FDA — Blog — Healy Chen

We're in the endgame now

Late last week, the FDA gave emergency authorization to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine. This is great news, one that that provides a bit of hope and a proverbial light at the end of this strange tunnel. It’s just a shame that we as a nation are crashing and burning to get there. Right now, over 3,000 Americans are dying every single day due to COVID complications. San Francisco is back in lockdown, and ICU wards across the country are on the brink. The vaccine that can’t come soon enough has arrived, but it’s fighting the aftermath of a war, rather than a building fire.

I am optimistic for a quick rollout, and for other vaccines to join Pfizer’s relatively soon. That said, there are still many more months to go before we start our descent back to normalcy. I’m afraid we haven’t yet crest the wave. A friend of mine that works in the health industry says she personally doesn’t expect to the get the vaccine until April of next year. It will likely be well after that for me, a healthy person in his 30s, working in a non-essential job. I took the New York Times’ “Find Your Place in the Vaccine Line”: 260 million Americans, and half of San Francisco, are ahead of me

What I am saying is that while the vaccine approval is absolutely good news, we shouldn’t get complacent. The coronavirus saga is far from over, though we can take solace that the end is in sight.

That means Christmas is and should be cancelled. I didn’t blame people for gathering for Thanksgiving after a long and arduous year, but do you really need to get together again after less than a month? I think if you saw family and friends during Thanksgiving, it’s only rational and right that you don’t do so for Christmas. The hospitals are already at capacity; the vaccine rollout won’t be quick enough to stem the rise in cases if people gather for Christmas in significant numbers.

Honestly though, I’m not expecting any collective breakthrough. This country has too much freedom, not enough selflessness.

Buying contact lenses shouldn't be this hard

America: land of the free, home of ardent individualism, and yet why on earth are we unable to buy contact lenses without a valid prescription? Do the rule-makers at the FDA think that I would willingly put an incorrect lens into my eyeballs? I’m really not sure what the prescription requirement is suppose to accomplish (no such laws exist anywhere else in the developed world that I could find), other than make the process of procuring contacts more difficult than necessary.

This wouldn’t be a problem if my insurance carrier covered yearly contact lens exams - mine only pays for one biyearly. Since prescriptions are only valid for one year, it puts me in a sort of limbo situation during the second year. What I usually do is right before the prescription expires, I reorder a large enough amount to cover me until the next exam that my insurance will cover. In years past, I’ve even gone as far as buying a two-year supply, just to avoid going in to see the optometrist.

Because the fact is, my prescription has not change at all for the past half decade, and given the option I much prefer to keep ordering the same contacts in perpetuity until that point when I can physical see a deterioration. As the cliche goes, time is money, and heading to the eye doctor requires a few hours that I would rather allocate towards something more important (like writing on this blog, haha.) It’s unfortunate then the laws in America is so strict; I mean, how and why exactly does an eye prescription expire anyways?

Nevertheless, the problem of not being able to order lenses online without a non-expired prescription became acute for me a few weeks back. During the procedure of switching to a new pair of lenses, I realized my reserve supply of contacts was not going to last me until the next eye exam. Due to health and sanitation reasons, I was adamant in not stretching the biweekly replacement cycle, so that meant I had to find a way to order contact lenses pseudo illegally.

Thanks to wonders of international commerce, it turns out shops in countries that don’t have the draconian restriction can and are willing to ship lenses to the United States. For sure there’s a comparative premium over the prices at online shops here in the States, but that’s a delta I must pay this time because otherwise I will run out of contact lenses. I placed an order with a Vancouver based company called Fresh Lens, and the product arrived yesterday correctly and as advertised.

A small crisis averted, I would say.