Tag: proactionary principle

A Summary of the USTP’s FDA Reform Panel – Article by Dan Elton

A Summary of the USTP’s FDA Reform Panel – Article by Dan Elton

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Daniel C. Elton, Ph.D.

The U.S. Transhumanist Party livestreams special Enlightenment Salon events every Sunday at 4 p.m. on YouTube. Two weeks ago, on April 4. 2021, the USTP organized a special Enlightenment Salon panel event on FDA reform. In addition to myself, the following people participated on the panel, which was moderated by USTP Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II:

  • Prof. Alex Tabarrok, Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics, George Mason University
  • Dr. Max More, President Emeritus, Alcor Life Extension Foundation
  • Jim O’Neill, CEO, SENS Research Foundation
  • Dr. Edward Hudgins, Founder, Human Achievement Alliance
  • Prof. Garett Jones, Mercatus Center, George Mason University
  • Will C. , Medical Student and Blogger

The entire panel was probably the most information-dense event the USTP has done. I kicked things off by giving a short presentation, which I managed to blaze through in 15 minutes. (The slides can be viewed here.) The presentation set the stage for a very informative and productive discussion.

My only regret was that we didn’t have any women on the panel. However, during the course of researching my presentation, I found out about the work of Dr. Mary J. Ruwart. Dr. Ruwart estimated the number of people who die every year from FDA delays to be around 150,000 per year in her book Death by Regulation. So, I am happy to announce that Sunday, April 25th, from 4 – 6 p.m. Eastern Time, 1-3 p.m. Pacific Time, the USTP will be doing a special Virtual Enlightenment Salon with her.

Here is the recording of the FDA reform event. At 00:05:00 my presentation kicks off:

I’ve written a summary of the major points each of the panelists (and two others) made during approximately the first hour of the session. These are heavily paraphrased. (Instead of providing direct quotes, I shortened what was said in most cases while maintaining the core meaning of what was communicated.) I have put my own comments in italics.

Prof. Alex Tabarrok:

  • The FDA can approve a bad drug (Type I) or fail to approve a good drug (Type II). If they approve a bad drug, people who were affected will go on Oprah, and there will be huge backlash. If they don’t approve a good drug, there is no backlash. The invisible graveyard is a statistical reality, but it’s hard to see. This can be seen easily by asking people to name a time when the FDA approved a bad drug (or a drug with unexpected side effects). Lots of people can think of something. Many point to Thalidomide, which is actually a drug that was approved in Europe and caused birth defects. Thalidomide, incidentally, has many important applications but was not approved by the FDA until 1998.
  • When you have a Type I error, you learn something — we learn about the harms of a drug, and we change our behavior. With a Type II error we never learn anything. We can’t see the consequences of a failure to approve, and even worse, we can’t see the many drugs that never even made it to FDA-mandated trials in the first place because they were deemed too risky to justify the cost.
  • Reciprocity is a sensible reform that is one of the most feasible.
  • The FDA likes to think they are the “gold standard” for drug approval. Yet, people in other countries don’t worry about whether drugs are FDA-approved. For food safety we already have reciprocity with Canada.
  • The FDA has been working for 40 years on new standards for approving sunscreens. So Europeans have much more advanced sunscreen than the US.
  • If aspirin were invented today, it probably wouldn’t be approved.
  • One thing U.S. policymakers have done already, which is probably the smartest thing they have done in a while, is PEDUFA (Prescription Drug User Fee Act). The drug developers pay an extra tax as long as approvals are sped up. The FDA was happy because they got to expand their bureaucracy, and drug companies were happy because they could get to market faster.
  • In the EU the EMA “farms out” reviews to private companies. (So the EMA is more like “an approver of approvers”). Private companies can do a good job – for instance, look at Underwriters Laboratories in the realm of electrical devices. (If you look at many electrical devices, you may see a “UL” seal.) Many major companies like Amazon won’t carry devices unless they are UL-approved.
  • There is no formal process whereby where if a disease is more deadly, then the standards should be lowered to speed approvals. For instance, for pancreatic cancer, which often kills within 6 months, the standards should be lower (and more risk should be tolerated), since patients have less to lose. For something like acne treatment, the standards can be much higher. The FDA recognizes this to some extent in practice, but it’s totally informal – technically it’s not supposed to happen. However they could do this formally and adjust the required statistical significance levels. They could use Bayesian statistical techniques as well.
  • There’s no route to approve a drug for anti-aging. If a company wants to do R&D on anti-aging therapeutics, there is not a clear route for approval.

Dr. Max More:

  • We should keep in mind full abolition of the agency as a long-term goal. [My response: I am against full abolition, but I agree with this. Everyone should at least consider abolition, and if they are against it, explain in some detail why the government needs to be involved versus using private-sector companies and tort law. Going back to first principles regarding the role of government is healthy, especially in places like Washington, D.C., where government institutions are taken for granted and not questioned as much as they could be.]
  • We should keep in mind Milton Friedman’s statement that expecting the FDA to behave differently than it does is like expecting a cat to bark (Note: He said this in a 1973 Newsweek column.) We can’t just say, “We want the FDA to do X”; we have to make sure incentives are in place so people actually do the things we want. Legal mandates can help, but it’s easy for people to skirt around them if the proper incentives don’t exist.
  • We are facing an enormous cultural barrier when it comes to reforming the FDA and CDC. We don’t have a proactionary culture anymore; we have a very fear-based culture, and a simple solution to it does not exist. However, we have a good opportunity right now just like the AIDS activists had a good opportunity in the 1980s.
  • The proactionary principle is a “grab-bag” of tools based on a certain value perspective which basically says that progress is fundamentally good. We aren’t omniscient, so we have to learn by doing. As Alex Tabarrok said, you can’t really learn things without making mistakes. It’s impossible to make progress, like some rationalists believed, by just sitting in chairs and thinking carefully. We have to become empirical. You can “look before leaping”, but you also have “look while leaping” and adjust how you land, to use a crude metaphor.
  • Cost-benefit analysis is a basic approach that is used in many organizations but doesn’t seem to be used as much in government agencies. It shouldn’t be controversial. Mandating cost-benefit analyses would be a step towards using ideas from the proactionary principle.
  • We should institutionalize the Devil’s Advocate procedure and institutionalize respectful disagreement. Instead of having the most powerful person in the room getting what they want railroaded through, we should require debate and motivate decision makers to ponder both sides. Other approaches could help, such as reference class forecasting, structured argumentation techniques, auditing procedures, and auditing review panels.
  • Reciprocity seems like a no-brainer that is relatively easy to achieve, and would greatly reduce costs.
  • Besides getting out these great ideas, we need to figure out how to get people to follow those ideas. Laws can help, but people can choose to not follow them. How do we put “bite” into laws? I think an annual audit on the FDA’s decision making would be a good idea. Importantly, the auditor’s report should be made public. The auditors should come from a variety of institutions, for instance a variety of think tanks from different sides of the political spectrum.

Gennady Stolyarov II:

  • The USTP agrees that abolishing the FDA should not be out of the question. In our Platform, Section CXVIII states:

Section CXVIII [Adopted by a vote of the members during March 25-28, 2020]: Given the extreme delays, bottlenecks, and expenses created by the mandatory approval processes on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the United States Transhumanist Party supports abolishing the FDA and replacing it with a Radical Life Extension Administration (RLEA), whose mandate would be to prioritize the rapid development of potential disease cures, treatments, and vaccines – including any possible cures or vaccines for COVID-19, as well as treatments to mitigate and reverse the disease of biological aging, the major risk factor for COVID-19. The RLEA would allow the marketing and collection of patient data on any potential cure, treatment, or vaccine which has passed affordable safety testing at a reasonably acceptable threshold.

Jim O’Neil:

  • I’ve had the pleasure of working with the FDA quite a bit, and in my experience most of the people there are very smart, and they actually believe in approving things, contrary to what it may look like from the outside.
  • The problem is that incentives matter, and the FDA is a central point of failure.
  • When someone has a severe side effect from a drug, the FDA Commissioner gets hauled in front of several Congressional Committees and is interrogated. When someone dies because something wasn’t approved, there’s total silence in Washington. We should blame Congress, not the FDA, for that incentive being in place.
  • Individuals respond to the institutional incentives, but they also have personal incentives. A lot of people want to be the next whistle-blower who finds the next thalidomide and calls a halt to it. Both of these are pretty severe and would affect even the most principled person in ways they couldn’t even detect.
  • I disagree with Alex that “FDA not recognizing aging as a disease is a major problem.” In order for the FDA to reasonably measure success of any therapy, there must be metrics and biomarkers. It’s not the FDA’s job to do all the scientific work to develop biomarkers for aging. That’s the job of the science community and the NIH to some extent. There are epigenetic clocks, but we need a lot more work on those. Those clocks can then be run through the FDA’s biomarker approval program.
  • The second thing I disagree with is Dan’s idea of making the FDA independent from HHS. I think that would make things worse.
  • My favorite approval ideas fall under the category of “progressive approval” or what Dan calls “tiered approval”. Contrary to what the FDA often thinks, doctors and patients are capable of processing information and making risk-benefit calculations using their knowledge about the specific situation they are in. The more information provided and the more transparency, the better. The FDA should focus back on their original mission of safety and purity. I absolutely support repealing the 1962 Kefauver-Harris Amendments.

Prof. Garett Jones:

  • I come at this as an macroeconomist. I think we can learn from what economists have learned about central banks around the world. The FDA should be as independent of congress and the president as central banks are or as judges are.
  • The Federal Reserve is a panel. That’s how we run the SEC, the FEC, the Federal Reserve, and the Supreme Court. There seems to be some magic to having a panel — it’s probably giving us a bit of the Law of Large Numbers in decision-making.
  • Another aspect of these panels is they have long terms. They are probably going to be serving under a few different Presidents. As I say in my book 10% Less Democracy, “short terms make short-term thinking”. Political independence can lead to decision-making independence, and we have evidence that’s a good thing.
  • Discussions in institutional reform have “high marginal product” right now, as an economist would say. Congress moves slowly, but Congresspersons tend to look for big opportunities for reform a couple years after a crisis. The Federal Reserve was established in 1913 but was born out of the Panic of 1907. Six years was how long it took between a huge financial crisis and Congress getting around to making some reforms. We saw something similar after the global financial crisis – it took about 2-3 years. The ideas that people are discussing now will be part of the information ecology of the next few years in Washington, D.C.
  • These ideas of long terms, independence, and panels are a good path for decision making. I am an unreformed Tabarrokian, so I agree with everything Alex Tabarrok has written about FDA reform (chuckle). What I want to push here is institutional reforms that seem to work in a wide variety of settings. A little more financial and legal independence will lead to a situation where Congress is less of a source of fear for FDA officials.
  • A lot of people on social media have told me that the President is in charge of the FDA. These people have never actually talked to anyone who worked on Capitol Hill — agencies live in fear of their Congressional overlords. They live in fear of the Senate Majority Leader and the Speaker of the House, who have power over their budgets. They also know that if they make a mistake, they can be hauled up before Congress and fired ignominiously.
  • There is a risk that a more independent agency may misuse its freedom. However, in practice, if we look at the data, independent agencies with long terms have high benefits and low costs.
  • It’s fun to complain about the FDA, but it’s wise to complain about Congress.

Dr. Ed Hudgins

  • We’ve been talking about how FDA regulators are always in fear of Congress. What I want to see are FDA regulators in fear of patients who want to get access to medications at less cost and quicker.
  • One of the most egregious examples of defining efficacy was when the FDA decided that 23andme could not offer advice on whether someone was prone to breast cancer. Essentially they thought that women were too stupid to understand the information and would rush out to get a double mastectomy without getting a second opinion.
  • Another example is in 1989-1990 when they wanted to classify a urine sample cup as a “class A medical device”, in the same category as a heart valve.
  • In April 2019, the FDA stated that it wants to regulate artificial intelligence as a medical device.
  • There are many consultants now, whose entire job is to help companies get through the FDA bureaucracy. So there’s a whole industry now just to help people get through the FDA — and that’s part of the problem now, too.
  • The “Free to Choose Medicine” idea should be at the top. Something like this was created around 1992 during AIDS crisis. Congress stepped in and put pressure on the FDA to do something. What they did was create a parallel track where sufferers could access a particular medication for AIDS during the three years it was being tested. 12,000 people took advantage of that, so there are 12,000 people who are not in the invisible graveyard as a result.
  • The idea of a parallel track has been put forward by Bart Madden. Data from people on that track would be put into a public real-world database.
  • There are alternatives to randomized controlled trials (RCTs). If observational data is put into a public database, then doctors can look at that data and make informed recommendations. Drugs would be able to fail quicker, too.
  • In the case of AIDS, it was patient groups that besieged the FDA’s buildings. In light of COVID-19, and people seeing that the system isn’t working for them, we have an opportunity now to push for change.
  • There’s momentum for FDA reform building off of the right-to-try legislation that has been passed in many states. In Texas and North Carolina there are strong pushes to broaden right-to-try to people like patients with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Will C.

  • The AIDS-FDA story is a little more nuanced than was described by Ed Hudgins and Max More. We all know about the militant groups like ACT-UP which pressured the FDA in the 1980s. However in the mid-1990s there developed a few counter-movements against that. One group was called Treatment Action Group, and they pressured the FDA to move slower because they felt the FDA was approving HIV/AIDS treatments that didn’t actually have much benefit.
  • A good book is Malignant by Vinay Prasad. It documents how, over the last twenty years or so, the FDA has lowered the standards for many cancer drugs. They often are approving drugs based on surrogate endpoints and biomarkers, and then the drugs don’t go through follow-up studies to show if they have actual clinical benefit. So there has been a natural experiment where we tried to lower the standards for cancer drugs, and it doesn’t seem to have worked very well. Of course, I’m not an economist, so there might be a way of adding up the costs and benefits where the marginal benefits have outweighed the costs.
  • The FDA had many failures during COVID-19. The first big one was with testing, both with the FDA and the CDC. Others were the decision to delay the approval of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (by about 4-6 weeks), and the decision not to approve the AstraZeneca vaccine, which hasn’t had any transparency. Finally, there was a complete lack of experimentation with human challenge trials. What all of these share is there has been very little transparency and not much good reporting on these issues. There have not been any thorough investigations from journalists, and we don’t really know what’s going on. Before attempting reform we need to first go and find out what went wrong during COVID-19. We need a non-partisan investigation of all of these issues. We need to utilize Freedom of Information Act requests. We need to find out how Trump was involved, why approvals took the amount of time they did, etc.

Dr. Natasha Vita-More

  • Cosmetics does not need FDA approval pre-marketing. It only needs post-market approval if the company says something in their marketing materials that could be misleading. There are many doctors pushing crack cosmetic treatments and behaving in a very “loosey goose-y”. I have a hard time understanding how they get away with these things, unless there are big-monied interests behind them.
  • We all know about Theranos. In 2015 they got FDA approval for one of their tests. There’s clearly an imbalance here – many life-saving treatments struggle to get approval, but a company which is completely fraudulent like Theranos was able to get approval. [My response: This is a great point! Theranos did receive approval, but only for their Herpes test. If I recall correctly, this test was done with conventional laboratory equipment rather then their special “minilab” device, a fact which Theranos hid from investors. Theranos also utilized a loophole to sell tests without FDA approval.]

Dan Elton, Ph. D., is Director of Scholarship for the U.S. Transhumanist Party.  You can find him on Twitter at @moreisdifferent, where he accepts direct messages. If you like his content, check out his website and subscribe to his newsletter on Substack. 

A List of Possible FDA Reforms

A List of Possible FDA Reforms

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Daniel C. Elton, Ph.D.

I have ranked these according to my own perception of which have the most support among DC bureaucrats and members of congress.

  • Improving transparency. During the COVID-19 pandemic the public has been kept in the dark regarding how key decisions were made, such as the decision to issue an EUA for hydroxychloroquine, the decisions that pushed Pfizer’s EUA from early November to late December, and the decision to require additional Phase III data from AstraZeneca which delayed their EUA by at least 3-4 months. Currently the FDA keeps much of the information relevant to decision making confidential. In theory Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests can be used to obtain some information, but in practice FOIAs are slow-walked, may require litigation, and take years to resolve. There are many possible ways to increase transparency at the FDA, some of which are outlined in this recent article in STAT News. 18 specific recommendations can be found in this journal article from 2018. One of people referenced as a top candidate for FDA Commissioner, Joshua M. Sharfstein, is a poor choice when it comes to implementing other reforms but has been a leading voice calling for more transparency.
  • Reciprocity. If a drug/medication is approved by a regulatory agency in a different country which has equivalent standards to the FDA (for instance agencies in the UK or Japan, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), or Health Canada), it should automatically be approved by the FDA (and vice versa). Reciprocity would save both taxpayers and companies a lot of time and money. Imagine if the AstraZeneca vaccine had been approved on January 1st, a few days after the UK approved it. It’s easy to see that tens of thousands of lives would have been saved, especially when you consider it would have been given to the most at-risk first!  In 2015 Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz introduced the RESULT Act, which is primarily focused on implementing reciprocity.
  • Making the agency independent from the executive branch. It’s hard to insulate the FDA from political concerns as long as Congress controls the FDA’s purse, but it could at least be removed from direct interference from the executive branch by making it an independent agency like the FCC or Federal Reserve. There seems to be wide support behind this idea right now and recently four former FDA commissioners all endorsed this idea in an interview.
  • Rolling reviews. It should not take 3-4 weeks from the submission of an EUA application until a decision is made, especially when thousands are dying every day while waiting for vaccines. According to Dr. Marty Makary, a professor of public health policy at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who has conducted over a hundred clinical studies, the FDA “could have done the approval in 24-48 hours without cutting any corners”. Likewise, the approval of drugs and therapies after Phase III trials have reached an endpoint should not take 6 – 18 months. While the FDA does engage in a back and forth with companies prior to when they submit their paperwork for an EUA or approval, they do not use rolling reviews. Due to their rolling review systems other countries like the UK were able issue EUAs for COVID-19 vaccines faster than the FDA. Rolling reviews should be the norm, and the submission and analysis of trial data should made as streamlined and as efficient as possible without compromising the integrity of the analysis.
  • Tiered approvals. Doctors who want to provide new drugs to at-risk patients currently have to wait 5-10 years for lengthy Phase III trials to conclude and then another 6 – 18 months for the FDA to carry out their review of the trial data. Tiered approvals would allow a lower level of approval after just Phases I and II, freeing up treatments to those who need them most. The centrist Niskanen center has a white paper which suggests four levels of approval (see also their op-ed in The Hill).
  • Expansion of Right-to-Try. Federal right-to-try legislation was passed in 2018. However, it is very restrictive, and patients need to have met a number of strict requirements before they can try new medications and treatments, greatly limiting its utility.
  • Treating aging as a disease. Currently it is illegal to market an FDA-approved product as a treatment for aging. Even though aging is a harmful biological process, it is not considered a legitimate “indication” for a drug or therapy by the FDA. In other words, the FDA doesn’t view aging as a “disease” and therefore anti-aging treatments fall outside their mandate. Some specific aspects of aging are also not considered as legitimate indications. The FDA is currently operating in an inconsistent way as some conditions which are due to the aging process can are considered legitimate targets, such as osteoporosis and menopause, but others, like sarcopenia (age-related muscle loss /frailty), are not.  Many experts, including David Sinclair, have spoken out about this issue. Some companies have found ways to get around the FDA’s restrictions, such as by using certain metabolic markers to track the degree of damage from aging. However, the impossibility of getting FDA approval for therapies that directly slow down or repair the damages from aging greatly dis-incentivizes industry R&D investment in this area.  Fortunately, with advanced gene and stem-cell therapies on the horizon, the Congress and the FDA have already taken a few steps towards being able to review and approve anti-aging drugs and therapies. The 21st-Century CURES Act, for instance, mandated the creation of the Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy designation at the FDA.
  • Challenge trials in emergency situations. Many people, including a group of legislators, lobbied the FDA to give companies the go-ahead to do challenge trials, but there was no action. Thousands of volunteers for COVID-19 challenge trials signed up with 1daysooner.org but were unable to participate as they had wished to. As a result, data on vaccine efficacy was obtained much slower than it could have been.
  • Use of the proactionary principle for all drug & therapy approvals. The FDA should publish a transparent, quantitative, scientifically informed, and structured cost-benefit analysis for each regulatory action performed, which estimates the expected quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) saved versus risk of QALYs lost for both the action and inaction. The analysis should be made public, ideally sometime before the decision goes into effect. Crucially, the analysis should enumerate the risks and benefits of granting an approval and the risks and benefits of not granting it. See Max More’s overview of the proactionary principle and his chapter in The Transhumanist Reader, where he presents not just a principle but an entire framework for rational decision making. The key reform here is to make it mandatory that decision making at the FDA be highly structured and quantitative so it under less sway from political concerns and cognitive biases. If such a framework for rational decision making was in place it’s unlikely the FDA would have decided to delay Pfizer’s Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) from early November to December 11th, a decision which cost tens of thousands of American lives.
  • Free to Choose Medicine with a Trade-off Evaluation Database.  In brief, Free to Choose Medicine would create an additional track after Phases I and II to allow doctors to prescribe new therapies to at-risk patients who are unable or unwilling to participate in a Phase III trial. Patients in the Free-to-Choose Track would be mandated to submit data to a trade-off evaluation database, creating a trove of valuable real-world data (this could be genetic, biomarker, and adverse events data, for instance).  See this excellent podcast interview with Bart Madden for more information. 

Figure from Bart Madden, “Free to Choose Medicine“, The Heartland Institute

 

Dan Elton, Ph. D., is Director of Scholarship for the U.S. Transhumanist Party.  You can find him on Twitter at @moreisdifferent, where he accepts direct messages. If you like his content, check out his website and subscribe to his newsletter on Substack. 

USTP Director of Scholarship Dan Elton’s Letter to the FDA’s Vaccine Committee Meeting on the Emergency Use Authorization of the Johnson & Johnson Vaccine

USTP Director of Scholarship Dan Elton’s Letter to the FDA’s Vaccine Committee Meeting on the Emergency Use Authorization of the Johnson & Johnson Vaccine

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Daniel C. Elton, Ph.D.

The public can comment on the FDA’s committee meeting tomorrow (February 26th) to discuss the Emergency Use Authorization for the Johnson & Johnson / Janssen vaccine candidate. Members of the public can submit comments via an online system here or via the mail. Attached is my letter. The main theme is transparency.  

 

To the VRBP Advisory Committee:

I am writing to request the FDA exhibit full transparency and show their cost-benefit calculations which justified such a long delay in approving the J&J/Janssen vaccine. Taxpayers deserve decisions that are made on the basis of rational cost-benefit analysis informed by the best science and data available. There is an incredible fog around key decisions that have greatly affected Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic – such as the FDA’s decisions that made it hard for at-home tests to be approved, HHS & FDA decisions not to pursue or support human challenge trials, and the FDA’s deadly decision to delay approvals of life-saving vaccines, most shockingly the AstraZeneca vaccine. With 2,000 – 3,000 Americans dying every day and millions of Americans desperate for life-saving vaccines (as evidenced by long lines across the country) it is only fair that taxpayers know the reasons for the FDA’s delays.

In a relentless pursuit of safety the FDA has ironically ignored the greatest safety concern to the American people – the SARS-CoV2 virus, and many have died needlessly as a result. Beyond normal expected utility based utilitarian calculations, the proactionary principle(s), developed by philosopher Max More and extended by Steve Fuller and others provide a good blueprint for conducting rational cost benefit analysis. It is my belief that the procedures the FDA have used to decide if and when to approve this vaccine have not utilized even the most rudimentary cost-benefit analyses, and lives have been lost as a result. I am open to changing my mind, however, if the FDA can produce a cost-benefit calculation that informed their decision making.

The interim Phase III collection period for the Janssen vaccine ended January 22 and they submitted their EUA application on February 4th. The American people have had to wait 22+ days for the EUA to be granted. Between February 4th – 26th, around 52,500 Americans will have lost their lives to COVID-19 (extrapolating the death rate forward 2 days from February 24th). In that time, countless others will have suffered under the ravages of the disease and the numerous sequela of “long COVID”. Even among those who have been lucky enough not to have their bodies invaded by the virus, most have suffered brutal economic and psychological effects from the pandemic.

As economist Tyler Cowen points out, it is a fallacy to think that manufacturing is the main bottleneck to getting life-saving vaccines to American people. Millions of doses of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were available when the FDA finally approved them, showing that FDA approval was a larger constraint than manufacturing. While J&J may not have as many vaccines produced by February 26th as Moderna & Pfizer did at their EUA, if an expectation of an earlier EUA had been set by the FDA the company would have had a stronger incentive to ramp up production. It is incorrect to view the manufacturing and approval as independent – both are linked, with the timeframe set for one affecting the timeframe for the other. In economic terms, the elasticity of manufacturing to demand is not zero. Production of J&J’s vaccine began long ago so they could provide vaccines for their Phase I/IIa trial which began on July 22, 2020. While the company has faced production setbacks, a GSA report (GAO-21-265) estimates they will have 2 million doses available on February 26th.

The government of South Africa announced on February 10th that they would start administering the J&J vaccine to frontline health care workers. Now imagine if the FDA had made the J&J vaccine available just two weeks prior and assume that 2 million doses could therefore be distributed two weeks earlier as a result. At the current monthly rate of deaths, the average american has a 1/9,410 chance of dying from COVID-19 every 2 weeks. The risk of dying from the J&J vaccine, by contrast, based on the Phase I/II data and our prior knowledge about similar vaccines, is at most 1/1,000,000 (likely an overestimate). Assuming the vaccine is 100% effective at preventing death from COVID-19 (a safe assumption based on the current science), delivery of 2 million J&J vaccines 2 weeks earlier could save 212 lives and reduce suffering in many more. However, this number is obviously an underestimate because the vaccines will be distributed to the elderly and those with pre-existing conditions first, who have a 10x – 100x higher chance of dying from COVID-19 than the average American. So, the true number of lives that would have been saved is in the ballpark range 2,120-20,120.

The FDA’s decision to delay approval of the AstraZeneca vaccine by demanding additional American Phase III trial participants represents an even more egregious decision which surely cost thousands of Americans their lives. To be respectful of the purpose of the meeting at hand, however, I have restricted my discussion here to the J&J vaccine alone.

I ask that the FDA produce a cost-benefit analysis and clearly explain the reasons for the following decisions:

  • The reason the FDA did not allow the J&J vaccine to be made available via the FDA’s Expanded Access Program after excellent Phase I/II safety & immunogenicity data was published The Lancet on January 13th, 2021. (side note: see this article in STAT)
  • The reason the FDA did not recommend and/or advocate that those with a high risk of dying from COVID-19 obtain the J&J vaccine via the Right-to-Try pathway prior to EUA.
  • The reason the FDA, in October, created a requirement for a median 2 month follow up period in Phase III trials.
  • The reason the FDA decided not to recommend J&J use challenge trials to demonstrate the efficacy of their vaccine in a faster manner.
  • The reason the FDA decided not to allow pre-distribution of the J&J vaccine prior to EUA to speed up distribution.
  • The reason the FDA did not implement rolling reviews for the J&J vaccine.
  • The reason the FDA decided it needed 22 days to review J&J’s EUA application.

For each point, a cost-benefit calculation should be provided including a list of costs and benefits to the action vs the opposite action, ideally expressed in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) saved or lost.

Finally, I ask that in their communications and messaging the FDA focus on the efficacy of the J&J vaccine against hospitalization and death, especially against the South African variant, so Americans are informed first and foremost about the most important benefits of this vaccine.

Respectfully,
Daniel C. Elton, Ph.D.

 

Dan Elton, Ph. D., is Director of Scholarship for the U.S. Transhumanist Party.  You can find him on Twitter at @moreisdifferent, where he accepts direct messages. If you like his content, check out his website and subscribe to his newsletter on Substack.

How We Can Judge the Safety and Efficacy of New Vaccines Prior to Phase III Data and Why We Must

How We Can Judge the Safety and Efficacy of New Vaccines Prior to Phase III Data and Why We Must

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Daniel C. Elton, Ph.D.

A common refrain we hear from public intellectuals about vaccines prior to Phase III data is “we don’t know anything about the safety or efficacy of vaccine X”. This attitude is both false and misleading to the public, instilling uncertainty and fear about vaccines. To see why it is false, consider if a normal vaccine safety study was done, but by coincidence all of the vaccines were given in hospital rooms that were painted blue. Could we conclude on the basis of such a study whether the vaccine would be safe if administered in rooms painted red? Yes, we can, and we should. We can utilize two forms of reasoning to conclude that the vaccine is safe if given in red rooms, even though we have no data on the matter.

The first form of reasoning roughly approximates the way an ideal Bayesian statistical reasoner would function to compute what is called a “prior probability distribution”. Under this form of reasoning, we consider the millions of doses of similar vaccines (called the “reference class”) that have been administered. For instance, we might consider the vaccines developed for very similar coronaviruses like SARS and MERS.  We note that if the color of paint did affect the safety of those vaccines, this would have likely been detected over the course of prior studies and over the course of millions of doses given previously. Of course, there is a chance the correlation might have been missed. To figure out how big that is, we can go a level deeper and consider a reference class of “things people might notice or fail to notice in medical studies”. We can conclude that for prior vaccines, if such correlations existed they would generally be picked up. On the basis of this and the fact that no such correlation was ever discovered in the reference class of prior vaccines we can conclude that the probability of vaccines like the COVID-19 vaccine being dependent on the color of paint is very small. 

The second type of reasoning, which happens to be much more straightforward in this situation, is what the physicist David Deutsch calls “reasoning from our best explanation of the world”. According to the philosopher of science Karl Popper, we should reason using our explanatory theories of the world which have survived the most rounds of attempted falsification, and which have the highest degree of falsifiability (this rules out non-testable explanations like “vaccines work via invisible ghosts”). In more prosaic terms, this simply means reasoning using the best scientific theories which make predictions in the domain under consideration. We note that our best theories of vaccine function do not anywhere depend on the color of paint in the room. Instead they depend on things like T-cells, binding affinities of molecules, the concentrations of certain molecules in the body, etc. So, we decide that the vaccine is safe regardless of the color of paint in the room where it is administered. 

Both of these forms of reasoning are valid and both are foundational to science, rationality, and human progress. Both of these types of reasoning can be used to say that vaccines under development are likely to be safe and effective before any data comes in. It’s why a reporter who interviewed numerous top scientists reported that they all told him that “they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along.” Yet instead of proudly sharing this important knowledge with the public, we rarely hear scientists say publicly that they expect the vaccines are safe and efficacious. Instead, they hedge, saying “we have to wait until the data comes in”. This is unethical both on Kantian grounds (they are lying) and on consequentialist grounds, because it leads to undue caution and the public being afraid of vaccines. 

Unfortunately, there is little incentive for scientists to tell the truth about what the likely risks and benefits are with new vaccines before full Phase III data is published. If, for instance, one or two people suffer severe side effects in a Phase III trial (which is rare, but has happened) a scientist who said they suspected it was “very safe” might receive harsh criticism for making a premature assessment. On the other hand, the same scientist will get no pushback for saying “we need to wait for data to make a judgement”. Indeed, they are likely to even be praised for exhibiting the virtues of “caution, prudence, and scientific skepticism”. Moreover, under no scenario should someone be allowed to get a vaccine until the full data comes in, even though it’s fine to allow people to sign up for studies where they have a 50-50 chance of getting the vaccine. Not very consistent, eh?

As US Transhumanist Party Chairman Gennady Stolyarov II has described in detail in an an earlier publication on this site, all of this is the result of a deeply flawed and deadly ethical principle called the precautionary principle, which unfortunately many people have fallen under the sway of. The principle originates in the environmentalist movement but is widely applied in medicine, and was instrumental in decisions such as the Bush administration’s ban on stem-cell research and decisions to ban life-saving GMO technologies such as golden rice. It has been formulated to varying degrees in several different ways. The United Nations World Charter for Nature (1982) issued one version of the principle, stating: 

Activities which are likely to pose a significant risk to nature shall be preceded by an exhaustive examination; their proponents shall demonstrate that expected benefits outweigh potential damage to nature, and where potential adverse effects are not fully understood, the activities should not proceed. 

The principle starts off OK but dives into serious error in the last line. The issue is that the precautionary principle only focuses on the potential adverse effects of proceeding and ignores the potential adverse effects of not proceeding, i.e., the effects of delay. As should now be clear in the case of the COVID-19 vaccines, not proceeding can sometimes be much more deadly than proceeding! There is often a high but unclear risk to not proceeding, and a low but unclear risk to not proceeding. (Picture two probability distributions, both wide (unclear) but one with a mean that is distinctly higher than the other). That’s where the precautionary principle throws expected utility theory (cost-benefit analysis) out and says we cannot proceed. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Freeman Dyson stated the issue as follows: 

“The Precautionary Principle says that if some course of action carries even a remote chance of irreparable damage to the ecology, then you shouldn’t do it, no matter how great the possible advantages of the action may be. You are not allowed to balance costs against benefits when deciding what to do.” — Freeman Dyson, Report from the 2001 World Economic Forum

Imagine an alternative world in which our society and government was not under the sway of the precautionary principle. In this alternative world, scientists would give their truthful assessment of new vaccines to the public, stating that they are likely safe and effective, using one or both of the reasoning methods mentioned above. In such a world, given the clear potential harms of inaction, the public would be allowed to purchase new vaccines if they wanted, if the companies manufacturing them were comfortable doing so, and if they were fully informed prior to their decision that they were taking an unapproved product that carries potential risks but also potential benefits. Initially, only a few people would purchase the vaccines, perhaps on the basis of Phase I results. These would be folks like those who injected themselves with a DIY vaccine over the summer, and the tens of thousands who were willing to participate in clinical trials as early as last spring. Companies would be incentivized to survey those who took the vaccine and collect self-reported data on their outcomes, which is very cheap and easy to do. After a few months going by without any of those people keeling over and dying, and with very few (likely none) of those people getting hospitalized for COVID-19, more people would feel comfortable getting the vaccine. Things would quickly snowball, with more and more people becoming willing to get the vaccine. During this time the distribution system would have been stood up and become operational, with on-site stockpiles building up ahead of the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization (currently, the FDA does not allow hospitals to stockpile unapproved vaccines ahead of their EUA). To present this case in its strongest form, in a future post I plan to estimate how many lives would have been saved, assuming many vaccines had become available to those who wanted them last March or August. However, I hope it’s easy to see that thousands of lives would have been saved in this alternative world.  

For more on the transhumanist alternative to the precautionary principle, the proactionary principle, see Max More’s excellent book chapter as well as the Wikipedia article and references therein.

 

Reject the Deadly Precautionary Principle: Approve All COVID-19 Vaccines Immediately! – Article by Gennady Stolyarov II

Reject the Deadly Precautionary Principle: Approve All COVID-19 Vaccines Immediately! – Article by Gennady Stolyarov II

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Gennady Stolyarov II

It should be a mild relief that vaccination efforts against COVID-19 are finally beginning in the United States, but they are beginning eleven months too late, while the pandemic surrounds us and most of us must wait months longer to receive vaccinations. Over 300,000 Americans have already died needlessly and preventably from COVID-19; hundreds of thousands more are likely to die in the coming months, even though the exact same vaccine from Moderna that is even today still undergoing Food and Drug Administration (FDA) review already existed in its current form by January 13, 2020. As David Wallace-Wells writes in New York Magzine, in an article entitled “We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time” (dated December 7, 2020):

You may be surprised to learn that of the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just two days after the genetic sequence had been made public in an act of scientific and humanitarian generosity that resulted in China’s Yong-Zhen Zhang’s being temporarily forced out of his lab. In Massachusetts, the Moderna vaccine design took all of one weekend. It was completed before China had even acknowledged that the disease could be transmitted from human to human, more than a week before the first confirmed coronavirus case in the United States. By the time the first American death was announced a month later, the vaccine had already been manufactured and shipped to the National Institutes of Health for the beginning of its Phase I clinical trial. This is — as the country and the world are rightly celebrating — the fastest timeline of development in the history of vaccines. It also means that for the entire span of the pandemic in this country, which has already killed more than 250,000 Americans, we had the tools we needed to prevent it.

As has been demonstrated time and again during this pandemic, scientists and doctors have been the true heroes in their rapid and immensely creative responses, whereas institutions and their processes have failed massively, and our egregiously broken society and culture have precipitated abysmal mass-scale reactions and behaviors as well. But the major reason why now almost 300,000 Americans died who did not need to die at all, is the Precautionary Principle – a cornerstone of contemporary “bioethics” which is, in fact, deeply unethical. The Precautionary Principle is the fundamental reason why new medical treatments, including vaccines, are required in the United States to undergo extensive safety and efficacy testing before they are allowed to be provided to patients, even willing patients who may knowingly accept the risks of experimental medicines. Essentially, unless safety and efficacy can be rigorously demonstrated first, along with a sufficient lack of adverse consequences, adherents of the Precautionary Principle believe that no action should be taken to implement an innovation. Those who espouse the Precautionary Principle completely ignore, of course, the costs and risks of inaction – which, in the case of a global pandemic, can be measured in more than 1.62 million lives worldwide, but which have also resulted in far greater numbers of deaths from more “routine” otherwise terminal illnesses, whose victims might have been saved by new treatments whose approval the FDA delayed, sometimes for a decade or more while billions of dollars were spent on hyper-expensive efficacy testing.

While laudable efforts were made in the United States to greatly accelerate the review timeframe for COVID-19 vaccines – hence the now well-known “Operation Warp Speed” – those efforts did not come in time for the hundreds of thousands who died and the hundreds of millions who now live in fear of death every day as the pandemic’s spread has become all-encompassing. Cutting the approval timeline from the typical unconscionable 4-5 years to 9 months is an improvement, but not nearly enough. Much more should have been done right away. Approval for the vaccines should have been granted as soon as they were developed, and instead of putting review roadblocks in the way, governments should have actively aided in vaccine production and distribution of all serious candidate vaccines from day one.

While New York Magazine’s David Wallace-Wells made the seemingly obligatory (during this tragically precautionary era) disclaimer that “To be clear, I don’t want to suggest that Moderna should have been allowed to roll out its vaccine in February or even in May, when interim results from its Phase I trial demonstrated its basic safety” (and Wallace-Wells still faced considerable vitriol for the quite modest observations he sought to make) – I do want to suggest exactly that. Indeed, I would go further and insist that it was a moral imperative to approve and facilitate the mass production and distribution of vaccines such as Moderna’s mRNA-1273 to willing members of the general population as soon as those vaccines were available.

Transhumanists reject the Precautionary Principle and instead follow the Proactionary Principle, which, per the description of Max More (Extropy Institute, 2004), “urges all parties to actively take into account all the consequences of an activity – good as well as bad – while apportioning precautionary measures to the real threats we face, in the context of an appreciation of the crucial role played by technological innovation and humanity’s evolving ability to adapt to and remedy any undesirable side-effects.” The Proactionary Principle does not ignore the potential for adverse consequences of an activity, but recognizes that there are situations when the benefits can greatly outweigh any potential adverse effects.

Imagine how, in an alternate history, a Transhumanist administration would have dealt with the COVID-19 crisis. Suppose, for instance, that Zoltan Istvan had been elected President in 2016 and thus was the President who faced the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Or suppose that Charlie Kam, the U.S. Transhumanist Party (USTP) Presidential nominee in 2020, had held the country’s highest executive office. The U.S. Transhumanist Party Platform contains 21 sections specifically addressing COVID-19 responses – proposals that were adopted by USTP members in late March 2020, and would have saved most of the lives of the COVID-19 victims had they been expeditiously implemented by governments. These proposals, indeed, are applications of the Proactionary Principle to the COVID-19 pandemic. Section CIII of the USTP Platform specifically states that “The United States Transhumanist Party supports the rapid research into effective cures and vaccines for COVID-19 and the harnessing of synergies from this research to also develop a cure for the common cold and more effective vaccination against influenza. Such research should proceed with no barriers, subject to the researchers’ expression of ethical intentions, and any regulations or processes that would delay the progress of such research should be immediately waived or repealed. In the effort to accelerate progress in this field, the United States Transhumanist Party advocates for an immediate $100 billion funding package for the rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine, with all volunteers being accepted into human trials as soon as practicable.”

This is exactly what would have been done by a Transhumanist administration with the Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, and any other vaccines, including do-it-yourself experiments such as that undertaken by Josiah Zayner. The Transhumanist administration would have asked the vaccine developer one question: “Do you intend to apply this candidate vaccine in an ethical manner when offering it to the general public?” After giving an affirmative answer to that question, the vaccine developer would have the full legal right to test, give away, or sell its product to any volunteers capable of giving informed consent – provided that the recipients understood that the vaccine was experimental and had not passed the typical safety and/or efficacy tests. Receiving any vaccine would always remain entirely voluntary. Individuals who were uncertain or concerned about side effects – or even motivated by pseudoscientific, anti-scientific, or religious objections – would maintain the right not to get vaccinated. However, those who chose to get vaccinated would be shown clearly and quickly to have far lower incidence of COVID-19, and the statistical disparity in infection rates between the vaccinated and the un-vaccinated would grow too large in just a few months for reasonable people to ignore. Those who become vaccinated would be free to lead their everyday lives and participate in economic activities as usual, and massive disruptions to the economy and to people’s livelihoods would have been completely avoidable. The multifaceted advantages of vaccination under this approach would become abundantly clear in a relatively short time.

Testing would not be eliminated by the Transhumanist administration. Indeed, it would be accelerated and fully funded via the $100 billion emergency package (and likely via other resources as well), so that vaccine developers would need to pay absolutely nothing out of pocket for any compliance with testing protocols. However, testing would occur in parallel with mass distribution of the vaccines, and as much data as possible would be collected from vaccine recipients in the general population, to greatly augment the samples of tested patients. If any specific side effects manifested themselves in a statistically significant portion of the population, protocols for administering the vaccine would be adjusted in real time. For example, if a specific group of people were found to be particularly vulnerable to certain side effects, members of that group would quickly receive additional disclosures and warnings and would be able to make informed decisions in light of this information.

Could there conceivably be adverse side effects or even deaths of certain patients under this approach of mass distribution in parallel with testing? Of course, that is a possibility. However, the scale of such side effects and deaths would surely be orders of magnitude less than the all-encompassing devastation that the current sequential review-and-approval process has allowed to happen. So far nobody has died specifically from any COVID-19 vaccine. At least 1.62 million people in the world have died from COVID-19. Numerous others have died because of the fallout of the restrictive measures taken to contain the spread of COVID-19. Even if the vaccines had been far more dangerous than they actually are, it is absolutely impossible for them to have caused anywhere near the death toll inflicted by the disease itself and the societal havoc that it and responses to it have wreaked. This basic insight, whose evidence is all around us, is precisely what the Precautionary Principle misses. By placing all of the burden of proof on the innovation, the Precautionary Principle gives a free pass to the wantonly murderous status quo. Inaction is not safety. Inaction is quite frequently the greatest danger – and at no time is that truer than during a global pandemic. If we do nothing, any of a vast array of perils will befall us rather quickly.

The United States has already lost more people to COVID-19 than it had to all but one of its historical wars. The novel coronavirus is the enemy here to be sure, but the Precautionary Principle is an even more pernicious and insidious foe. The Precautionary Principle is responsible for the hundreds of thousands of American dead just as much as the novel coronavirus itself, since it prevented an implementation of an existing off-the-shelf solution that could have saved the vast majority of their lives. Every war in history has resulted in unacceptable death tolls because of fundamentally flawed premises – ideas and practices that brought about the war because people accepted them as commonplace and justified. Slavery, religious intolerance, jingoistic nationalism, and totalitarianism have all stemmed from deep moral errors that caused colossal loss of life – and fortunately most of humanity has recognized the great evil that these notions entail and has resoundingly rejected them. The Precautionary Principle, when implemented in institutions that have the power to make life-or-death decisions, is in that same league of moral errors; it will be remembered decades and centuries hence as the greatest destroyer of lives in our epoch.

How much senseless loss of life needs to occur before we recognize that our institutions, based on the Precautionary Principle, are wantonly negligent in allowing our fellow humans to die and are still withholding life-saving solutions from them? It is time to reject the Precautionary Principle once and for all and to institute the truly humane policy of allowing all rationally capable individuals to assess the risks and benefits of emerging medical treatments for themselves. This would not only save colossal numbers of lives in the immediate term, but also greatly accelerate medical discovery and technological progress – since innovators would be able to obtain data rapidly and iterate upon their approaches. The arrival of cures for cancer, dementia, diabetes, and biological aging itself will depend on how free medical innovators are to offer their treatments and how free patients are to accept them. Extensive and expensive pre-distribution review processes kill many more people than they save. End them now!

Gennady Stolyarov II is the Chairman of the United States Transhumanist Party. 

Elon Musk and Merging With Machines – Article by Edward Hudgins

Elon Musk and Merging With Machines – Article by Edward Hudgins

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Edward Hudgins

Elon Musk seems to be on board with the argument that, as a news headline sums up, “Humans must merge with machines or become irrelevant in AI age.” The PayPal co-founder and SpaceX and Tesla Motors innovator has, in the past, expressed concern about deep AI. He even had a cameo in Transcendence, a Johnny Depp film that was a cautionary tale about humans becoming machines.

Has Musk changed his views? What should we think?

Human-machine symbiosis

Musk said in a speech this week at the opening of Tesla in Dubai warned governments to “Make sure researchers don’t get carried away — scientists get so engrossed in their work they don’t realize what they are doing. But he also said that “Over time I think we will probably see a closer merger of biological intelligence and digital intelligence.” In techno-speak he told listeners that “Some high-bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence.” Imagine calculating a rocket trajectory by just thinking about it since your brain and the Artificial Intelligence with which it links are one!

This is, of course, the vision that is the goal of Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, co-founders of Singularity University. It is the Transhumanist vision of philosopher Max More. It is a vision of exponential technologies that could even help us live forever.

AI doubts?

But in the past, Musk has expressed doubts about AI. In July 2015, he signed onto “Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers,” which warned that such devices could “select and engage targets without human intervention.” Yes, out-of-control killer robots! But it concluded that “We believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways … Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea…” The letter was also signed by Diamandis, one of the foremost AI proponents. So it’s fair to say that Musk was simply offering reasonable caution.

In Werner Herzog’s documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of a Connected World, Musk explained that “I think that the biggest risk is not that the AI will develop a will of its own but rather that it will follow the will of people that establish its utility function.” He offered, “If you were a hedge fund or private equity fund and you said, ‘Well, all I want my AI to do is maximize the value of my portfolio,’ then the AI could decide … to short consumer stocks, go long defense stocks, and start a war.” We wonder if the AI would appreciate that in the long-run, cities in ruins from war would harm the portfolio? In any case, Musk again seems to offer reasonable caution rather than blanket denunciations.

But in his Dubai remarks, he still seemed reticent. Should he and we be worried?

Why move ahead with AI?

Exponential technologies already have revolutionized communications and information and are doing the same to our biology. In the short-term, human-AI interfaces, genetic engineering, and nanotech all promise to enhance our human capacities, to make us smarter, quicker of mind, healthier, and long-lived.

In the long-term Diamandis contends that “Enabled with [brain-computer interfaces] and AI, humans will become massively connected with each other and billions of AIs (computers) via the cloud, analogous to the first multicellular lifeforms 1.5 billion years ago. Such a massive interconnection will lead to the emergence of a new global consciousness, and a new organism I call the Meta-Intelligence.”

What does this mean? If we are truly Transhuman, will we be soulless Star Trek Borgs rather than Datas seeking a better human soul? There has been much deep thinking about such question but I don’t know and neither does anyone else.

In the 1937 Ayn Rand short novel Anthem, we see an impoverished dystopia governed by a totalitarian elites. We read that “It took fifty years to secure the approval of all the Councils for the Candle, and to decide on the number needed.”

Proactionary!

Many elites today are in the throes of the “precautionary principle.” It holds that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing harm … the burden of proof that it is not harmful falls on those proposing the action or policy. Under this “don’t do anything for the first time” illogic, humans would never have used fire, much less candles.

By contrast, Max More offers the “proactionary principle.” It holds that we should assess risks according to available science, not popular perception, account for both risks the costs of opportunities foregone, and protect people’s freedom to experiment, innovate, and progress.

Diamandis, More and, let’s hope, Musk are the same path to a future we can’t predict but which we know can be beyond our most optimistic dreams. And you should be on that path too!

Explore:

Edward Hudgins, “Public Opposition to Biotech Endangers Your Life and Health“. July 28, 2016.

Edward Hudgins, “The Robots of Labor Day“. September 2, 2015.

Edward Hudgins, “Google, Entrepreneurs, and Living 500 Years“. March 12, 2015.

Dr. Edward Hudgins is the director of advocacy for The Atlas Society and the editor and author of several books on politics and government policy. He is also a member of the U.S. Transhumanist Party.