What does full vaccine approval mean?

Hey Everyone, Peter Zeihan here from Iceland where some places look like Minnesota, somethings like North Carolina, some like Wyoming, some like New Zealand. And, some like Mars.  

When I was, I came in from the mountains yesterday I found out that the United States, the FDA, gave full approval to the Pfizer vaccine. So it’s no longer in emergency authorization. I just wanted to discuss very briefly what that means and what that doesn’t mean. Let’s start with what that doesn’t. 

This does not mean that the COVID vaccine is no longer experimental because it hasn’t been experimental for a year. 

The phase three trials that we did last year on Pfizer were the largest field trials of any medication ever in human history. 

So it ceased to be an experimental drug a year ago.

What emergency use authorization means is that the medication is to be used only in a prescribed manner, in a very specific situation, as applied by a medical professional.

So in this case as a two shot regimen to be administered as a vaccine. Once it has full authorization that opens it up for others uses which it wasn’t necessarily designed. So we’re seeing some of that third shots are going to start next month, but to give you a really good idea of what it can mean, theoretically, when Botox was approved, it got an initial authorization kind of like the emergency authorization and it was to be used, you know, to smooth out your forehead. Well, once it got full approval could be used for other things. And since then it has been used in migraine treatments. 

So it’s not like we’ve gone from experimental to non-experimental. We’ve gone from fully approved to approved in a much broader array of circumstances. 

Okay. So that’s, what doesn’t mean? What it does mean is that we now have legal cover for any employer to allow mandates from places throughout their employee system.

The courts have already been very aggressive in approving mandates up to and including the Supreme Court, but now that there’s full authorization, and this has been indicated by the FDA to be safe in all circumstances for nearly all people, you should expect to see a cascade of mandates that are gonna effect probably the plurality of American workers by the end of the year and only accelerating after that because there’s now no absolutely no legal or safety reason to think otherwise. 

For those of you who are curious about COVID and Iceland, remember that two thirds of the population lives in your Reykjavik and that’s where about 85% of COVID cases are, more concentrated the population, the more likely to have respiratory disease. It’s just how it works. 

But I spoke to somebody at the hospital in Akureyri, which is the second largest town yesterday. And she indicated to me that the number of people who have been vaccinated, but who are hospitalized is two for the entire country. 

So 97% of the cases that they have seen here in the recent surge are, are minor. 

They have a very aggressive test and trace system here and nothing like the United States. So they’re turning up a lot of cases because of the Delta, but because the population is 90% vaccinated, the only people that are ending up in the hospital are this handful of people that for whatever reason, have not been able to get the vaccine yet. So it’s actually pretty well under control here. 

The probably gonna fall off of the red list for the European Union tier four list for the United States very, very quickly because the virus spurting out here, there’s just not enough population to carry it forward. 

Okay. That is everything from me. Hope you’re all enjoying the summer back home. And I will return to the states in a couple of weeks, take care.