Tag: pharma

Trump appoints former director of company researching vaccines to head Federal program to find vaccine! Huh? Wha?

1 Comment


Trump, Dr Moncef Slaoui – AP Photo/Alex Brandon

The former pharma executive tapped by President Donald Trump to lead the federal government’s hunt for a COVID-19 vaccine has more than $10 million in stock options in one of the companies receiving federal funding.

Dr Moncef Slaoui, a Belgian-American, was this week named Chief Scientist for Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” which aims to develop a working vaccine as fast as possible.

In order to take up the position, Slaoui resigned his role on the board of directors for Moderna Inc….Slaoui has 155,438 stock options in Moderna. The stake is worth $10,366,000 at Moderna’s current share price, $66.69 at the time of publication…

After news of Slaoui’s holding was published, former presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren said that Slaoui “must divest immediately.”

I’ll second that emotion.

Moderna has been one of the leading candidates to win the COVID-19 vaccine derby for quite a spell. I have to admit my dinky retirement account had shares of MRNA for a while. If I had the insider connections that Slaoui has I probably never would have sold them. :-] But, then, that’s the kind of creepy stuff that fits Trump like a cheap suit.

Big Pharma does love our money

4 Comments

Leading drug makers rang in the new year by once again raising list prices of their drugs—this time on more than 250 of them, according to an analysis reported by Reuters…

The larger price tags applied to a range of medications, from blood thinners to cancer therapies and treatments for respiratory conditions, HIV, arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.

Nearly all of the increases were below 10 percent, according to the 3 Axis analysis. So far, the median price increase is around 5 percent, though additional price increases could still be announced.

Don’t worry. They’re not doing themselves any harm. As of November, the 2019 inflation rate was 2.1 percent.

The Justice Department Abandons the Law, the Constitution

1 Comment

❝ A continuing challenge of covering the three-ring circus that is the Trump administration is not letting the outrageous antics and statements of the president and his allies distract attention from the outrageous policies being implemented on his watch.

One example, unfolding right now in the midst of the president’s various rhetorical wars — with our G-7 partners, with the special counsel, with his own attorney general — is the administration’s remarkable move not to defend the constitutionality of key parts of the Affordable Care Act…

❝ This is crazy. Nobody imagined — not members of Congress who happily gutted the individual mandate, not President Trump in signing the new law, not members of the public who wanted to learn about what the tax change meant for them — that the consequence was also to eviscerate perhaps the most popular part of the health care law, the protection for those with pre-existing conditions.

You might have thought if that was going to happen, it would have come up at some point in the public debate. You might have thought it would receive some notice from the president, who in his first address to a joint session of Congress proclaimed that it was his priority to “ensure that Americans with pre-existing conditions have access to coverage,” and who signed the tax law without any peep about this provision’s supposed unconstitutionality.

I wouldn’t say “crazy” and I’m not surprised. I expect nothing less than absolute allegiance to the most corrupt ideology of America’s class rulers. In this instance, Trumps/Sessions lifetime of butt-kissing of the whole medical-industrial complex.

From insurance companies to Big Pharma, there is no masquerade of new evidence or revelation. The corruption of these two politicians has always been as self-evident as their racism, snobbery, sexual hangups. You pick out something disgusting and backwards about American politics there’s a good chance they’re standing in line for a hug.

World’s largest investment group says “Coal is dead’ and oil faces “peak demand”

Leave a comment


Of course, you could invest on Trump’s advice

❝ “Coal is dead,” Jim Barry, the global head of BlackRock’s infrastructure investment group, explained in a recent interview.

BlackRock, the world’s largest investment group, with $5 trillion in assets — more than the world’s largest banks — has begun to bet on clean energy. Why? “The thing that has changed fundamentally the whole picture is that renewables have gotten so cheap,” said Barry…

❝ President Donald Trump famously campaigned on restoring coal jobs, and has continued to reiterate that commitment as president, but the economic reality makes that a futile effort.

The U.S. alone has shuttered 40 gigawatts of coal plants since 2000.

“These [coal plants] will not reopen whatever anything President Trump does,” as Bloomberg New Energy Finance recently explained, “nor do we see much appetite among investors for ploughing money into U.S. coal extraction — stranded asset risk will trump rhetoric.”

The economic reality is that cheap fracked gas and plummeting prices for clean energy has squeezed both coal production and coal consumption to levels not seen for decades.

❝ Coal isn’t the only fossil fuel at risk. Because of the rapidly improving performance and cost of batteries, Barry is “bullish” on electric vehicles. And as a result, he is bearish on oil demand, noting that “there was always this historic view on oil about peak supply but it’s about peak demand being an equal dynamic.”

In short, the smart money is headed away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy.

Not that any of this means much to our state and national politicians. Smart money doesn’t concern them – just money. That’s what controls elections in our much-vaunted Republic. And, for now, the corporations most willing to provide funds to our political hacks are the ones who get representation.

The people? Looks like we’re still last in line.

Clinical trials tend to be positive when Docs get industry dollar$

1 Comment

❝ When study investigators have financial relationships with pharmaceutical companies, clinical trial results are more likely to turn up positive…

In a review of 190 papers on randomized controlled trials, taking money from industry was significantly associated with favorable trial results in a fully adjusted model…Salomeh Keyhani, MD, of the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues reported online…

Their findings suggest bias in the evidence base, Keyhani said. Practicing clinicians “should be concerned enough to employ healthy skepticism while reviewing the results of any one trial,” she told MedPage Today.

❝ The paper makes the distinction between a study being funded by a drug company, and investigators who have financial relationships with those companies.

Researchers with financial relationships can influence the study results in less obvious ways, such as study design and analytic approach, but Keyhani noted that the current research is a “cross-sectional study so any interpretation of the findings should be made with caution.”…

Gasp! Who’da thunk it.

RTFA for methodology – and more.

Life expectancy in the US diminished for the first time in decades

Leave a comment

❝ Last year, we learned about a troubling trend in the US population. Death rates were creeping up for middle-age white people, particularly women. The researchers who identified the problem in a blockbuster study attributed the change to economic struggles and accidental poisonings — mainly caused by prescription painkiller and heroin use.

But a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a more disturbing finding: It’s not just middle-age white folks who are dying sooner — it’s everyone.

Between 2014 and 2015, death rates crept up for the entire population, and the causes are more complex than the oft-cited rise in opioid use…

1) Mortality is increasing for the entire population

❝ …The change is small, but it represents a trend not seen in decades, said Jiaquan Xu, an epidemiologist with the National Center for Health Statistics at the CDC.

“In 1999, the [age-adjusted death rate] increased, but the last time life expectancy decreased for the total population was in 1993,” Xu said. “After that, it sometimes decreased for specific age groups, but not the total population.”…

2) Eight of the 10 leading causes of death increased in 2015

❝ In 2015, the rates of eight of the top 10 leading causes of death in America increased — including heart disease, chronic lower respiratory diseases, unintentional injuries, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, kidney disease, and suicide. (The trends for flu and pneumonia didn’t change.) According to Xu, it’s unusual to see a negative trend for so many health measures.

“Mortality is rising across a wide variety of illnesses,” wrote Dartmouth health economist Jonathan Skinner…”so it’s not just the opioid epidemic. And as a consequence, it’s not entirely easy to figure out what to do about it.”

The only outlier on the top-10 list was cancer, which has seen its death rate drop by 1.7 percent in the last year. That was no surprise: The cancer death rate has actually been declining since the early 1990s. These changes are mainly attributed gains in early detection and treatment advances, as well as declines in the smoking rate.

3) Whites are suffering — but there’s still a big black-white health gap

❝ According to the latest data, both black men and white men saw their death rates increase by about the same amount. (White females saw a bigger increase in mortality than black females: The death rate increased by 1.6 percent for white women while it stayed the same for black women.)

This is part of a larger trend. The gap between black and white mortality has narrowed in recent years. But in absolute terms, African Americans have worse health outcomes and a shorter life expectancy than white Americans…

“That life expectancy hasn’t risen for any of the groups — black, white, Hispanic, male, female — is concerning,” Skinner said.

❝ What’s more, we’re entering a time where funding and political will is focused on medicine to cure people and not on public health to prevent illness before people get sick. In particular, the Senate passed the 21st Century Cures Act — the biggest health reform bill since Obamacare. The legislation promises to bring medical cures to patients faster. But nearly half of the funds for the legislation are going to be paid for cutting $3.5 billion from public health efforts like immunizations and obesity and tobacco prevention.

Congress cares about cure, of course. Last time I checked, the biggest contributor to national political campaigns in the United States was Big Pharma. They’re pretty much always part of the top vote buyers. And Congress members already have socialized medicine.

West Virginia Attorney General accuses Epi-Pen’s owner of Medicaid fraud

3 Comments

The state of West Virginia is investigating Mylan, the maker of EpiPen, a life-saving autoinjector used to treat severe allergic reactions, for possible anti-trust violations, including skyrocketing price increases.

Attorney General Patrick Morrisey announced the fraud investigation Tuesday against the company that was founded in his state. Mylan’s chief executive, Heather Bresch, is the daughter of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat.

The state filed documents in Kanawha Circuit Court to force Mylan to provide documents related to its EpiPen. Morrisey issued Mylan a subpoena on Aug. 26. The company initially agreed to cooperate, but has since failed to respond to the majority of the subpoena…

The drug maker, which has a manufacturing plant near Morgantown, W.Va., acquired the rights to the drug in 2007, when it cost about $57 and it has since that time raised the price to $500 for a two-pack.

The court filing documents the price increases as well as “failed attempts to introduce an EpiPen competitor, litigation over intellectual property and dominance Mylan has over the epinephrine auto injector market,” according to the release.

The subpoena also asks about rebates Mylan paid to participate in the state’s Medicaid program…The petition suggests such conduct, if proven, could subject Mylan to a potential Medicaid fraud action under state law…

Hope the greedy creeps at the top of Mylan get what they deserve.