, leaving doctors with “woefully few” drugs to treat the sick. But the author neglected to explain why that happened.

On Jan. 30, the New York Times published an article, “How the Search for COVID-19 treatments Faltered While Vaccines Sped Ahead.” The article bemoaned the fact that “nearly a year into the coronavirus pandemic, as thousands of patients are dying every day in the United States and widespread vaccination is still months away, doctors have precious few drugs to fight the virus.”

According to the Times:

“The government poured $18.5 billion into vaccines, a strategy that resulted in at least five effective products at record-shattering speed. But its investment in drugs was far smaller, about $8.2 billion, most of which went to just a few candidates, such as monoclonal antibodies. Studies of other drugs were poorly organized.

“The result was that many promising drugs that could stop the disease early, called antivirals, were neglected. Their trials have stalled, either because researchers couldn’t find enough funding or enough patients to participate.”

The article also pointed out that in many cases, “researchers have been left on their own to set up trials without the backing of the federal government or pharmaceutical companies.”

The Times article was informative, but it failed to answer the most basic and important question: Why did this happen?

The answer to that question is fairly simple. And the situation we find ourselves in now was as preventable as it was predictable.

As far back as March 2020, Children’s Health Defense was well aware of the direction our federal agencies were headed. That’s when we ran this short video and accompanying article posing this question: “How should America respond to the coronavirus pandemic? With therapeutic drugs or a vaccine?”

In our article, published March 27, we cited a March 16 MSNBC interview conducted by Rachel Maddow with Dr. Ian Lipkin, director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia School of Public Health. In the interview, Lipkin acknowledged that our national priorities for tackling the pandemic were being driven by a desire to create new patents and in turn, new profits.