Comment by olliej

This is blaming the FDA for lack of treatment, not the recentness of the treatment.

That all the MRNA treatments they refer to are in trials tells you everything you need to know: we don't know which work, we don't know how effective they are, and we don't know what they work on.

It is possible to enroll in trials for these treatments, but as they say they "may" be denied as they're so far along. But that's what you want: if a trial takes someone on who would be highly likely to die even if the treatment works then depending on the trial size it's possible that that one patient might skew the results such that the treatment is denied, or alternatively, another person who applied for the trial gets denied even though they had a higher likelihood of survival.

I can understand it being incredibly hard for this guy, but we have been through the alternative:

* Snake oil treatments: drugs that do nothing but bankrupt people

* Actively harmful treatments: drugs that literally make things worse, while bankrupting people

* Paid trial scams: you can pay to be part of a trial, which immediately allows for the above two despite a regulatory environment that ostensibly requires trials.

etc

Things like the FDA exist in response to prior actions, and once they've existed for a while, people forget that the only reason that they don't seem necessary, is because they are there. Much like the "unnecessary" financial regulations that were removed, and immediately resulted in banks creating the Great Recession.

Hence, it is not possible for the FDA to create a "patients can be 'treated' with untested treatments" loophole that is not trivially exploitable by the kinds of people that resulted in the FDA existing in the first place.