And this isn’t the whole problem. We want pharma companies to develop drugs and vaccines for the developing world. But people in the developing world can’t pay as much money as people in the rich world, obviously.
Pharma R&D is expensive: sometimes billions of dollars to research one drug. And for every drug that is successful, there might be 20 that aren’t, and the research into those needs to be paid for as well. That money needs to come from somewhere. At the moment, it comes from patients in rich countries paying sometimes hundreds of dollars for pills that might, individually, cost a few cents to make. The “marginal cost” of each dose is tiny — Jacobin and Oxfam fume that the Covid vaccines, for instance, are priced at many times the manufacturing cost — but that cost needs to cover the “fixed cost” of all the R&D (and marketing, staff costs, etc) you’ve put in.
The ideal solution to this would be selling the drug to everyone at the maximum cost they’re willing to pay. Charge hundreds of dollars in the US, a bit less in the UK and EU, much less in Bulgaria, and almost nothing in Malawi. “If you could perfectly price-discriminate, you’d be charging above the marginal cost in lots of countries, and at the marginal cost for the ones who couldn’t afford more than that,” says Barder.
But that’s not possible. For one thing, if they tried it, people would buy the pills in Malawi for a few cents and fly to the US and sell them at a profit. But more important, Congress or Parliament (and the press) would kick off – why are our citizens paying hundreds of times over the odds? It would be politically impossible to do. So, instead, they make the drug at a single price, which only rich countries can pay, until the sales in those countries have paid off the R&D costs. “Drug companies are just responding to the incentives we’ve set,” says Barder. “They’re doing the thing we asked them to do.”
The temptation, when faced with problems like these, is to argue that big pharma should be destroyed, and all drug research run by publicly funded university laboratories. And maybe that would work – but it’s a huge gamble. Pharma companies do some bad things, but they objectively do make drugs that are hugely valuable to society. And it’s not that publicly funded bodies are free of bad incentives. Academica has huge problems of its own — academics are rewarded for publishing lots of papers, rather than for necessarily finding out true things. Government’s incentives are to remain popular, rather than to fund the most effective things: it would be easy to imagine lots of money going to fund treatments for picturesque children with cancer, rather than for, say, diabetes, even if it were a much less effective way of saving lives.
Still, it might work. At the moment, as Barder says, there’s a tendency to “socialise the losses and privatise the gains”: private companies get rich off research that is often begun in university departments. A starting point might be to pump lots of money into university research, let them bring drugs to market, and see if they can outperform big pharma. What would be crazy, though, is to destroy big pharma first, and then hope that our new nationalised version can keep new drugs coming through.
A more low-key version, says Gulati, might be for academic institutions to become better at demanding equity in pharmaceutical products that are based on their early research. He also suggests that countries such as the UK could negotiate cheaper drugs by offering the NHS as a source of clinical trial subjects — as has happened with Novartis’s new cholesterol drug inclisiran, aka Leqvio. That’s hugely valuable to pharma companies, and it’s something the NHS can do easily and safely, with its huge, centralised, well-protected data systems.
Those ideas might help make drugs cheaper in the UK and other rich countries: getting them to poorer countries is a different problem, with different solutions. Governments could buy out patents — if a firm thinks it can make $10 billion over the next 10 years for its product, we could say that we’ll give them the $10 billion now (or a bit less) in exchange for the rights to make the drug available at cost.
Barder likes one idea, put forward by the late economist Jean Olson Lanjouw. “Her suggestion was,” says Barder, “that if I’m AstraZeneca and I show up at the UK patent office asking for IP protection for a new drug, the patent office should say ‘Well done. Can you tell me what you expect the market value for this drug to be in all 200 countries in the world?’”
Then AstraZeneca or whoever would say “I expect most of my revenue to come from the US, UK, EU and Japan, and relatively little from sub-Saharan Africa and Bangladesh.” And the patent office would grant them a patent, on the condition that they license it for free use in those countries that make up the bottom 2% of their revenue. “It’s like a tax of 2%,” says Barder, “but those countries might well make up 80% of the disease burden.” It hasn’t been tried, as far as I know, but it’s worth thinking about, and it would avoid the problems of Congress or Parliament demanding that the drug be made cheap here — although it would only work for global diseases that affect the rich world as well as the poor — diseases like cancer, or heart disease, or hypertension. It wouldn’t help incentivise research into diseases like malaria or dengue, which have no impact on the rich world. The “advanced market commitment”, which I discussed here, and involves Western governments promising to give pharma companies a bonus for every dose bought by developing nations, might be more effective for that.
Andrey Zarur, the CEO of the biotech firm GreenLight[1. I have done several pieces of paid writing for GreenLight over the last two years], who are producing their own mRNA vaccine for Covid at the moment, comes at the whole thing from a different angle“Pfizer was not designed to make low-cost therapeutics available to every corner of the world,” he says: it’s a 150-year-old company with settled investors and a particular way of working.
He compares it to Apple. “You have a $1,000 iPhone 13,” he says. “Who’s that designed for? My children. Idiot teenagers with rich parents.” Poorer countries need smartphones too, but the solution is not to force Apple to sell smartphones to Ethiopia at a discount. “What you need is an innovative company with different processes.” Instead of demanding changes from 150-year-old companies that are very good at the specific things they do, create smaller, newer companies which do the thing you want. “There’s six billion people in the developing world,” says Zarur. “You should be able to figure out a way to turn a reasonable profit with reasonably priced drugs.”
It’s obviously true that pharma companies have done bad things. It’s also obviously true that they’ve done marvellous things — I have relatives who are alive today who wouldn’t be without the pharmaceutical industry’s products.
Perhaps there are other systems which could have produced those drugs, other than the undeniably cutthroat capitalist system we have today. But any system would have bad incentives and obvious, easy-to-publicise disasters.
The job of government in this situation should be to find the bad incentives, the market failures, and to patch them; to make it work, to decide which end of the balloon to squeeze. The Indian government, for example, decided a few years ago that it would not accept evergreening any more — it passed a law saying that it would only offer new patents on drugs that were sufficiently different from existing ones.
In 2013, the government won a court case against Novartis, which had tried to get a new patent on a cancer drug, imatinib mesylate — a crystalline version of an existing cancer drug, imatinib. The government said that the new version was no better than the existing one and was simply an attempt to squeeze more money out of the healthcare system.
It worked. You could argue (as Novartis did) that it will reduce innovation; but the point is you can change the system, change the incentives, encourage the behaviour you want, without smashing the system entirely.
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SubscribeGood to see an article on the negative aspect of Big Pharma, but I think many opportunities were missed here. Why not do an article on Big Pharma during Covid, which makes it immediately relatable as we are watching this unfold.
For example why not point out that not all Pharma has had to self fund development of vaccines and anti-virals – governments (i.e. the tax payers) have invested billions in Pharma to this effect.
Why not discuss that Big Pharma controls narratives to manipulate and control – it courts and seduces doctors to use specific products (see Dollars for Docs) and it sponsors Corporate Media. Funding given to scientists by governmental organisations also ensures that certain narratives and outcomes are guaranteed.
What about the dirty tricks used by big Pharma to discredit safe drugs – we witnessed Pfizer doing this to their own off-patent drug Ivermectin. After decades of selling a drug that is one of the safest in the world, Pfizer questioned its safety during Covid. Discuss efficacy if you must, not safety. Pfizer surely had large governmental organisations on board (e.g. FDA), as they peddled the same disinformation.
Certainly the health and survival of people is not the main driver in Big Pharma and while one appreciates that businesses have to make a profit, the scale of money grabbing at the expense of human lives is obscene. There is plenty more in their evil alliance, so why not unpack this. It is an article waiting to be written.
Ivermectin was not efficacious in clinical trials for covid
Efficacy is debatable, but it is not the topic for this discussion. If you read my comment, I said that Pfizer should not have been discrediting the SAFETY of Ivermectin.
Ivermectin was developed and marketed by Merck, not Pfizer, but Merck is every bit as bad as Pfizer (recall Vioxx, and of course now their new anti-COVID drug Molnupiravir which was hyped at first before the end of the trial and then 3 weeks later its efficacy in preventing hospitalization and death dropped from 90% to 30%; not to say that the drug was deeply flawed as it was mutagenic not only towards the virus but also towards chromosomal DNA – i.e. even if it cured you it might give you cancer 5,10,20 years down the road).
As for Ivermectin, the clinical trials to date are a mixed bag, especially when one recalls that many of the trials are designed to fail. It is also very difficult to test because the window for successful administration is very short (within say 2 days of onset of symptoms), yet the current Oxford trial includes patients up to 14 days from onset of symptoms, so expect ivermectin to have no effect in those late patients and consequently mess up the results of the trial. Incidentally, ivermectin has multiple modes of action, and one of its activities is a chymotrypsin-like inhibitor, which is exactly the same activity as that of the new Pfizer anti-COVID drug Paxlovid. Not only that, ivermectin is only marginally worse as a protease inhibitor than Paxlovid. The difference in treatment cost, of course, is many orders of magnitude. Further, ivermectin has an incredibly good safety profile when administered in human doses (as opposed to horse doses, but then ibuprofen in horse doses will also kill you); ivermectin has literally been administered to billions of people over the course of 35-40 years, has saved countless lives in Africa (and cured river blindness), its discoverer was awarded a Noble prize, and in most countries (but of course not the US and UK) it is available OTC. Further, the reports from India suggests that Ivermectin was used to great effect to bring the delta wave under rapid control.
As for pharmaceutical companies themselves, the issue, at least in the US, is that the relationship between Pharma and the regulators is far too cozy which isn’t helped by the fact that the FDA is funded in large part by fees from the drug companies. Further, practices such as offering inducements for doctor’s to prescribe new medications where perfectly good old ones already exist is intense. That’s a massive issue, and unfortunately many doctors don’t appreciate that it is vastly better to administer an old drug with a well known safety profile than a newer drug with a unknown one given that rare adverse effects will never be picked up in trials. i.e. Picking the latter up relies on effective post-market surveillance. That’s precisely why myocarditis was missed in the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccine trials but is actually quite prevalent in a particular demographic (namely teenagers and young men between the ages of 11 and 25).
Thanks for correcting me Johann – I always enjoy your posts. Of course it was Merck who discredited it. They (and Ridgeback) were funded to the tune of $1.2 billion by the US government to develop their new anti-viral. I seem to have Pfizer in my crosshairs more frequently recently and yes, I saw that the Pfizer anti-viral uses the same mechanism of action as Ivermectin on the Dr John Campbell column which must raise eyebrows surely.
While all of this plays out, I will soon pull my Ivermectin out of the cupboard. I have taken it for over a year during the epidemic waves and it is as cheap as chips.
I can’t get hold of it anywhere. Do you want to sell some?
I am in South Africa!
… ‘Scott Alexander’ on Astral Codex 10, has concluded from his review of the multitude of Ivermectin studies, that it works in places like the sub-continent, because by eliminating the worms endemic in the populations there, it improves the immune response to Covid. So that’s probably why it doesn’t show positive results in developed countries.
I’m afraid many people in developed countries would disagree – not that many are given access to the drug. Do you spot the flaw?
Let us try again. You claim to know that myocarditis is a ‘quite prevalent’ vaccination side effect in young males between 11 and 25. That sounds like some nice, specific information. Could you please give a link to the source of that claim, so we can evaluate it?
And I’ll try again: simply go to the VAERS, UK Yellow book or European Medical Agency web sites and discover for yourself. And if you can’t be bothered to do that, how about you just read the adverse effects printed by Pfizer and Moderna on their vaccine data sheets. Nobody, other than you, is denying that myocarditis post-vaccination in young males is an issue. Not even the CDC. It may not be that common, but it’s common enough 1 in 5000 to 10000 to worry about.
Now the CDC’s argument (https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/clinical-considerations/myocarditis.html) is that myocarditis post-COVID is more common than myocarditis post-vaccination. But the fact remains that myocarditis is by now a very well established adverse reaction to the mRNA vaccines, and neither Pfizer nor Moderna are hiding this.
Everything depends on how one views risk. When you receive the vaccine, what happens next is purely deterministic and there is absolutely nothing one can do about it. i.e. it’s not like a drug that one can simply stop taking to reverse the adverse effect. The same is true, of course, if you get infected by SARS-CoV2. But the difference is that one can reduce the likelihood of one’s getting infected by not going into crowded, poorly ventilated, loud indoor spaces.
Further risk is very much stratified by age. The risk profile for COVID is directly proportional to age – the risks increase exponentially as one gets above 65. The profile for untoward effects from the vaccine have exactly the opposite risk profile: those most at risk are the young, not the old (likely due to how their immune systems respond to COVID vs vaccine).
In other words, it should be up to the individual to make an assessment of their own personal risk. For example, I was doubly vaccinated with Pfizer back in February but I won’t be in a rush to get a booster shot until I see a lot more real world data regarding the efficacy of the booster and its duration, as the risk of adverse reactions increases as the number of shots increases (and this is evident even from simple anecdotal evidence).
They say that even with the risks, on balance it is worth having unless of course you are the unlucky one. Dr John says that the risk can be reduced more if they aspirate the jab to make sure it is not going into a blood vessel and from there all around the body but most nurses say it is against the NHS protocol. Personally I don’t want to gamble with my body so also am holding back on a booster.
CDC is using rates of severe covid myocarditis and not using other studies like in university athletes putting it at below 2% and transient. CDC and FDA funded significantly by pharma and vaccine patents. They are ignoring the signals incl myo, neuro, thrombo. While we fund these dangerous and ineffective vaxes, safer treatment and vax alternatives languish and our all cause mortality rates climb above those induced by the actual virus. Propaganda works and pharma knows this.
Exactly correct.
So, you are saying that the vaccine is killing more people than the actual virus? That requires a reference.
If you go to the UK Yellow Book and scroll down to the dental section you will find that vaccines “cause” a median diastema.
As you are well aware, I am sure, VAERS, the Yellow Card and similar systems are passive reporting systems. Anyone can report anything. They are designed as a research hypothesis generating tool, not a diagnostic tool, and most definitely not a tool to seek causation.
Detailed analysis is used to ascertain whether a specific adverse event is occurring at a higher rate than would be expected in the general population. The rates of heart attacks etc in the general population are well known and documented.
If these systems didn’t work really well there would have been a considerable delay in picking up, for example, the thrombocytopenia and rare thromboembolic events seen with the Astra Zeneca vaccine.
Elaine, to get back on topic, this article is about Big Pharma. What is your opinion on the article itself and Big Pharma in general?
I feel ambivalent about Big Pharma. They have done great things. They have also crapped in their own backyard.
The current business model is clearly dysfunctional.
Doing the fundamental research, all the regulatory testing and then bringing a successful drug to market is a high risk and an eye wateringly expensive enterprise.
So, how to make this process less open to abuse / malevolent manipulation / political control / unrealistic share holder expectations ?
Well the efforts being made now to deal with the Really Big Pandemic (Anti Microbial Resistance) might show a part way forward. This article in Nature covers this in detail :
Why big pharma has abandoned antibiotics Nature October 2021 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02884-3
Briefly it involves :
1. Paying developers a contractually agreed upon amount to research and develop antimicrobial drugs for 3 – 5 years (the PASTEUR Act proposed in June 2021 in the US)
2. A Netflix model. Buyers would pay a pre-agreed amount to use as much or as little of the drug as they need. The model would include an up-front payment to companies during the early stages of development as a further incentive to get research under way.
For 1 and 2 governments / buyers would need to employ rottweilers as negotiators.
3. Wealthy countries pay much more for their Antibiotics than poor countries.
Then I guess there is the old chestnut of more draconian regulation.
Laura Creighton has proposed another strategy (see above or below)
Thanks, the most important issue on this thread is of course, big pharma (though the side discussions are interesting).
I understand that bringing a drug to market is eye wateringly expensive (assuming not heavily funded by governments i.e. you and me, as has been witnessed recently), but profits are also eye watering and this is the alarm bell.
Whilst people understand that they have to make a profit, it especially rankles that in the health industry especially, obscene profits are made on the back of very dubious practices, some of which approach criminal imo.
I think very few disagree that there should be a radical approach to process and regulation.
They need profits to maintain their cash flow into new research surely ?
If you are playing Russian roulette with other people’s money (the shareholders, including I would guess some big pension funds) then I would think a prudent strategy would be to keep your reserves topped up every year for those inevitable big failures
If they make obscene profits, why don’t more companies enter the market, perhaps assisted by subsidy-minded governments? After all, a substantial profit can be made from a single successful drug, and important laboratories exist independently of the pharma companies, do they not?
They do, often focusing on research but maybe don’t have the finances or long term suistainability for development, marketing and production. I know AZ has previously bought up niche biotech companies with interesting prospective products to take advantage of their research.
You are missing the point and have failed to see the forest from the trees. Yes, the US VAERS and UK Yellow book are self-reporting. But here’s the thing: (1) The European Medical Agency Reporting is through doctors and pharma; (2) Every single study investigating VAERS has shown that adverse effects are underreported to the tune of 90%; (3) sure not every adverse effect is related to the vaccine and sure some are bogus BUT the number of adverse effects and deaths post COVID vaccination in VAERS exceeds that of ALL other vaccines combined for the last 30 years. That’s no longer a small effect, and while you may believe or wish to believe that all the adverse effects in the US are being reported by right wing extremists, this is certainly not the case in the UK or in the EU.
It should be evident to anybody who can think critically that it is time to take a step back, take a deep breath and really investigate adverse signals from the current crop of vaccines. It is all the more important, and especially relevant to Chivers’ article, because the mRNA and DNA-based vaccines were a quick stop-gap measure. It is easy to synthesize mRNA, and easy to synthesize and clone DNA into an adenovirus vector. By using this approach one is limited to a SINGLE component of the virus (and hence immunity is very narrow) but one doesn’t have to worry and expressing and purifying the spike protein which is non-trivial. That’s why AZ, J&J, Moderna and Pfizer were able to produce and then test a vaccine so quickly. But unfortunately the protective effect of these vaccines appears to be very short-lived, hence the rush to boost for which there is no current data as to how long that protection will last or how broad it is, or how effective it will be against upcoming variants of which there will be many given the of SARS-CoV2. What is required is broad-based immunity afforded by a traditional type vaccine, and those generally comprise either inactivated or attenuated WHOLE virus. But PHARMA being what it is, Pfizer, Moderna, J&J and AZ will fight tooth and nail against the introduction of any such vaccine unless manufactured by another big US pharmaceutical company who can take Pfizer et al on. As it is, the Indians have produced what appears to be a highly efficacious inactivated whole virus vaccine called COVAXIN, but you can bet it will never be approved in the US, given that the FDA is in the pocket of big pharma, big pharma is a major contributor to political campaigns, and the NIH is in bed with one of the vaccine manufacturers (Moderna). The net result is that this will go on and on and a lot of lives will be unnecessarily lost.
Lastly, Rasmus, you should understand that this is not a political issue
“the number of adverse effects and deaths post COVID vaccination in VAERS exceeds that of ALL other vaccines combined for the last 30 years”
Well of course it does – Covid and everything to do with it is the biggest health news story since HIV.
VAERS was only set up in 1990. How many people in the US knew it existed before Covid ?
Covaxin. From the latest Lancet paper November 23rd :
The adjusted effectiveness of two doses administered at least 28 days before testing was 46% (95% CI 22–62) and administered at least 42 days before testing was 57% (21–76). After excluding participants with previous SARS-CoV-2 infections, the adjusted effectiveness of two doses administered at least 14 days before testing was 47% (95% CI 29–61).
So maybe it won’t be approved in the US because it isn’t as effective as Pfizer and Moderna ?
And … it has to use and adjuvant to elicit a decent Th response
How effective are Pfizer and Moderna taking variants into account?
Interesting as the earlier reports suggested that COVAXIN was better. Just another example of hype I guess. But recall Pfizer and Moderna are only highly effective initially. After 6 months they are way way down.
I have also read in a recent issue of PNAS (can’t remember exactly when so I can’t give you the link) that a live attenuated vaccine has also been developed. Very early preliminary stage though.
Your comment about VAERS is only partially true. The EMA database for post-phase IV surveillance of drug adverse effects has been going on for a long time. I don’t know about the UK Yellow book, but I do know that all recently introduced drugs have long been subject to post-phase IV surveillance in the UK. That’s the only way to pick up signals for rare side effects. And an example of that would be cardiac events associated with Vioxx, a drug that was one of Merck’s biggest blockbusters before they were forced to take it off the market. And the Vioxx story is interesting in itself as it highlights so well the issues of big Pharma discussed in Chivers’ article.
There is a simple way of convincing people, and we could have saved a lot of ink if you had followed it.
1) make it clear which point you are making. Say ‘myocarditis in young males is a significant side effect of mRNA COVID vaccines’.
2) Provide your arguments and evidence, say a couple of those links we have seen.
3) We evaluate it and, in this case, believe you. End of story.
If you then wanted to argue that this means we should not vaccinate young men, provide the next set of arguments, including balancing the risk of vaccination against the risks of COVID. Instead you have chosen to deluge us with vague warnings and anecdotes. When asked for evidence you demand that I should write what amounts to a mini-thesis on COVID vaccines – all to reproduce the information that you claim to have but refuse to share. Which is not going to happen.
As for my scientific curiosity, I take information from sources I trust, and try to reconcile them. In this case from the various health bureaucracies, medical consensus etc. If someone thinks this is wrong, I rely on them to provide an argument that I can consider, and possibly use to change my evaluations, and/or change my list of trusted sources. Once there is a disagreement between what seems to be reliable sources I might spend some time sorting it out, but I keep major research to my day job. That is scientific enough for me.
Anyway, if you want to convince me of anything, instead of being dismissed as irrelevant noise, you know what to do. And if this is not a political issue you should stop treating it like one and come up with some scientific discussion.
If you blindly believe the authorities who are heavily conflicted, you are not thinking critically. Especially when the US public health authorities seem to be reliving groundhog day every day.
Sometimes ones needs a bit of common sense. Ask your friends and acquaintances if they’ve suffered any significant adverse effect from the vaccines, where significant is defined not as life threatening but sufficient to not want them to go to work the next day. e.g. splitting headache, chills, muscle aches and extreme tiredness. Sure this would be anecdotal but I would wager that while those over 65 experienced little untoward effects those below did. And that is certainly true of my circle of friends, acquaintances and colleagues.
Now, if a vaccine causes those types of effects in many people, it is hardly surprising that truly severe effects including myocarditis and the various inflammatory/auto-immune neurological conditions are going to be a lot more prevalent than they would be for other vaccines which produce absolutely no untoward effects (such as MMR and DPT, with the Pertussis in its current form, not the one that did cause problems in some young children).
The rare clotting events associated with thrombocytopenia were not first picked up in the UK. They were picked up in Norway and related to findings in a nursing home. And they weren’t picked up by some surveillance system but rather by clinical observation – i.e. when you see cases of something that you have learnt about in med school but are unlikely to ever see throughout one’s entire medical career, something is going on. In response, the UK government and AZ were simply saying there was nothing to see here, move on, no relationship to the COVID vaccine whatsoever. It was only when the German Koch institute (the german equivalent of the US CDC) confirmed the Norwegian findings for clinical cases in Germany that AZ and the UK Government were forced to concede that there was an issue.
Now the AZ response is obvious: they want to defend their product at all costs, especially since billions of dollars in potential profits are involved. By why the UK government. Well they were conflicted by patriotism and national pride (and I don’t blame them at all): the AZ vaccine was a British product resulting from research in a publicly funded university, Oxford, and the UK government wanted a British product to succeed at all costs.
Sounds perfectly normal to me. These are very rare effects, if I remember right. Someone notices (someone has to be the first), Since this could have been a coincidence, (remember the MMR vaccine and autism?), people then wait till there is confirmation from somewhere else before they accpet the result as real.
These effects are not very rare! I have been looking for the link regarding all the very fit athletes dropping like flies after their vaccinations but cannot find at the moment but will post as soon as I do!….
In the UK, the incidence has been 73 fatalities after more than 50 million doses: i.e., fewer than 1.5 per million. In the context of the appalling attempts by the French president to discredit the vaccine (while agitating for the European plants producing the vaccine to be commandeered, ‘why the UK government’ takes on rather a different appearance, don’t you think?
Simple question:
Have you done a statistical analysis of those adverse effects databases, to see if the adverse effects are more than you would expect in the populatlin anyway? Or have you seen such an analysis done by someone else? Yes or no?
Yes, yes and yes. The rates are way higher. Likewise for clotting with thrombocytopenia.
Here’s the thing Rasmus. You only need statistics when the effect is small, not when it’s large. When a whole bunch marines come down with myocarditis within a week of vaccination, alarm bells should immediately ring. Young fit marines, who are vastly fitter than you or I, don’t just come own with myocarditis. It is exceedingly rare in that age group. Sure it is generally viral or post-viral, but you don’t see clusters as have been observed with a very tight temporal relationship to having received a shot. Further, it is obvious that you keep burying your head in the sand and don’t want to learn anything because it is not like this is being denied by the relevant pharmaceutical companies (it’s even on the warning label!) or even the CDC. They are just underplaying the significance. And what’s worse they are ignoring the possibility of sub-clinical myocarditis. For example, the normal ejection fraction is between 50 and 75%, but if you’re at 75% and your ejection fraction drops to say 60% you won’t notice anything unless you are engaged in strenuous physical activity. But any damage to the heart is irreversible, and will tend to get worse with time. So those marines may have recovered perfectly OK for now, but they may well not do so well when they hit 70 and develop congestive cardiac failure.
And incidentally myocarditis is not the only serious adverse effect. Other where a significant increase in incidence has been observed include pericarditis, and a whole range of inflammatory/auto-immune neurological conditions, including Bell’s palsy, Guillain-Barre syndrome and transverse myelitis.
Incidentally the great governor or the Great state of California, none other than Gavin Newsom, was reported to have suffered from Bell’s palsy subsequent to his booster shot administered jointly with a flu shot. So these things really do occur.
@Elaine Giedrys-Leeper, @Leslie Cook, @Laura Creighton.
Thanks for the links. Now we know (no thanks to Johan Strauss), that the increased myocarditis risk seems real, but quite rare, that it happens mainly in young males, that most cases are mild and clear up without trouble, and that people who have analysed the relevant data and are responsible for the health of various countries judge that even for young males the risk from vaccination is lower than the risk from getting COVID while unvaccinated (not surprising to the layman). Nothing there that would turn anyone off vaccines, that I can see. The AHAjournals link does sound unusually dramatic for a scientific paper, but it seems to be in a reputed journal, at least. I cannot access beyond the abstract, but anyway it is not clear what, if anything, an increase in risk biomarkers means in terms of health. That would take an expert to judge.
It is notable that Johan Strauss refused to give a link that shows how big the risk actually is – even in this case where the risk is clearly real. One wonders why? Could it be that he wants to scare people with talk about dangerous side effects and do not want them to find out how small the risk actually is? That would be dishonest. Or could it be that he simply does not care whether vaccines are dangerous or not, because he is against current COVID policies for purely ideological reasons and would remain against even even if vaccination risks were zero? In that case continuing to spray us with carefully selected data would be highly unprofessional.
Now there is no requirement for degrees or qualifications to participate in debate. Everybody has the right to be listened to with respect and be judged on what they say, not who they say they are. But Johan Strauss recently chose to emphasize that he was an MD/PhD, in order to bolster his authority. If claims authority a research professional, he should be judged as such. And his refusal to give sources and references, his refusal even to evaluate the actual risks properly before he uses them in argument is enough to disqualify him completely. Either he is not capable of understanding the most elementary data analysis – in which case he is incompetent. Or he is capable, but deliberately refuses to do so, in order to mislead.
Look ad hominem attacks are really not called for. Nobody is scaring anybody. But if one is going to institute boosters at the very least people should be aware of the risks and be able to assess those for themselves. As for links they are so many I’m not going to enumerate them. You can search on Google as well as I can, and you can go to the VAERS, Yellow pages and EMA web sites just as well as I can (and you can google the names of these web sites).
If the risk was zero, it would be great, but it isn’t. And here’s the kicker. When you start giving the vaccines to the 5-11 yr group and even younger as has been proposed, only a few deaths will blow this whole thing up. Because deaths in adults simply don’t have the same emotional kick as in children.
As for ability to analyze data, I’m not going to give you my real name, but I will bet you any money you like that my knowledge of matters medical and scientific, including complex data analysis is orders of magnitude greater than yours. Now, you can chose not to believe me and you can believe that I’m full of bluster. That’s entirely your affair. But all I can say is that it behoves everybody to think critically and carefully about the current vaccine data (not to mention the monkey business that occurred in both the Pfizer and Moderna trials).
As for the risk of myocarditis: the number for young adults (15-25) is something between 1 in 5000 and 1 in 10000. That’s not entirely insignificant, especially if you happen to be one of those affected. But as I said, it’s up to each individual to ascertain their own risk and balance the risk of being infected by COVID (which can be modulated by appropriate behavior) versus the risk of vaccination where once jabbed there’s absolutely nothing one can do about it.
You are doing it again. Boasting about how good and qualified you are. And I do not care. If you understand data analysis, make an argument that shows so. If you have arguments and information, provide them, and I will judge you on that. ‘Look at the adverse effects databases’ is rubbish, pardon my French.
I am sure I disagree with Leslie Cook quite as much as I disagree with you. He may or may not be less qualified than you are. But when asked he provided information that allowed me to evaluate his arguments. That suggests he may be open to arguments in return (even if I think he is wrong), and that even if I can never convince him of anything, I could learn something by debating with him, at least. You have a lot of ground to make up before you can aspire to his level.
Look below at the Nature article (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y) that somebody cited. And then see my post with some direct quotes from the article. The article in Nature reports on a couple of studies published in the NEJM. You wanted exact odds. For 16-19 yr old males the risk is 15 in 100,000 which is a ridiculous way to quote the risk to make it seem smaller than it is because those odds translate to 1 in 6667. Then the risk for all men is 4 in 100,000 which again is written that way for the innumerate to make it seem smaller than it is because those odds translate to 1 in 25,000. But the risks stratify with age, and are much lower the older one is, so that 1 in 25,000 doesn’t translate to the real risk in the relevant age group.
I would trust that the link to the Nature piece and from there you can go to the actual studies in the NEJM directly, will make your realize that the risk is not negligible. Now it could be due to the fact that the blood supply to the deltoid muscles is much higher in men than women (bigger muscles and all), and the failure to aspirate upon injection results in some of the vaccine going into the blood stream. But nevertheless, it’s a serious issue.
And Rasmus, telling you to go to the official web sites in NOT rubbish. If you want to really look at the official data, take some time to look at them. But quite clearly you appear to be a very unscientific type of person because you have displayed, over the last few weeks, not an iota of curiosity to discover for yourself what the observations actually are. Rather you have been so conditioned, or rather brainwashed, into believing that anything that’s called a vaccine is both safe and effective. But that is not necessarily the case. You might wish to go back and read up on the H1N1 swine flu vaccine and what happened, let alone the results from the Dengue vaccine which resulted in many deaths of children to the extent that they were forced to stop testing (but only after having vaccinated something like 800,000 kids if I recall correctly).
Or perhaps you’re not unscientific, but simply in the pay of big Pharma which is exactly what Chivers’ article was all about.
Thanks for your level of content in your posts. You seem to be very informed and knowledgeable and I’d guess you’re also fairly discerning and critical regarding the probable facts and truths concerning the whole vacc issue. Around feb-march, early in the vacc cycle, I glanced through the adverse effects stats from the Swedish medical products agency and was taken aback by some of the early figures, eg. mortalities, although these could have been due to Covid or other ailments.
I’ve also made the ”mistake” of listening to the interview of Dr. David Martin by a German covid sceptic group, presenting a plausible conspiracy like but facts based analysis of the US involvment in the virus and vaccine development involving Big Pharma, based on his interpretation of patents, funding, and interaction between the parties concerned. I didn’t know what to believe, but I definitely don’t believe anything coming out of Big Pharma. His latest presentations or rather shows have been a lot more conspiratorial but he equates the vacc for younger people as a poison or biological weapon and is on the warpath to expose the forces behind the vacc tsunami (not just Big Pharma).
It would be interesting to see a balanced and critical analysis in Unherd (if this is at all possible) of the whole vacc issue including David Martin’s take on what has really been going on?
Thank you for posting mainly in text that is clear and easy to read for us all – and not just posting endless links.
It does seem you want to disagree with anyone who has concerns about the vaccine and/or adverse events.
You ask for people to prove things, or to give evidence, which is fair enough in a court of law or a tribunal, but in the real world it does sound like you are asking others to do the leg work in order to prove something that you seemingly don’t want to accept, because you are so entrenched in your current view. As an Unherd writer wrote so eloquently earlier in the week, you brleive wholeheartedly in ‘The Thesis’ and don’t seem to be willing to consider that there may be a valid ‘Anti-thesis’.
You are clearly a very intelligent person and capable of indepth research. There is now so much data out there that it is well worth a person like yourself, doing their own in depth analysis and not relying on what you read in the media, or even on Unherd.
It is only through doing your own in-depth research that you can arrive at your own conclusions, rather than relying on views of other people.
In one of your previous posts you say:
“that people who have analysed the relevant data and are responsible for the health of various countries”
as though these people are in any way independent. If you watch some of Prof Norman Fenton’s excelleny videos you quickly realise how data is being manipulated to say exactly what the Govt want it to say, eg. to instill fear or boost vaccine uptake. If you’re not familiar with statistical analysis and Bayesian modelling his videos can be challenging, but I think it is worth the effort.
It would great if someone like Prof Fenton could have an honest and open public debate with Boris Johnson and his advisors, as I think a lot of jaws would drop.
Talking of which …
It is also worth studying how people with vested interests are hiding key data, or incorrectly analysing official data in order to, for example, make the virus look more dangerous than it is and/or make in injections safer than they are.
This is a very big topic and it is impossible for Johann, or anyone on Unherd or anywhere else, to give you a link to a single source or a single point of reference that will satisfy your need for definitive proof.
I am not writing this to disagree or to say you are wrong in any way. I just wanted to encourage you, and anyone else reading this, to do your own in-depth research and to not rely on anyone else for their information or their viewpoint … not the mainstream media, not the government (of any country), and definitrly no TLA.
Thanks for the friendly post. Thanks also for the Prof. Fenton reference. I very strongly prefer text over video (except for entertainment), but he looks like he might be worth listening to even in video form.
I would agree that demanding proof (in the very common case where there is no final proof to be found) is just a way of putting the burden on the other party. I hope that is not what I am doing. But I do not think it is unreasonable to ask for at least some reasoned argument and evidence from someone who wants you to change your mind on some important topic. And especially anyone who presents as a knowledgable medical person has a duty to abide by some elementary rules. Of course people are free to advance any opinion they want based on nothing but their personal feelings, but in that case I will ignore what they say, and advise other people to do likewise.
I’ll freely admit that my starting assumption is that the mainstream scientific consensus is most likely to be right. The Thesis, if you like. As I see it that is part of science. Getting to where we are now took decades and centuries, and we only got here by relying on what was done before us, and only revisiting the parts that looked like they needed fixing. We would still be arguing about the healing properties of unicorn horn, otherwise. Of course what we have is far from perfect. There are known problem with incentives, vested interests, mistakes and errors. It could even be that our current vaccination policies are wrong, but there would have to be some evidence for the alternative position, to put up against the evidence for the current one. If your starting poosition is that ‘official’ science, the MSM, Big Pharma etc. are all a bunch of crooks out to screw us so nothing they say can be trusted (is that the Antithesis?), we no longer have anything to talk about. Science is about weighing evidence, and you just dismissed most of the available evidence.
As I said elsewhere, even a rough summary of one of the adverse events database would take me a full-time week, absolute minimum. In-depth research on this topic would amount to a thesis project, if done properly. If you then want me to do it without relying on governments, media, or organisations for information, you are asking me to reinvent medicine and biology from the ground up – and if I was capable of doing that, I would already be counting my Nobel prizes 😉 Frankly I think it is a lot better use of my time to evaluate conflicting claims based on their arguments, and meanwhile continue to do my normal work.
Just a little point: I would suspect from your comment where you say “your starting assumption is that the mainstream scientific consensus is most likely to be right. The Thesis, if you like. As I see it that is part of science,” you are not nor ever have been a practicing scientist and certainly not one at the forefront of their field. Now it is perfectly true , as Newton once said (although it was said sarcastically as an attack on Hooke): “if I can see further than others it’s because I stand on the shoulder of giants”. So yes, science relies on what has come before. But it is also the case that almost every single really big advance has gone against the consensus and accepted views of the day. Indeed, those who have made breakthrough advances are generally those that have done things that the consensus thought was not possible. (And if you want a simple example of something recent that is easily understood, just consider the consensus regarding stomach ulcers and acid secretion and the huge amounts of money made by Pharma in the form of cimetidine and ranitidine), only for an obscure Australian doctor to discover that the real culprit was H. Pylori. That doctor was piloried for a long time by the consensus. I the meantime those who took ranitidine for a long time are now at higher risk of various cancers and AZ, I believe, is the subject of a massive class action suit in the US.
So this isn’t a question of reinventing anything. Rather it is a question of pushing into the unknown. Impactful science does not involve turning the handle, it involves going “where nobody has gone before”.
Further, any really good scientist (of which there are very few) is always highly skeptical of the status quo.
In the context of COVID, many of the reactions from public health authorities, other than Sweden, were dictated by panic and fear, and went against all the pandemic responses that they and the WHO had in place. They did this because they panicked and had to be seen to be doing something. So 15 days to slow the curve, which was not an unreasonable thing just to slow things down a bit to see where one was, turned into many months of lockdowns. Similarly with masks. There had been a ton of work on masks in the community showing that, unfortunately, they had little impact on the transmission of influenza. That view was stated again and again at the beginning by the WHO and Fauci. Yet from one day to the next that changed to masks being absolutely critical based on NO real world data. It was all based on lab experiments in a very controlled environment. Now, the initial idea that masks would serve as a very effective method of source control was not unreasonable especially at the beginning of the pandemic. But when one then takes stock 12-18 months later, it is clear that unfortunately masks have had next to no significant impact on the course of the pandemic.
The same is true of the vaccines. In the US Collins and Fauci were all in for vaccines putting an end to the pandemic. And if the current crop of vaccines had done the trick that would be awesome. But they didn’t do the trick because the vaccines were very narrowly tailored so as to be able to get them out at “warp speed”. 6 months later it is clear that the initial 2 shots are failing, at least in terms of infections (although hopefully they still reduce hospitalizations and deaths but who knows really). So the immediate strategy of the public health authorities in the US, UK and Europe is boost, boost, boost (which of course lines the pockets of the relevant Pharma companies who have profited immensely – indeed for Moderna their vaccine was a Hail Mary as otherwise they would have gone bankrupt in short order), even though the WHO have come out to say that’s not a good idea (although who knows with the WHO where they’re coming from). It will be great if the boosters actually work and we’ll be sure to find out in 6 months or so. My suspicion, however, is that the boosters will also fail. Time will tell.
We then come to the “Thesis” view that the current crop of vaccines are both effective and safe. Now one can repeat an untruth many many times until many people believe it, but that doesn’t make it true. As Lincoln is reputed to have said: “you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time”. But it would be far better if the public health authorities were completely on the level regarding the risks of vaccination. Unfortunately they are not so they are pushing full steam ahead to vaccinate not just 11-18 yr olds but 5-11 yr olds and soon 2-5 yr olds. Yet those age groups are least at risk of untoward sequelae of COVID. The people at most risk are those over 65, and especially those over 80 as the risks increase exponentially (or close to) with increasing age.
That’s why I’m of the view that it’s time to take a little step back, take a deep breath, and figure out exactly what is going on. There are some very worrying signals coming out of the UK: for example, the all-cause mortality rate from I think July ’21 to Oct/Nov ’21 is double in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated. That increased mortality is not due to COVID deaths (which is still higher in the unvaccinated) but to deaths from other causes. I’ve got no idea what’s going on, and of course there many be many confounding factors, but it is nevertheless a troubling observation.
It would be really helpful if you stopped speculating about my credentials. I have had a career in research, as it happens, but it does not matter. Either my words make sense or they do not – same as yours.
It is certainly true that big advances come from people who step outside the limits, who do things everybody say is impossible, indeed often from people who are pig stubborn and refuse to listen. In a way it is a tautology – if it does not go agaisnt the current consensus, how can it be a very big advance? I can well believe that people at the forefront of their field have little respect for received opinion. After all they are working where data are new and understanding still limited – and they are (or imagine they are) uniquely gifted. The trouble is that people who try things that are known to be impossible, who are pig stubborn and refuse to listen – are almost always wrong. For every Galileo there are a million cranks. That is the balance you have to make – you need to be able to accommodate big changes in understanding that go against what is currently believed. But you also need to stop wasting time on (re)evaluating ideas that are never going to pan out, and concentrate your energies where there is a pay-off. I have often thought that science works rather like simulated annealing, which arguably does the same thing. And which is arguably the best known optimisation technique for intractable problems.
Coming back to vaccines – what point are you making? That current vaccines are not nearly as effective as we would hope? Granted – they prevent neither transmission nor mortality (even if they seem to help with both). That they are not as safe as we would like? Granted (of course – nothing is ever as safe as we would like, and these seem to be less safe than many other vaccines). Then what? Should we change to different vaccine types? Requires a precise comparison between the effects of different vaccines. Should we stop vaccinating and dare COVID to do its worst? Requires a precise comparison between vaccinated and unvaccinated. Should we limit vaccination to older people? Requires another precise comparisojn – of the kind that official bodies have already done, and that you systematically refuse to even consider. Should we put all our faith in Ivermectin, with or without vitamin D? Please provide some data. But before even that, please make it clear what you are trying to prove.
While you are wondering about why are deaths from other causes are increasing in the vaccinated, you might want to read this paper out of Sweden.
SARS–CoV–2 Spike Impairs DNA Damage Repair and Inhibits V(D)J Recombination In Vitro
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/10/2056/htm
Sticking vaccines that are based on the spike protein into people may be an even worse idea than we thought.
It would also suggest that letting the live virus infect people is an even worse idea than we thought. Which alternative are you proposing?
Letting the virus infect people? Who’s doing the letting? If you believe Dr David Martin it’s the NIH and Big Pharma in conjunction with the Wuhan lab. The alternative? Maybe to vax the 80+s and other vulnerables and let the 60+s decide if they want to risk Covid or the medium/long-term consequences of the vaccine.
Only if the over 80s want it, of course. They may be facing multiple hazards.
yes, I realised that after I’d posted.
Thank you.
If this supposition is correct, then other vaccines not made of whole spike proteins will be better. And getting ill, once, and then having subsequent immunity will be better than getting boosted every 3 months with a spike protein based shot. But having an immune system that has been taught to make spike proteins, and will do so whenever it thinks it has met a suitable corona virus in the wild would also be a terrible outcome — so we will be hoping that the ability to do so wanes because we cannot do it any more, and not for some other reason.
Other vaccines might then be better. And getting boosted every three months might still be better than catching the disease – depnding on the risks of each. Still,so far OK.
One problem in what you say is that it is not guaranteed that you cannot get COVID twice. Who says that ‘natural’ immunity will last forever?
But the big problem in your post is that the immune system is not taught to make spike proteins, never learns to make spike proteins, and never is able to make spike proteins. The immune system leans to make antibodies against the spike protein – which is an entirely different thing. And if you are worried that some of your cells will temporarily, make spike proteins when given an mRNA vaccine, you should consider that even more of your cells will be making spike protein during a real infection.
People can get covid twice. But people who got Sars-cov-1 in Singapore in 2003 aren’t getting covid at all. (At least when the big variant was alpha, I haven’t heard a peep about later variants). So some people, at any rate, are getting the ‘catch once, and done’ version, at least with existing variants.
Whether your cells will make more of the spike protein during a real covid infection than when being vaccinated seems to depend on how severe the infection is.
And the worry is that the ‘temporarily make spike proteins’ might not be as temporary as all that. For other mnra vaccines with animal trials, that was a problem, which is why the vaccines never came to market.
Has the problem been fixed? Pharma says it has. Do I trust Pharma not to be lying to me — or simply incompetent — when they say that? Nope.
If SARS cov-1 confers permanent immunity to SARS- cov-2 that would be very interesting and important information. If we have a reliable study that proves it, of course. Do you? For the rest you have a lot of intersting ‘maybe’s, but to get anywhere we would need to apply some information to find out what actually happens. And you have decided that the pharmaceutical industry, government health organisations, and (presumably) most academics are so untrustworthy that nothing they say can be relied on. So we have no information to use, never will have any, and are left with individual gut feelings and confirmation bias as the only resources we have. How do you propose to get ahead from here, in general terms?
I only have an in vitro study about T-cell immunity. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2550-z_reference.pdf
This is of great relevance to the question ‘how long does T-cell immunity last?’. Some scientists I know put out a call (in Taiwan, I think) asking to hear from people who were infected with Sars-cov-1 and subsequently infected with sars-cov-2. Nobody responded. It is difficult to know what to make of this, as up until fairly recently, practically nobody was getting sick in Taiwan with covid at all, whether or not they had caught sars-cov-1. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it is what we have.
You are going to have to stop assuming that your magical telepathic powers gives you insights into the motivations of others and what they do and do not believe.
I do think that the pharmaceutical industry should never be trusted. I do think that regulatory capture happens. I do think that some scientists lie, and some of them even get caught being paid to lie. They are also very, very, easy to fool, moreso than other demographics, a thing that professional magicians have known for a long time. Martin Gardiner, a very serious amateur magician, Skeptic, and writer of the Mathematical Recreations column of Scientific American for 25 years said that this is because scientists, in general are too trusting. They work on the idea that what they are being told is honest — the person may be mistaken, but they aren’t trying to deceive. The scientific establishment is currently not very well equipped to detect outright fraud.
Some of us are working to change this, witness my very concrete proposal about what can be done to protect us from the abuses from big pharma. It’s not just something I made up out of my head yesterday morning.
So how on earth could you get to the point where you got the conclusion that I believe
I think we have lots of information to use. I think the scientific method is the best thing the human race has ever come up with for discovering the truth. But I think that the scientific establishment has a lot of housecleaning to do, because when more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, we have a reproducibility crisis indeed.
Even the BBC knows about it now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
Anybody surprised to know that, according to the BBC, pharmacology results are among those that scientists are finding it hardest to reproduce?
—
As an aside, I am getting a little tired of being accused of confirmation bias, and relying on nothing more than my gut feelings when, every time you ask for a reference to something out one pops as I get back to you.
Do you have anything backing up your trust beyond a belief that ‘the system must be working or I would have heard something about it by now?’ Because: this is what ‘hearing about it’ sounds like, right now.
I’m working on repairing scientific credibility from the inside. How about you?
You raise several points, here. On the replication crisis and the various problems in pharma and science I would not disagree with you.
On references (and general reliability), I’d give you a lot of respect. You gave a reference on myocarditis, that showed that this was real, well-established problem, and also that it was rare and relatively mild in its effects. I believe I thanked you. Now you give this reference on T cells, (again: thank you). It shows that there seems to be long-range immune response in T cells, as well as cross-reactivity between different viruses. This is very important and promising but, as you admit yourself, it is not yet known how much practical health benefit this gives. So it is true, as you said, that “getting ill, once, and then having subsequent immunity will be better than getting boosted every 3 months“, but we do not know whether it actually ever happens that people get ‘catch once, and you are done’ immunity. So we can not base our policies on that assumption. If it was actually well established, as you said, that “people who got Sars-cov-1 in Singapore in 2003 aren’t getting covid at all.”that would be extremely important, but from your own data this is no more than a hypothesis for now – so you may be guilty of some slight exaggerations, I’d say.
If this was a problem in cosmology, scientists would battle it out for another couple of decades, and settle on a consensus when all criticval voices had had a thorough hearing. As it is, we need to act (or not act) on COVID right now, and all scientific arguments have political effects, in either promoting or dissuading vaccination, for instance. It seems to me the obvious way to proceed is to gather together the available information on the risks of 1) COVID, while vaccinated or not, 2) various available vaccines, all for different age groups, 3) transmission through vaccinated or unvaccinated subjects, 4) effect of social distancing, masks, lock-downs etc. and put together some recommendations. This will be rather uncertain, givn the uncertainty in the inputs, but what else can we do? And here we have various government-related committees (SAGE in the UK, I believe) who have done exactly that and come up with the current recommendations. It seems to me the obvious, convincing approach would be to start with those reports, present where you think they are wrong and why, and come up with an alternative sest of recommendations. I might even be convinced by something like that. What I see instead is a lot of people who present isolated points, refuse to engage with the arguments of the mainstream position (claiming that they are so corrupt that it is naive to listen to them) , and often give the impression that they are convincd a priori that we should not vaccinate (as much) and are looking for thetorical arguments to support that. I do realise that it is a high bar to go up against SAGE and its reports. But if we want evidence-based decisions, is that not what we have to do?
Here is what the Guardian has to say about the composition of SAGE.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/27/gaps-sage-scientific-body-scientists-medical
Goodness gracious. They’ve left out all the people who could do the things you mention to come up with decent guidelines. I wonder why?
Maybe – but to some extent it does not matter. Scientifically, if SAGE got it wrong, someone else has to get it right and show why. If SAGE are not doing it properly, someone else has to do it better and use that to push for a different decision. It is not enough to complain.
This article is 18 months old.
I remember someone bringing it up on UnHerd last year.
I went and looked at the composition of SAGE at that time (2 clicks away via Google). In April there were 86 members listed (not counting the subsidiary “feed in” committees like NERVTAG). 5 of them were psychologists, the other participants were who you would expect, immunologists, critical care specialists, public health bods, a renal physician, diabetic specialists, geriatricians, CMOs, and including yes … a respiratory virus specialist and even an environmental engineer specialising in air flow dynamics.
Looking at the list today there are now 149 participants and no, I am not going to go through them one by one checking all their specialties.
All these people don’t turn up to all the meetings of course – they are invited to participate according to what needs to be discussed. All the minutes of SAGE and all the feeder committees are available to view as well, along with the supporting evidence they have used.
More details here at Gov.uk :
List of participants of SAGE and related sub-groupsUpdated 22 November 2021
and
Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies
That’s good to know. Thank you.
I seem to remember someone on UnHerd quoting this article in the Spring of last year.
I looked then at the composition of SAGE. It had 86 participants at that time (not counting the “feeder” committees like NERVTAG).
5 of the participants were psychologists the others were who you would expect – immunologists, critical care specialists, public health bods, a renal physician, diabetes specialists, geriatricians, CMOs, and including yes … a respiratory virus specialist and even an environmental engineer specialising in air flow dynamics.
Looking today there are now 149 participants.
They don’t all turn up for every meeting, of course – just when they are needed.
Minutes of the meetings, along with the evidence they reviewed and membership and membership interests all available online.
The T cell thing. Well the good news is that although this type of research is really difficult and expensive to do there is lots being done. Does pre infection with SARS (not many people got it) or other coronaviruses give you cast iron underpants vis a vis Sars Cov-2 ? well apparently not given the ubiquity of common cold coronaviruses and the amount of damage this upstart cousin has wreaked across the planet.
“They are also very, very, easy to fool, more so than other demographics, a thing that professional magicians have known for a long time.”
So what is the evidence for this other than Mr Gardiner’s alleged experience ? If you don’t count you actually don’t know whether such an opinion is an accurate representation of reality or not. That which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
The BBC article is from 2017 and mentions 2 specific areas of research – psychology and “cancer studies” (type of study not described). I don’t think the difficulties with reproducibility in psychology was a surprise to anyone, given that the majority of these studies are dealing with this infinitely variable entity called a human being.
Back in 2017 1 in 10 drugs never made it to market. From this great article (and others) “Counting the cost of failure in drug development” Lo June 2017 it is clear that almost out of necessity pharma companies have had to use almost a scattergun approach to new drug developments – why ? because there isn’t enough base knowledge about how different human bodies work to inform even the basic pre-clincal work. The article suggests one possible, expensive, part solution.
The magicians have done studies on fooling people. And the scientists have done studies about being fooled. The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, which used to be called the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, used to — and maybe still does, I haven’t been paying attention — go around investigating claims of the paranormal. Found fraud, after fraud, after fraud after fraud. And documented again and again how the credulous scientists had a hard time getting into the correct mindset to deal with somebody who is trying to deceive you.
Thank you for not taking my comment badly.
I think we’re in total agreement on most things, but maybe differ on the current state of science.
You said:
“Getting to where we are now took decades and centuries”
and you are absolutely right, but does that not beg the question why have we throen all this knoeledge in the trash can and replaced it with pseudo science that is no longer up for debate.
For example decades of research on masks has been ignored and we are now told masks work. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the science which clearly said one thing until 2020 and then flipped. Amazingly all the govt scientists said masks didn’t work and then all of them said the science of decades was wrong. Very weird.
The same is true of how to handle a pandemic. If you research ALL the science of the last century, one wonders why, again in total lockstep, all the govt scientists flipped and handled it in a way than went against WHO’s original pandemic guidelines.
Then there’s the scientific definition of words like:
– vaccine
– pandemic
– herd immunity
Decades of science was clear as to the meaning of these words, but then govt scientists, in lockstep, agreed to change these definitions hugely.
Note I keep saying ‘govt scientists’ because if you research this you’ll find tens of thousands of scientists who question all of this changing of decades of scientific thinking.
Like you, I too think we should respect scientists and the knowledge we have painstakingly acquired over centuries. THAT is what makes me question why govt scientists and big pharma have been allowed to redefine terms, ignore decades of established scientific thought, and present things as scientific fact with a complete unwillingness to participate in the usual discipline and rigor of true scientific debate and discovery. That strikes me as being a scientific dictatorship and nothing like the kind of free-thinking and pioneering ‘science’ of the past. The scientific giants of the past must be turning in their graves.
I have not got a good answer to you on masks – though I keep wearing mine and think there may well be one. But for the rest I question your claim that we have “throen all this knoeledge in the trash can and replaced it with pseudo science that is no longer up for debate“. I do not think it is unheard of for scientific consensus to be contested, or for thousands of individual scientists to question establisned consensus (sometimes rightly, more often less so), and get miffed when the authorities do not agree with them. What is new, if anything, is that a combination of the internet and the urgency of COVID have given individual dissenters an audience and a notoriety that they could never have dreamed of in any previous century.
As for your word definitions I do not see what you mean. ‘Vaccine’ and ‘herd immunity’ mean the same thing as they alweays did AFAIAC, and the limit between ‘pandemic’, ‘epidemic’, and ‘widespread, infections disease’, is mostly arbitrary and administrative anyway.
Vaccine — at least in some countries — has always meant ‘sterilising vaccine’, which is why, there, the flu thing has always been called a ‘shot’, and a ‘prophylactic measure’ but not a ‘vaccine’.
Herd immunity some places is being defined as ‘sufficient people have got immunity from being vaccinated, and vaccinated alone’. Those of you who got immunity from being infected and recovering do not count. Also, you do count if doubly vaxxed, even though we know that the doubly vaxxed can catch the disease. You want to define herd immunity as ‘the disease cannot find new hosts so finds it difficult/impossible to replicate’ for whatever reason — even if we don’t know what it is. Even if it turns out that throwing virgins into the volcano gets you this result 🙂 Herd immunity should be about how hard a time the disease is having in finding new hosts, whether or not pharma got paid for your contribution.
Agree on herd immunity.
OK, I saw the first video,and it confirms that this kind of thing should be done in text. Videos are fine to tell a story, but not so good to present arguments in a controversial case.
But OK, this is good enough to look at further. I shall try to find time to check a couple of his papers – and other people’s refutations. If Fenton can no longer get published, one possible reason (apart from conspiracy) could be that his colleagues have noticed some flaws in his work. Again, thanks for the reference.
OK, I had a second look, and Fenton still looks quite professional (again, thanks). I’d certainly believe his general cautions about how many ways data can be distorted (innocently), and how much information and care it would take to get rid of all of them. I’d like to see a detailed study based on his methods – as well as the counterarguments from people who disagree with him. Of course, if he is not currently getting published, we areunlikely to see either – which seems a shame.
I see some shortcomings, though. First, he is not doing his detailed Bayesian model either (there not being enough data). Instead he is discarding a lot of the available information, and selecting without too much ado a particular set of classification criteria for his mortality analysis. That much freedom of action leaves a lot of scope for adjusting data to a desired conclusion. Is it really the case that e.g. intensive care data or death certificates can give *no information whatsoever* about the effectiveness of vaccination? Then, he seems to be suggesting that vaccination is causing quite a lot of deaths, to counterbalance any lives saved from reducing the severity of COVID. Yet he is basing that only on getting the numbers to fit, and has absolutely nothing to say about the likely mechanisms, let alone evidence for what they are. That is not really enough, IMHO. Conclusions based on purely numerical fitting are generally a lot less reliable if they are not backed up by information about the mechanism – as many people have found who tried to predict the future behaviour of the stock market purely by extrapolating from the past.
Finally I see no evidence that official data are being manipulated, as opposed to people simply using their best judgement in a complex situation. I would only go for ‘manipulation’ as an explanation if I had a very high prior probability for vaccination being useless and/or health authorities being dishonest.
To sum up I’d say that he has convinced me that available estimates are probably more uncertain than I had thought at first – but he has *not* convinced me that the opposite view is any more certain, or that the balance of probabilities has shifted. That would require positive evidence (and a lot more work), as opposed to just pointing to how difficult is is to determine.
The paper from the joint Swedish-Danish-Norwegian study hasn’t been published yet. In the meantime, here is what the Norwegian Institute of Public Health is saying about it (in English). https://www.fhi.no/en/news/2021/myocarditis-in-boys-and-young-men-can-occur-more-often-after-the-spikevax-v/
Start here. It’s an abstract but you can get full pub. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/circ.144.suppl_1.10712
This abstract is written with language one normally only sees in the Sun newspaper – proper researchers don’t use adjectives like “dramatically”.
There are typos in this abstract =/- instead of +/-
I then look at the figures for IL6 and the humongous ranges they are quoting here (with no stats to indicate that the differences they found with these huge ranges were meaningful or not). The same applied to the other 2 markers they looked at.
At that point I give up and go back to watching world chess.
Is that so. Perhaps you should read more of the scientific literature. There is a lot of hyping in the scientific literature so I’m not at all surprised by the use of the word dramatic. Personally, I don’t think it’s appropriate unless the effect really is dramatic. A better word might be “significant” but many non-english speakers can make that mistake.
“Perhaps you should read more of the scientific literature.”
LOL !
All I can say is that the the scientific literature I read doesn’t use hyperbolic adjectives at all. In fact if I see one in the title, the abstract or the discussion it rings all sorts of alarm bells for me.
LOL your scientific field must be different from mine, and mine (molecular biophysics/structural biology) is supposed to be rather hard core.
And here’s another:
https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/cid/ciab989/6445179?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Aaaah ! let the paper wars commence !
Here is a nice balanced article from Nature with decent references and no pay wall :
Heart-inflammation risk from Pfizer COVID vaccine is very low October 2021https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02740-y
Thank-you for your references, I like to see peer-reviewed work from journals that I generally trust. Like you, my antennae start vibrating when I see a paper with dramatic language and too many typos, or lack of decent statistical analyses.
The rate may well be low. What is low: 1 in 10,000, 1 in 50,000, 1 in a million. And then look at the rates in the relevant demographic. So yes, the risk is low, but the risk of any bad outcome from COVID in the 11-25 yr group is also very very low.
The article in Nature is a news report, not a scientific paper, that reports on the results presented in two papers in the New England Journal of Medicine. But my question to you is whether you have actually read the Nature piece.
Here’s a direct quote from a paragraph (the 9th one) in the article: “But young men aged 16–19 had a 15 in 100,000 chance of developing myocarditis after their second shot. The vast majority of these cases were mild and eventually resolved. The researchers also found that myocarditis was more likely to develop after the second vaccine dose than the first.”
Now by my calculation 15 in 100,000 translates to 1 in 6667. That’s not such a low risk. Now if you’re 60 and older or a woman, you’re risk is much much lower. But women, especially young women, are subject to other adverse effects, including rare clotting events which are not just limited to the AZ vaccine.
The paragraph above that states: “The researchers found that up to 4 in 100,000 men developed myocarditis after receiving their second dose of the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine, but the incidence for women was fewer than one in 100,000.” Again 4 in 100,000 for ALL men, translates to 1 in 25,000, which is not that small a risk.
The paragraph above that one states: “The researchers identified 136 cases of myocarditis reported within one month of having a Pfizer shot. Of these, 95% were mild, but one person died.” Now death is a pretty bad adverse event wouldn’t you say. But so-called mild myocarditis is a complete misnomer: there is no such thing as mild myocarditis because the damage is permanent. As I noted in a previous post the individual may not notice anything especially if he/she doesn’t engage in any really intense physical activity, but wait and see what happens to that individual in 50 yrs time. Worth remembering that 75% of all heart transplants are the result of cardiomyopathy secondary to myocarditis. And from Google regarding life expectancy with myocarditis: “Long-term prognosis was usually good with a 3–5-year survival ranging from 56 to 83%, respectively. Patients with acute fulminant myocarditis, once they survive the acute illness, had an excellent long-term prognosis of 93% at 11 years, compared with 45% of the patients presenting with acute non-fulminant myocarditis.” Doesn’t seem to me that those are such good odds if one is young and develops myocarditis subsequent to COVID vaccination.
“Now by my calculation 15 in 100,000 translates to 1 in 6667.”
Que ? my trusty calcuator (significant other with computer science degree) calculates 15 in 100,000 as 0.15 in 1,000 and 4 in 100,000 is 0.04 in 1,000
The 23 US Military Personnel case series that you mentioned in another post is a lovely study.
I note that in the discussion they say “support the diagnosis of hypersensitivity myocarditis.” and further research from The Clinicopathological Profile of Eosinophilic Myocarditis Sheikh 2018
tells me “Hypersensitivity myocarditis is a self-limiting condition. It is not associated with ST-segment abnormalities. Cardiac involvement is rare with only mild heart failure symptoms that resolve spontaneously”
So one has high hopes that the majority of these guys have no untoward sequelae.
I note also that there are 6 different types of eosinophilic myocarditiis and that they point out in this study that : ” nearly 1% of highly fit athletes with mild COVID-19 infection have evidence of myocarditis on cMRI.”
0.15 in 1000 is what? It’s 1 in 6667. Let’s do the math for you. 1.0/0.15 = 6.6667.
Now let’s get to the psychology of this: 15 in 100,000 sounds like very little because the dominator is so large. 0.15 in 1000 also sounds little because the numerator is less than 1. But 1 in 6667 doesn’t sound that little anymore does it>
Now given uncertainties, if one is realistic the risk is anywhere between 1 in 5000 and 1 in 10,000. One person may regard that risk has nothing to worry about. Another may believe that it is something to worry about, especially given the potential long term consequences of myocarditis even following recovery.
Mandating a vaccine with this sort of risk profile for a disease that poses almost no risk to the relevant demographic, strikes me as unethical. Let everybody judge their own risk and make up their own minds. But don’t claim the current vaccines are as safe as the MMR, DPT and polio vaccines, because that would be completely disingenuous.
“given the potential long term consequences of myocarditis even following recovery.”
Seems to depend on what sort of myocarditis you get.
“But don’t claim the current vaccines are as safe as the MMR, DPT and polio vaccines,”
No they probably aren’t but they have been pretty effective at reducing the mortality and morbidity of a widespread nasty disease.
Well done. Throw Japan into the mix now. Ivermectin does almost no harm. Incredibly safe if taken orally at proper dose and even for horses it is 200 mcg/kg which is pound per pound the human suggested dose. Court ordered Pfizer adverse event released yesterday. First 90 days approx 1200 deaths reported. As the most conservative multiplier of vax death under-reporting is 30 according to CDC prior to 2020, that is 36,000 in 90 days. Supported by Norway’s Pfizer roll out documented at .09% mortality. Supported also by international jumps in all cause mortality at every vax roll out. When do we stop putting lipstick on the pig?
I agree. Merck was a very good company in the early days especially working on Ivermectin to cure the diseases you have mentioned in Africa. You have hit the nail on the head regarding Ivermectin. The reports I have read show that Ivermectin is more effective than Pfizer’s Molnupiravir but needs to be given in the early stages of Covid. The big barrier is that it is too cheap so they invented their own version which is massively more expensive and it appears that governments have complied to get it banned in the west.
“Further, ivermectin has an incredibly good safety profile when administered in human doses”
The horse ivermectin comes in a big syringe kind of tube with stops guides on the plunger shaft – and a ring that locks to the stops – and each stop is for 50 pounds body weight. The human/horse body weight dose is same. One puts the stop lock onto the does amount which corresponds to the ‘horse’ body rate, say 4th notch for 200 pounds (which happens to also be my weight) and dispense it. The entire tube does 1200 lbs of body weight, 6 doses for a 200 lb horse – and cost $9 a tube at the farm supply store near me.
I have used it three times, the last when my double jabbed mother got covid a bit ago, and we both felt like we had colds – she tested positive and got monoclonal antibodies, I self medicated.
I have taken it regularly as a prophylaxis during the epidemic waves as do many thousands of other people. I also use the animal version even though my doctor does prescribe IVM – especially for his Covid patients. The animal version is cheap in South Africa and the pills are way more expensive.
Many lives have been saved here and unfortunately data is not being formally collected as there has been a lot of disinformation spread about the drug. Some of this is obviously deceitful and designed to influence the gullible – think the FDA/corporate media communications that humans should not take ‘horse medicine’. The big pharma tentacles reach deep.
It does not just stop there – I lived poor and remote many years, where one self doctored, and another thing exists – legal antibiotics, and you wish for (In USA) all you have to do is buy them for Fish, or Birds, they require no prescription, and are in the same tablets and doses as for humans. Remember azithromycin? Good to have a Zpack in case you get Pneumonia (bacterial) and some of the ones for skin infections as they can kill fast, like Clindamycin
Look online (USA sites anyway) and you see all are there to buy prescription free – ‘Bird Zithro (Azithromycin)’
https://fishmoxfishflex.com/collections/bird-azithro-azithromycin-250mg
I have never been one who is helpless…..but always have depended on my self to get through things if at all possible. I hand built my own house – and it is no different to any middle class house, I rebuilt many truck engines, and a couple transmissions, and motorcycles, and so on –
Also Leslie, I have an 80L welding Oxygen bottle full, and a medical ox regulator made for them, and the face cannualas so I can give O2 if need in my house – I got it all ready in 2020 Feb when the Chinese videos of people collapsing came out. And the Querctin and zinc and the rest of the vitamins, and foods for being sick…..Then in March 2020 I got really bad Covid and was fine at home – I never needed the O2, but it was handy if I did….
Japan removed the ban on Ivermectin and the cases reduced from a very high curve to practically nil. This kind of news is censored in some circles so something fishy is going on.
Neither the Japanese government nor the Japanese Medical Association have ever officially recommended the use of Ivermectin outside of clinical trials.
In early August Japan was facing a big wave of infections and at that time the government extended its Covid 19 emergency curbs to 70% of the population.
At the same time (12th August) a local group of doctors – the Tokyo Medical Association gave a press conference and recommended that Ivermectin be considered as a drug treatment for Covid 19.
2 weeks later case numbers dropped and hospitalisation rates followed.
So, one press conference resulted in hundreds and thousands of people rushing out to purchase and use Ivermectin ? Well, this is unknown because there is NO DATA showing what Ivermectin usage was before or after the TMA announcement.
In addition the same doctor from the same Tokyo Medical Association had said exactly the same things in a press conference on February 9th and guess what happened after that – Covid 19 cases increased for most of March and April (as in fact they did after the second press conference, but for a shorter time period.)
Here’s the thing. Personally I’ve got no idea whether hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin work. But if I wanted to find out by conducting a double blind RCT, I would use EXACTLY the same protocol as had been reported to be successful prior. Did the medical establishment and the powers that be do that. Did they replicate the exact protocol and dosages used by Raoul in Marseille comprising HCQ, azithromycin and zinc. The answer is not a single one of the “official RCTs” chose to duplicate Raoul’s work. They changed things around, omitting zinc and/or azithromycin, increased the dosages of HCQ to toxic amounts, an no surprise things didn’t work out. i.e. the trials were designed to fail. Exactly the same story with ivermectin which should be administered with vit D, Zn and either azithromycin or doxycycline. The question is why this was done? Why fly bind and try and reinvent the wheel when what appeared to be effective protocols had already been established or claimed to have been established were already available. There’s only one reason. The powers that be didn’t want these cheap repurposed drug combos to work because if they had the vaccines and any other subsequent anti-viral drugs, including remdesivir, would never have received an EUA in the US.
That’s exactly my understanding too.
No-one as far as I know has done a serious study replicating Gautret,Raoult et al’s original protocol because of all the concerns regarding the methodology and statistics used to generate the conclusions. See this paper for a full measured critique : “Reply to Gautret et al: hydroxychloroquine sulfate and azithromycin for COVID-19: what is the evidence and what are the risks?” International of Antimicrobial Agents July 2020
There is a lot of history of pharmaceutical studies giving positive results that in the end do not hold up. Trials are vulnerable to random fluctuations and any number of subtle biases – that is why they insist on double-blind trials. Noting wrong with initial exploratory trials, but if the effect is real it should be robust, and show up also with other concentrations, other co-drugs, etc. This is not a Harry Potter potion, wher the entire effect can be inverted if you stir clockwise instead of anti-clockwise.
It has been extremely effective in Uttar Pradesh and there are questions to be asked about the way clinical trials were run in the west
Precisely. And I would only add to your use of the word obscene the word atrocity to describe what is being done. This entire thing – from the gain-of-function “research” (design, more like), to the censorship of information, and the refusal to offer alternative treatment or simply credit natural immunity is a crime against humanity. Conspiracies are indeed afoot – and that’s no theory.
More generally: Who says spending $billions to develop a drug means that the drug is any good, anyway? One of those “dirty tricks” is to develop a drug and then mine the data to see if there is some effect that can be fobbed off as a therapy.
‘at the expense of human lives’
So if the drug had not been developed and sold, less lives would have been lost ?
Odd
It is obvious to me that Big Pharma is corrupt; they are there only to sell a product. What is the alternative?
Governments nationalise drug investigation? I’m already shaking at the thought of this.
Governments do something else? But they need advisors to do this and the advisors have to come from Pharma backgrounds so they must be corrupt as well.
People develop their own solution? Back to Granny’s days – honey and lemon is good for colds.
To change the subject, all scientific discussion has now been corrupted. I’m thinking about environmental issues here. Why should this be any different?
You didn’t provide a solution. Relying on Soviet Pharma or Chinese Pharma feels foolhardy. Likewise where I the successful world leading State owned Pharma industry model?
An excellently written hors d’oeuvre on the topic, but definitely requires a deeper dive if readers are to get even the slightest glimpse into the true underbelly of this evil industry.
Just like Bill Gates, the pharmaceutical industry spends hundreds of millions on bribing the media to portray them as the good guys, and millions more to politicians to pave the way to monopolistic style commercial powers, and a willingness to turn a blind eye to what the public (if they only knew) would consider to be criminal practices.
People need to wake up and realise that the pharmaceutical industry is one of mainstream medias biggest ad revenue generators. This means they effectively control the media, which is why none of the MSM giants write anything that criticises the big pharma complex or, for example, the vaccines that are generating bilkions in revenues. Why would they risk offending the golden goose? It also explains why the media is doing everything in its collective power to ramp up vaccine uptake. This is the best form of free advertising big pharma could have ever dreamed of.
Unfortunately, this ownership of the whole media means that people are not getting a fair and accurate story about covid, vaccines or adverse reactions. They’re getting an edited version that suits the big pharma paymasters.
An essay on just the marketing/PR/lobbying tactics of big pharma would most certainly make for interesting reading, It is essential to understand how low these companies are willing to sink in order to make billions a year. Such an article would make the mafia look like a charitable organisation.
Another essay could focus on how the pharmaceutical industry is more bothered about lifelong sickness than lifelong health. If they had the choice between one inexpensive pill that cured an ailment or an expensive drug that the person had to take for life (ie. the subscription model) they’d push for the latter every time, which is why they will be salivating at the thought of routine covid booster jabs.
Just to be clear, there are many amazing, honest and passionate scientists who work for these companies who do incredible work. These people are not the problem at all. To understand the issues one needs to climb far higher up the company. Take an indepth look at the corporate histories and business practices of the top Pfizer or Moderna executives and you’ll find a lack of ethics and a willingness to do whatever is neccessary that is no different to Theranos. The only difference is that the latter took it way too far.
Regarding your comment on lobbying, Russel Brand who I thought a tw*t (for no particular reason) and now think near genius, has a recent YouTube inter alia on the lobbying of Senator Kyrsten Sinema by the pharmaceutical industry to the tune of $750,000 and $920,000 from other industry lobbies. I would have thought this criminal.
People sneer at others for getting news from podcasts, not realizing in their ignorance that they will never get the truth from corporate media who are so heavily compromised.
In fairness, Russell was a t**t when he was drinking and drugging and *horing and Katy Perrying. Then he sobered up, rubbed his eyes, saw the world he was hiding from, and grew into manhood. Just like the delicious Rick Mayall (sorely missed).
That is true. One has to understand that this is happening under a seemingly corrupt Democratic Goverment party.
Sorry, he’s a woke, lovey tw*t, who may have happened on something of interest in his relentless drive to promote a mindless anti capitalist agenda.
I think you should take another look…
Is saying that Big Pharma is evil not the same as saying that capitalism is evil?
Governments have started to sort out the problem of large corporations not paying enough tax. Is it simply not time for them to get around to sorting out Big Pharma without losing the benefits?
No, more regulation is needed. I don’t for a moment believe that socialism is not evil – there is corruption, it is also run by elites, but the middle class and ambition which creates hard work is obliterated.
Part of the problem with capitalism may be that it doesn’t scale. What works great for a large market or network of small firms competing against each other, none of whom have much power doesn’t work out so well when the power is concentrated in a few huge firms who can buy regulators and politicians with ease and crush any potential competitors long before they become threatening.
That is true Laura. The EU was mostly lobbied by Big companies who all wanted to remain. A country prospers where there is a level playing field and competition is encouraged.
Capitalism developed from simple trade which isn’t evil. If evil people partake of it then yes it can be evil but that is why we have government and laws isn’t it?
Your comments are absolutely spot on and accurate. Well said.
Thank you all for the very intelligent discussion in the comments. I echo the concern regarding the alliance of ‘government – healthcare – pharma – education’ as monolithic, while diminishing the scientist and patient. It does seem to be a ‘hamburger – lighthouse’ dichotomy.
The problems are not just in Big Pharma. Government no longer has any incentive to discourage monopolies in many sectors. News and information companies enjoy safe harbor because technology is rapidly evolving and government has become a tick on the dog rather than policing abuse. Government involvement with energy conservation makes government a party to subpar products we consume, so there is no longer any incentive to protect consumers. There is no longer any such thing as a ‘durable good’.
The firewall between the regulator and the regulated no longer exists. It may have existed for. brief time but Big Business has found a way to cultivate government to do its bidding and vice versa. It is corrupting.
Once the government gets corrupt it taints everything else.
When I say what you are saying I get called a lot of names but I agree with every word you say. I expect you get cancelled on Youtube and Facebook so the $$$$ reach far.
Thankfully Unherd readers are more discerning and open to hearing opinions they might not always agree with. Although I do think that a lot of Unherd readers have taken the time to do a lot of research away from the MSM and so have a less myopic view of the world, and rarely just go with the narrative given to them by the TV.
The first thing we need to do is to stop allowing the drug makers to fund and run the studies of whether the drugs are effective. This needs to be done by an independent body, for whom the incentives are lined up with ‘never tell lies’ and ‘don’t take bribes’ and ‘avoid regulatory capture’ and the like. Making the people who run these things be elected in some way might be a way to keep the foxes from managing the henhouse.
Big pharma always says that they need the cash to cover the costs of development, but most of the costs are in the trials and the studies. If we no longer trust them to do the trials — and we shouldn’t — then they don’t need the money for that. Coming up with the idea for new medicines and treatments is something that researchers can do in tiny startup companies. Once they have something that has gone through the independent testing procedure, they don’t then immediately have to license their patents to one monopoly holder, but can license them to several companies whose expertise is ‘manufacturing in quantity’. At this point you can let the market take over as these companies compete with each other which usually means lower prices, as long as the independent testing body gets enough funding.
Good comment. The pharmaceutical industry’s rot runs deep – as is evidenced already by the discussion on this page. Of course they should never fund studies, yet they do. It beggars belief.
Yes, and it’s not only Big Pharma, but Big Tech, Big Finance etc. These unholy troikas of Government, Big Business and un-elected “regulatory” agencies invariably seem to set the fox to guard the hen house.
So the original costs are insignificant??
And regulators are already part of the electoral political process and independent of pharma. If they can be captured, so can any other politically controlled organisation you propose.
There is no organisation on earth that cannot be captured, but you can make it harder to do this. Instead of having an independent testing body, you can have multiple ones and have them compete with each other on the basis of integrity, for instance.
You need some extremely careful setting up to get that result. Who chooses which independent testing body gets the contract? If it is the companies, they will compete on giving the most company-friendly results, like big accountancy firms or the competing UK press complaints bodies. If it is the government, thy will likely compete on lobbying and political connections.
The point is that another process has to be found – I am sure you would agree with this.
I like this. It should apply to everything – particularly media and government.
Also the ‘original costs’ for drug discovery these days have shrunk. You can now do with inexpensive or free software on your laptop what used to be only possible using a hideously expensive mainframe computer, which never had enough cycles for you, as was common for drug development even 20 years ago. But going from ‘this looks like it would be worth doing a trial’ to ‘we can sell this’ is still very expensive.
That is an excellent comment. The biggest costs in drug development relate to trials. But trials and their results can always be distorted to put the best possible light on a given drug. It is indeed unconscionable that the drug companies conduct the clinical trials given the huge conflict of interest.
I like the idea, but I guess the problem would be scaling up and down the expertise to manage the trials, within the independent body(ies). I guess pharma companies have traditionally funded the trials as they had this expertise.
It’s more because they had the money. They outsource this stuff.
Now you say it, I guess they do. It is this regulatory area where a lot of the cost and time is taken, so I think you have a point. Plus it keeps the free market speed in the rest of the process.
Sounds good Laura. You’d make a good health secretary.
Earlier this year I had two doses of Astrazeneca. Now I am due for a booster, and this will be Pfizer. The NHS website says that AZ can be given as a booster in some cases, but I’ve asked and not got it.
The receptionists at my GP practice have given me the brush-off.
AZ has been supplied at cost price of about £3/dose, whereas Pfizer is sold at a profitable £20 or so. Maybe it’s true that Pfizer provokes a stronger immune response, or maybe something else is going on.
Pascal Soriot, head of AZ, insists that his product is superior, but then he would. Albert Bourla, of Pfizer, tells the opposite story.
After reading Tom Chivers article I am deeply suspicious.
This version of the flu has a 99%+ recovery rate. Why did you submit to having poison injected into your body – twice! – when you could have just let your natural immunity handle it if you were exposed?
You don’t know how old I am, and you don’t know what heart condition I have, so please don’t give medical advice.
I know but it is too late now. I will be a good boy now and won’t take the booster though
Flu is not a corona virus – so it’s not a version of the flu.
“Why did you submit to having poison injected into your body – twice!”
Because it seems to work well. But one must each weigh ones cost/benefit situation.
I refuse the vax because they try to make me get it, and that means I resist just because that is how I am – the wreckage of my life is because I always had to go out the door marked ‘NO EXIT’ and in the door marked ‘NO ENTRY’, I just cannot help it……
‘Live Free Or Die, Death Before Dishonour’, silly, I know, but it is just how I am.
On a scale of 1 to 10, how likely are you to be rebellious?11
Thank you.
Dr Robert Malone the inventor of mRNA vaccine for speaks against the Pfizer vaccine as health checks were not kept to and they crossed a line. He gets cancelled regularly on the media and he is the inventor. One has to wonder.
Tricky, what to do….
But if you do get the Big-Pharma to do the $30 pill in USA, three cents pill in Guiana thing – then would it not also fall on the other vast, Power mad, power wielding, politician owing groups to do the same.
The Military Industrial Complex. The Pharma/Medical and them are basically just identical twins, perhaps negatives of each other, to use the old Film analogy – but otherwise are Trillion Dollar Industries who do more Lobbying and corrupting of the Political Process, than all decent business put together. An M-16 rifle to USA Military, $1000,- to the Guiana market, $70, is that not also fair?
The mechanisms the Global Elite work with to subject us to their twisted future goals are: Medical/Pharma Industrial Complex,. Military Industrial Complex, Banksters, Finance, Walstreet, Hedge-funds, stock-market. Bond market, Social Media/Tech industrial Complex, Mega-Ag (5 companies do most of all the food), Education Industrial Complex, MSM/Entertainment Industrial Complex, Consumer/Retail Industrial Complex…….. You know, the ones who pay for all the media campaigns, own the Politicians, decide what gets said and shown, and get all the money and run the world’s Economies?
Shouldn’t they all do it? Poor people do not live by medicines alone.
I found this article interesting beyond just big Pharma. Tom describes what happens when human beings set up a system, then get lax about the controls they’ve put in place.
Assuming irrationality, greed and venality are essential parts of the human condition, to live cooperatively large groups require a broadly common understanding of right and wrong (essentially something like the 10 commandments) and then sufficient diffusion of power to keep the psychos (who tend to find their way to the top) under control. For a few decades after the war we had that, but we’ve been too weak to resist the multiple small infringements and are now seeing the cumulative effect.
I don’t believe there’s a cabal of “inner Davos” working together at world control. I just think we’re seeing what happens across multiple complex systems Pharma, military industrial, academic, political when the borders of their behaviour aren’t policed properly over an extended period.
Let’s smash it to pieces, and build Nirvana from the rubble, is always the left’s solution. There has to be a better way than that but am not awash with confidence that we’ll find it.
The problems are real, and huge, but I honestly curious about what kind of solutions you would consider. If companies are too powerful, should governments and intergovernment organisations have more power, to keep them in check? If there is too much money in politics, do you favour strict limits on political donations and campaign costs, government enforced? How would you deal with the many countries run by kleptocrats, from usia to the Congo?
Patriotism, morality, and unity amongst the voters is the only way government can stop the monied from preying on the citizens. Like in the past, where voters would vote against their own direct interests if they felt it the National good, and had a unified ‘Christian’ system of morality and society.
That is 100% why the divisions in the Western Society have been created – divided and conquered, and the voters are owned.
In USA the majority does not pick the elected – the minority fringe do, as they tip the scale for one side over the other – and they can be bought, or manipulated.
Really it goes back to Wiemar Germany – that time and place where fantastic creativity existed – but a very great deal of it was towards evil, and now days, as the generations before us, it is what is out to destroy the West. Specifically the ‘Frankfurt School’ – search it, it is fascinating – but Wiki is completely captured by their minions (post Modernist Neo-Marxists) so gives a very partial story…
But take a right wing interpretation of their goals, the 11 Points of the Frankfurt School (I know, is biased to the conspiratorial Right), but you can see it really is happening:
“The 11 Point Plan of the Frankfurt School
1. The creation of racism offenses.
2. Continual change to create confusion.
3. The teaching of sex and homosexuality to children.
4. The undermining of schools’ and teachers’ authority.
5. Huge immigration to destroy identity.
6. The promotion of excessive drinking.
7. Emptying of churches.
8. An unreliable legal system with bias against victims of crime.
9. Dependency on the state or state benefits.
10. Control and dumbing down of media.
11. Encouraging the breakdown of the family.”
“(((Munzenberg))) summed up the Frankfurt School’s long-term operation thus: ‘We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks’.””
Thanks. Not a direct recipe (of course) but interesting points.
“The job of government in this situation should be to find the bad incentives, the market failures, and to patch them; to make it work, to decide which end of the balloon to squeeze.” That sounds awfully like ‘picking winners’ which bodies like the EU do so badly. Nationalising drug development would be a catastrophe for healthcare: politicians with no understanding of science making decisions which affect the health of a nation – sounds just like how Covid is being managed!
I appreciate that the love of money is the root of all Pharma evil; but maybe we are stuck with it to some degree as the best pragmatic solution. Although that legal development in India does sound like a useful moderator.
Another article written for the sole purpose of collecting likes in the comments section. It all boils down to the fantasy of a socialist egalitarian society which will have its top scientists produce great products without expecting a penny more than their least productive colleagues… These ideas were tried over and over and failed again and again
I have enjoyed reading the comments about this old chestnut. In the end I sum my feelings up as, Aesop’s Fables – Have you ever made a wish and got what you wanted, only for the reality to fall way short of the expectation?” be careful what you wish for“
This is a provocative article but in trying to provoke argument it just scratches the surface of the health problems in the world – note the word ‘health’ and not ‘sickness’.
The biggest killers in the world are the chronic diseases – those which develop over time and tend to hit older people. Basically, we are trying to keep people alive for longer. Many of these ‘diseases’ are partially self-inflicted. The very evil people (irony for the Americans) of the first world tried to save people in the third world from starvation by giving them bad, cheap food in large quantities and this created a liking for these bad foods – why eat your own poor crops when you can get sugary food cheaply? So, life expectancy is longer and chronic diseases become killers. There is no doubt that these situations demand better health, not perhaps better drugs.
So, we come to pandemics and there is only one at the moment. I took a cursory look at death rates from Covid around the world and came to no real conclusion. On these pages there are only anti-vaxxers so vaccination doesn’t seem that important in itself and I’m not sure how much it would cost to give the whole world a tin of the de-wormer. Probably a cheap solution.
But there are other issues. One is the health of the population and its innate resistance to a virus, another is the existence of health care and a third is political will. Brazil and Mexico have had very bad experiences – Brazil had no oxygen and no political will and Mexico was pretty much the same. India has done quite well but with a much younger population.
To paraphrase Mr Redman, if the pandemic were Ebola I think everything would have been completely different but Covid has only gone for the vulnerable (healthwise) so people have not felt quite as threatened.
Great comments
ooops, sorry, posted as a reply something I meant as a top level post. I moved it.
Hi Chris,
“but Covid has only gone for the vulnerable (healthwise) so people have not felt quite as threatened.”
BUT!!!!! To protect the vunerable the world has destroyed its self. Billions will soon be destroyed and condemed to utter poverty due to the reduced economic activity of lockdown economic knock-ons. (paying people not to produce, doing that by $50 Trillion of World debt created) Distorting the World Economy. The young have no hope of pensions, the middle aged either – (unless the entire economic paradigm changes completely)
The young are left to pay back this debt! And they will do it through either inflation of default and defaltion. They lost a huge amount of school and socializing – the young and middle aged have been destroyed to give the old another, partly, miserable couple of years.
This covid response has been one of the most evil actions by the global Governing Elites, ever dome to the world’s people.
Yes, you are correct. But the posr-war concensus in western democracies has been to prolong life at any cost. This includes phenomenally expensive cancer treatment with the aim of keeping someone alive for another year.
You are suggesting that for Covid this idea should be dropped in favour of support for the young people. It doesn’t matter whether I agree with this or not but it is a huge change of direction.
In the USA and UK the populations are getting older and their votes are becoming very, very important. If you withdraw protection from them they will turn more and more to the left and then you will have even worse problems. What you need is a politically correct solution, not a theoretically correct solution.
I have always been a scientist and proud of it. But I realised about 20 years ago that science was dead, killed by corruption. I was giving presentations around the world (including the US Navy and US Department of Defence) to try to solve certain problems. Others were presenting information which I knew was wrong, in order to sell their products. So, Big Pharma is corrupt and the vaccinations are probably poor solutions to the Covid problem.
The alternative is Granny’s suggestion : honey and lemon for a cold, etc. There are a few ideas and Invermectin is one, vitamin D another and they are not mutually exclusive. There will be others. But who will investigate them because Big Pharma and the universities have been corrupted? The same with global warming- the whole thing has been corrupted.
I predict that science will go down and down to a point we were at about 100 years ago and then suddenly will come alive again with a new vigour.
I almost always agree with you on theory. But a few hundred people agreeing on a theory doesn’t do anything.
My understanding is that Ebola is so deadly that kills its host too quickly – thereby making it less successful at widespread transmission.
You mention the chronic diseases – if you take heart disease and cancer (the biggest killers by some magnitude worldwide – one has to wonder about the silence of governments on causes, most of them lifestyle, poisons etc. Oh, but of course, the huge food industry and agrichemical industries are part of the problem and steer the narrative in the same way as big pharma.
Don’t leave big pharma out of heart disease and cancer though – they are capitalizing on it in a big way, with as much skullduggery as that used with Covid. This year I did my own reading and research, hunted down one of the top cardiac/lipid profs, did some of the less routine scans/tests and can now understand my own risk and contribute to my own healthcare. My understanding is that in most parts of the world, cardiology proceeds according to an outdated formula – with lots of profits for big pharma and the other large monopolies..
I’m not leaving Big Pharma out. I am a scientist and believe that all science has been corrupted. Everything Big P does is only to make money. The same goes for Environmental Sciences, the food industry as you say, everything.
I know this but knowing is not a comfort. Non-scientists in the universities are making a lot of money by discrediting science. What is the answer? Who will pay to investigate Invermectin as a solution to Covid or Honey & Lemon as the solution to a common cold? Governments can’t do anything because they rely on scientific advisors and they are, by definition, corrupt. The discussion is about Big P. Yes, they are corrupt so the answer is? Everyone go back to Granny’s recommendation?
Well there seem to be plenty of vocal people out there who do support the use of Ivermectin and want desperately to prove definitively that it works in order to discredit big pharma – you could try crowdfunding.
I’m not sure that the issues lie with big pharma – after all, for every successful project spawning billions for the pharma companies, there will be hundreds of failures costing the same companies millions.
The issue comes when you combine big pharma with corrupt media and corrupt governments. Sure it’s in Pfizer’s interests to promote their vaccine ahead of out-of-patent early treatment, or ahead of a supplied-at-cost AZ vaccine, but the problem comes when governments and the media not only parrot the Pfizer line without question, but also aggressively pursue, deplatform and hound to the ends of the earth anyone who dares to go against the Pfizer line and suggest that, actually, for example, Ivermectin is an early treatment worth persevering with. And then does the same to any doctors who attempt to provide this kind of treatment.
Oh and it’s also immensely harmful for governments to rely on the pronunciations of those who stand to get personally very rich by such behaviour referred to above, as the US has with the abhorrent Fauci.
This current situation with big pharma is only harmful because the media and governments allow it to be.
The pinch of all this is in this comment:
“Drug companies are just responding to the incentives we’ve set,” says Barder. “They’re doing the thing we asked them to do.”
As long as we (society) want to take pills to fix us: the model will not change: we have the drug industry we (by our way of approaching medicine) have asked for. Further, I am a vet and know very well how it works: drug companies provide perfectly packaged treatments for us making our life as medics very easy, with defence back up when things go wrong. (honestly: easy life)
The views and ways of much of the medical community is part of the reason the companies are there. And note: the drug companies have to justify themselves to their shareholders only. And ideally behave within the law (the duty of government… good luck).
If we want to resolve the drug company issues we have to seek to change medicine from a ‘just treating ill people approach’ (industry of illness) to health policies and research on how to make people healthy. The questions in research will change and the answers they get will be different from the current mainstream model. This will eventually be much cheaper and ‘nicer’ for society. Individuals will be much freer in deciding on their health approach, … and we would not need vaccines to manage covid… But research and publication is in the hand of big pharma (well their financial channels)… we are stuck so far unless governments cut the lobby out… good luck… Change will come from the population, don’t count on the powers that be…
This all sounded really sensible – untl you got to “… and we would not need vaccines to manage covid…”.
But big pharma controls the narrative, so the chance of cheap repurposed drugs could not be allowed to manage Covid.
I am interested in the opinion of vets, who arguably deal with more frequent epidemics.
Dear Rasmus, you seemed to me to have quite a sensible mind but it looks like you have not understood the last part of my post: read again slowly
The patent on Ivermectin ran out years ago and it is only sixty cents a dose but effective for Covid if used at the beginning. Pfizer has produced another version of this but at a far higher price and far less effective. With negative publicity from some quarters the authorities managed to ban Ivermectin which has been used safely for sixty years. One cannot help suspecting that it was too cheap and those with power managed to get it banned in the west.
It isn’t that big Pharma is bad, it is the ignorance and incompetence of the government and its advisers in accepting their claims and that of academics. Ultimately, of course it is our own fault because most have given up taking responsibility for themselves and delegated it to the government.
Thank you. A concise summation. Taxes, for a citizenry who has given up being willing to do the work of daily holding government’s feet to the fire, no longer function as pay to play. More like a poor man habitually buying a lottery ticket on government check day, a pathetic wistful tip of the hat to the vaguely remembered notion of hope. Getting the money out which our taxes come is only half the job. We must work to get our money’s worth once our “representatives” have been entrusted with it. The inevitable incompetence and venality of government is primary, but it enables Big Pharma to go bad to a spectacular degree.
When the BBC interviewed the Pfizer boss recently, no one disputed his claim that we might need booster jabs every year (paid for by taxpayers everywhere). And no one mentioned his company’s $1.3 billion fine, some years ago…. At the time, it was a USA record.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_pharmaceutical_settlements
Mr. Reagan said he had approved the bill ”with mixed feelings” because he had ”serious reservations” about the vaccine compensation program.
https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/15/us/reagan-signs-bill-on-drug-exports-and-payment-for-vaccine-injuries.html
Repeal the 1986 Vaccine Act, put Pharma back in open court, let the lawyers at them, and curse me in 25 years when we have a balanced system where the lawyers have beach houses again and Pharma execs are bankrupt. Yea, I hate lawyers too William Shakespeare, but they just take your money rather than destroy your medical freedom in the name of “science”.
I’m just going to leave this article here: https://brownstone.org/articles/your-booster-life-how-big-pharma-adopted-the-subscription-model-of-profitability/
It plays a bit fast and loose with some of the immunology but gets the key bits more or less correct. And although it’s strident tone may grate a little, the message is provocative and difficult to completely ignore.
I think many of us suspect that big Pharma would be happy if any of its drugs caused several other problems for patients which, in turn, would require a new cure, etc…
Given that the origins of Covid 19 virus are highly suspicious I feel that the article could have outlined the role of the US organisations like the CDC, the WHO and the myriad of NGOs and their connections with Big Pharma which appear to make all this possible.
Perhaps big pharma should get together and invent a brand new drug. One that appeals to the masses. Call it Tranquilax, a three in one miracle drug. Part tranquilliser part stimulant and a very strong laxative to take our minds of all the shit that is going on.
Having worked for small innovative engineering companies (not in pharma), I’m dubious about calls for more regulation. The rhetoric is always about cracking down on “Big” whatever but the burden always falls heaviest on smaller companies, (due to economies of scale) which is exactly to big corporations’ liking.
Yes, yes, yes. We get it. The first pill a drug company develops costs $billion. The second pill costs a fraction of a cent. The third pill costs a fraction of a cent. The nth pill costs that same fraction of a cent. Get to the point.
They can be absolutist, well so i can be too. It is repulsive to realise just how repulsively greedy and perverse they have become. So like all those tyrants/’captains of industry’ back in the latter half of the 19th century with its grand global gobbling up of so much that would effect the slowing down, progressively quicker each decade culminating in all the perversity of the present non-moment – taulology intended.
Is it not the age-old problem of monopoly? Democratic governments strive to limit it, but there are so many incentives to permit it, such as encouraging ‘national champions’, lobbying, bribes, legal action, buying up competitors, and I’m sure there are more of which I’m unaware.
“We are only limited by our inability to imagine, and our inability to imagine comes from a lack of curiosity;
Our lack of curiosity comes basic human laziness, the generic fight for survival on planet earth causes a desire to remain comfortable with the least amount of effort;
Thus, the status quo of inertia remains in effect.
We cannot imagine that some entity(s) have the gall to perpetuate a lie so big, so the average human cannot wrap their head around the idea of THE BIG LIE…
… but, Adolf Hitler and his cronies sure could imagine THE BIG LIE, because THEY SUCCESSFULLY IMPLEMENTED The Big Lie.
I’m still waiting for them to develop a safe and effective vaccine. Vaccine using the old definition of course
It’ll come along about the same time as a vaccine for the common cold.
Omnicron is basically the “common cold”. Nothing in the world is absolutely safe nor absolutely effective. Measuring trade-offs requires abdicating black or white fallacies.
Yes, well, that was my point.
Nothing in the world is safe. You can overdose on water. Life is not safe. Both safety and efficacy are measured using scales, statistics. Science is not easy. Measuring risks is not easy.
Strikes me as about right. Limited government, limited ‘big’. The Art and Discipline of cogent persuasion has been lost to common sight – even by the biggies/bullies. Once an entity gets too big then all is on the way out if such a ‘quasi’ bully is allowed to much ‘ground’ – pun intended. The Law, seasoned, reasoned and measured fairly for all, is what ensures tenure for civilisation. ‘We’ have a bullying global civilisation now which appears to be programming decline at various rates all around the Earth. Poor Earth. The savagery of ‘big’ is repulsive on all fronts.
The bullying you refer to might be capitalism and I have some bad news for those that hate capitalism: It is the most effective way to reduce poverty.
Would you classify *the collective force* of every nation outside the US demanding America abdicate biotech patents as “big” or “evil”? Canada, by all metrics, has higher standards of living than the USA yet they can get American innovations in generic form at a massive discount. Who will make the lifesaving drugs if not “Big Pharma”?
The Moderna and Pfizer mRNA vaccine patents were nullified by Biden. Did that increase the production and distribution of those vaccines? No. Because even post-industrial rich nations did not invest in the infrastructure needed. OWS incentivized creation and distribution pipelines.
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Those are contradictory claims. Either it costs billions of dollars to develop a new drug or the pill can cost a few cents to make. You can’t have both.
Yes, you can. The research may take a decade or more screening possible substances for the effect you want, testing it in the lab, carrying out clinical trials, getting regulatory approvals, and at the end of the process you may have something that is relatively easy to make in the volumes you need. But, why bother if you can’t cover the cost of all those inputs and get a return on investment? And, no, I don’t work for big pharma.
So you’re saying there is a point at which the research and development costs (testing, clinical trial cost, etc.) no longer apply to the overall cost of the pill. At what point is that again? And why, when your arbitrary threshold is met, do the other costs magically disappear? And, most importantly, where do they go?
I am simply saying that it may cost a great deal of time and money to find a drug that is relatively cheap to manufacture. Having found it, you will want to recoup your costs and make some profit some of which goes back to investors as dividends and some to fund future research. So to go back to your original point, it is possible to spend billions of dollars to develop a new drug that costs cents to make. Part of the development process would include finding a way to manufacture the drug as cheaply as possible.
I would simply add that big pharma will probably focus on conditions for which there will be a lot of demand for treatment rather than on rare conditions for which demand will be low.
Let me try this again. Let’s say my name is Bob and I start my own pharmaceutical company. I want to make one pill that will turn my eyebrows yellow. Like, bright yellow. I use the considerable cash I’ve saved from my lucrative monster truck career to invest in the venture. I contract the necessary experts to develop the magical formula. At the end of the many-years process I have my pill – my eyebrows are yellow – but I’ve spent $5 million on research, development, manufacturing, etc. How much did my one pill cost? $5 million-ish? How is this possible when it only costs pennies to make “a pill”?
You see why unherd needs a ‘this made me laugh’ button? 🙂 Thank you for this.
I presume when he wrote “individually” he meant manufacturing costs after development.
Oh dear, the old loony left theme of “profits are bad” again.
No they aren’t. They reflect contribution to society. Which in this case is absolutely enormous, hence the corresponding size of the profits.
And were there cheaper options from other companies? I think not.
But hey, let’s wreck the companies that actually cracked the problem, and go with the failures and also-rans instead. That’ll sure teach big pharma to come up with timely practical solutions.
Astrazenica sold at cost, and so was indeed cheaper.
Yes AZ was cheaper but I suspect that was a marketing ploy as they have said that once the WHO declares the pandemic over they will be selling at a profit. In other words their strategy was to undercut their competitors and then make a killing. They didn’t succeed in the 1st world because Pfizer proved to be more able to ensure that their product became the dominant product (and Moderna was fortunate to be able to hang on to Pfizer’s coattails as their vaccine is essentially the same as the Pfizer one). But in the 3rd world AZ’s strategy is likely to be very successful.
The article didn’t come across to me as saying that profits are bad. It’s more nuanced than that
Nobody works for nothing but corruption is in the world especially in the power structures which attract them. Especially organisations like Stonewall.
Do you work for big pharma? I can’t think of another reason why anyone would find the enormous scale of corruption in the industry acceptable. If you didn’t know before, then just read the comments.
Most on here seem to know what is going on behind the narrative.
There’s more to it than that because the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines are really stop gap measures, as is evident given the fact that the vaccines are failing and boosters are now required. No surprise given that these vaccines only present single component of the virus, namely the spike protein, and a version of the spike protein that is now no longer in circulation at that. The real solution in terms of vaccines, probably lie in either inactivated whole virus or attenuated virus, which would hopefully presented a vastly broader-based immunity against to natural infection which has been shown to be anywhere between 10 and 30 times more efficacious than any of the current mRNA or DNA-based vaccines. The Indians have developed an example of the former that appears to be highly efficacious against ALL strains of SARS-CoV2. It’s called Covaxin. But I’ll bet it will never get traction in either the US or UK because of intense lobbying on the part of Pfizer, Moderna and the NIH. Why the NIH, because they’re in bed with Moderna.
Some other vaccines need 3 doses. For example, hepatitis B. This does not, on its own, imply that they are failing
It is perfectly true that hep B is given as 3 doses. But hep B doesn’t fail after 2 doses within 6 months does it. And the dosing and scheduling are largely empirical and have been established over many years. More importantly, adverse events following hep B are exceedingly rare and very few even experience a sore arm, let alone systemic effects such as chills, muscle ache, extreme tiredness, etc. etc. etc. which are common place (but not particularly serious in the big scheme of things) in the case of the current COVID vaccines.
Similarly boosters from vaccines such as MMR and DPT again have essentially no adverse effects whatsoever, not even a sore arm. So one can boost at one’s heart’s content with those.