Should have never considered letting them restart in the first place but assuming they actually do keep the pause going, it's better late than never...
Our Covid Response
- Thread starter gorfias
- Start date
Should have never considered letting them restart in the first place but assuming they actually do keep the pause going, it's better late than never...
The pause is now officially extended through May 1, 2022.
Pause on student loan payments is extended through May 1
The Biden administration is extending a student loan moratorium that has allowed tens of millions of Americans to put off debt payments during the pandemic.
apnews.com
Thank you for your sympathy.
I made this post for one reason. I'm one of those people where Covid isn't a big deal. It doesn't affect me nearly as much as anyone else. I was more annoyed at my inability to taste and worried that it might not come back.
But that still doesn't mean I can't spread it. My mother died before I actually got Covid (March for her, May for me). And I was 300 miles away from her.
But my God, I don't think I would be on this planet now if I knew I had Covid and passed it to her. I would have ended myself. I can't imagine that guilt.
So I will line up for every shot. I will wear masks. I will avoid gatherings. Covid was a mild inconvenience to me, but that doesn't mean it isn't anything else than a death sentence to someone else.
Is this the point I remind everyone the Obama administration requested budget cuts to the NIH and CDC for seven years straight, and diverted funding and expertise from them to his dumbass pandemic response team that didn't actually do anything but touch up the language of national health emergency action plans that had existed since the Eisenhower administration? To cover his administration's ass after the '09 H1N1 clusterfuck?
While not actually restocking national strategic PPE reserves, or putting forth the modicum of effort it would have required to audit PPE expiry dates? Did we just collectively forget as a people, that when the federal government did have to release inventory from our strategic reserve it turned out the inventory hadn't been audited and restocked since the Bush administration?
At a guess, Bush Jr, 1st term, during the Anthrax scares... although that would imply a level of competence from that administration so I'm not overly confident in my guess.
Depending on how you define "we", we did, judging from all the meme pictures juxtaposing Obama talking about pandemic preparedness with Trump's dismissal of the critique of his performance.
Dubya's second term, to be precise.
Long story short, it used to be called the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile and was a Cold War relic that was largely left by the wayside in the '70s. Clinton revived it, but it was extremely limited and small in scope, and intended to counter CBRN warfare. Indeed, 9/11 and the anthrax scares were the Bush administration's impetus for renaming it the Strategic National Stockpile, and massively expanding it to include supplies and PPE for pandemic emergency response; the '05 hurricane season was pretty much its proof of concept as it was one of the bigger success stories in an otherwise bleak tale of emergency response and management.
As a result, Congress in a rare act of competence gave the Bush admin a blank check to up-size the SNS to its heart's content in '06. And the admin did.
Then the Obama admin bumblefucked around seven or eight major disasters, the '09 flu season being only the first, not replenishing it while giving SNS funding to pharmaceutical companies producing orphan drugs. Granted those orphan drugs were for use in the ebola and zika outbreaks, but even then the broader use and therefore higher ROI would have been in replenishing stockpiles of general use pharmaceuticals and PPE as we knew then as well as we know now. Democrats have been trying to blame the tea party for this shit, but the fact remains most of those cuts were White House (not Congressional Republican) offers, and the administration's use of what they had, was of rather dubious wisdom.
Obama talked about a lot of things. He did diddly fuck about most of them. The best-case scenario on that lump of shit was that it lured the American populace into a false sense of security, and gave them an easy scapegoat when the chucklefuck that replaced him proved himself to be precisely who we all already knew he was.
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So, we have this shortage of monoclonal anitbodies. Joe Rogan thinks its because of the profit motive of Big Pharma.... despite those same companies are the ones making the anitbodies.
Also, vaxxed people are jealous and want others vaxxed
As to the Bush comments, Biden is currently about as effective as Obama as an administration. If you haven't noticed, it means they aren't doing anything. Whinge about being obstructed and Machin this, Sinema that all you want. It's Biden's failure as he's top dog. Trump did more to fix up messes than Biden. (He just generally made things worse, so its not necessarily a positive.)
Remember when the GOP will come to their senses after 6 mths? Funny stuff
While Bush does fuck up frequently, he did some good things... Unfortunately more of the former than latter but it certainly wins in some areas. Meanwhile Trump makes a decision based on a gut feeling and then makes everyone else bad because they used logic and evidence
Also, vaxxed people are jealous and want others vaxxed
As to the Bush comments, Biden is currently about as effective as Obama as an administration. If you haven't noticed, it means they aren't doing anything. Whinge about being obstructed and Machin this, Sinema that all you want. It's Biden's failure as he's top dog. Trump did more to fix up messes than Biden. (He just generally made things worse, so its not necessarily a positive.)
Remember when the GOP will come to their senses after 6 mths? Funny stuff
While Bush does fuck up frequently, he did some good things... Unfortunately more of the former than latter but it certainly wins in some areas. Meanwhile Trump makes a decision based on a gut feeling and then makes everyone else bad because they used logic and evidence
Pakman's straight out his ass on this; Rogan's correct. Pakman literally made the argument as to why he's straight out his ass in the exact same video. One needn't ask themselves why mRNA vaccine research started, why it faltered in the '90s, and why only now was it revived to see precisely how far straight out his ass Pakman really is on this.
Research into mRNA vaccines literally started as a potential form of cancer treatment -- programming the immune system to attack cancer cells. And despite initially-promising results, the research died in the womb because no pharmaceutical company would invest, because chemo and radiation therapy were more profitable.
COVID vaccines are more profitable than monoclonal antibody treatments. Incredibly cheap to manufacture with a high retail price still being under patent (which the US government is defending with intractable inhumanity), and as we're now learning to the detriment of all less effective over time, least of all against better-evolved variants, with the only recourse being more shots. Pharmaceutical companies didn't even have to pay for the R&D, least of all in the US where they contracted with the companies that did develop them (on other countries' dime) for domestic distribution (on the country's dime), ergo socializing risk and cost while privatizing profit in the most picture-perfect (for late-stage capitalism) way possible.
It's the exact same song on infinite repeat we've seen every time in the past, every time there's been a major national health crisis and major health care scandal. Chemo's too profitable to put real dime on curative research for cancer. ART's too profitable to put real dime on curative research for HIV, and it suspiciously until the patent expired on Truvada for its approval for use as PrEP. And even then, Truvada's sold at a 25,000% mark-up from its cost to produce; same could be said for insulin, with its 10,000% mark-up even though the latter's had cost controls finally implemented by the government. And so on, and so on.
Ya really don't need to ask who the current chair of the Senate energy committee is, when that person was seated, and what their spouse does currently, to answer that question. Manchin and Sinema are 100% rotating villains, and this dog and pony show is by design.
They can produce both and profit on both. We are only out of monoclonal anitbodies because everyone's opening up and there are huge spikes everywhere. It's a demand issue.
Now, I want to point out a trend that you pointed to. Many of the treatments that you cited that are profitable are not preventations. They help cure someone with a disease. The vaccine is a preventative. Using your own logic, Big Pharma is incentivised to NOT produce vaccines as this is unprofitable long term. It's why governments got involved in the first place. Big Pharma never would have bothered. Monoclonal anitbodies, on the other hand, is the one that 'cures' you, thus it's got more of an incentive to be produce (chemical therapy is more regular so is incentivised even more.)
Now, with that, a caveat. I don't think Big Pharma have any incentive to increase production of monoclonal anitbodies. It's a short term spike that just helps increase the price of the anitbodies. There isn't really massive government funding that's associated with it that can be used to leverage increases in production. So they won't. They did exact the same thing eariler this year with the vaccine. I wouldn't doubt they are still trying to do it
Except for a few things, which I mentioned in that same post.
1. Pharma companies didn't pay for the R&D. It was paid for by public funding, whether by the US or other countries. Ergo, little to no private capital was invested in their development or production -- the chief argument for pharmaceutical patenting, and the oft-exorbitant pricing after those pharmaceuticals reach the market.
2. Pharma companies aren't paying for distribution. That's being paid for -- once again -- by public funding, at a price mark-up of about 2,000% at least in the US. To "offset" costs pharmaceutical companies never paid in the first place.
3. As we now know, vaccines aren't providing the long-term protection which served as their primary selling point. Their effectiveness is down by half, less for variants, six months post-administration. Hence, the "need" for boosters which are more money in pharmaceutical companies' pockets, especially as they remain protected by patents, and represent a long-term, ongoing, source of revenue. In the big picture -- as in, the societal, logistic, and infrastructural scale -- that's not curative or preventative, that's palliative, and it's exactly the same profitability model as palliative versus curative care on the individual level.
And the big one in terms of why big pharma would have gotten involved anyways,
4. Opportunity cost. Hospitals being overrun with COVID patients and therefore unable to admit patients, or having to triage patients out, for other conditions and procedures is less profitable than the best-available alternative. Oncological care is, by a wide margin, the most profitable for the pharmaceutical industry as a whole; do you think these companies are happy cancer patients are having to delay or cancel care due to COVID? or that they're getting sick and dying of COVID, thereby no longer receiving (and paying for) care?
Just a question. Do you think that Big Pharma didn't make bank off the Ivermectin craze?
Whilst not entirely wrong, this is also misleading.
RNA is very hard to handle because it degrades so easily, and very expensive to handle and maintain. 20-30 years ago, the technology to do this was much less developed. The cost of developing drugs and vaccines tends to be very high. Now consider that a company is a) testing a novel delivery system with additional risk of failure; b) increased development costs, c) increased production costs. Even now, the AZ and J&J vaccines, using more conventional vectors, cost much less than Pfizer and Moderna's mRNA vaccines. And when you say "died in the womb", this just isn't true: there was a major setback when the first mRNA vaccine that got to late stage trials for cancer failed, but nevertheless research continued - hence why we have mRNA vaccines for covid, because people carried on looking at the technology and optimising. mRNA vaccines had not reached a sufficient level of technological maturity, so were more the area of government research grants, academic biotech spin-offs, venture capitalism, and that's the way it always is with new techs. Covid emerged at a point that the technology had reached a higher level of viability and provided a huge test bed to give it a shot.
"Profitable" is not really the right word to use to describe favouring chemo- and radiation therapy. It's more a simple cost-benefit analysis about what is cheaper and more reliable. Nor are mRNA vaccines necessarily ready for use for cancer anyway: all treatments for cancer turn out trickier than we'd like, because "the cure for cancer" has hardly turned out to be simple. They are very unlikely to be some sort of "wonder treatment" and there's every possibility that to bring one to market would be to see it fail in the market compared to a cheaper drug with similar efficacy - if it passed trials in the first place. But covid should drive more interest to the area and establish it as a more mature tech, and then we'll see what happens.
Not much, because ivermectin is off patent and a cheap generic, thus Big Pharma will have made very little. What we could call "Little Pharma" - basically chemical manufacturing companies that mass produce stuff but don't do (much) pharmaceutical R&D - probably made a tidy sum.