- Every time I watch I commercial for prescription drugs and it says “If you can’t afford your medication”, I scream at the TV: “It’s because you live in the USA!”
- All the technology that makes your smart phone “smart” was conceived by, developed, and funded by the US government.
- By the way, the above reality is never mentioned in the biography of Steve Jobs.
- If you think anyone working at an essential job at low wages should improve their education and skill set to get a better paying job, you still think that the person doing that essential job deserves to live in poverty.
- Every nation with K-12 schools that outperform the USA is staffed by union school teachers, with the nations scoring the highest overall having the strongest unions, but Republicans still say that the root of our failing schools is “the unions”.
- If you ask anyone who supports Charter Schools to give examples where their charter school has met the dissemination requirement of the charter, odds are they have no idea what you are talking about.
- I’ll bet many of the Trump rioters who stormed the Capitol are against the COVID-19 vaccine because of an alleged microchip in the serum that will allow the government to track their moment….and we will know exactly who stormed the Capitol by collecting and tracing their cell phone data.
- On January 20th, 2021, Donald J. Trump will finally fulfil his promise to make America great again by leaving the White House for good.
- 75% of all new pharmaceutical research is funded by the US government.
- Americans get to pay twice for these new drugs when the same government hands the results of the research to private companies along with government enforced patents.
Please share widely!
Can you please provide a source for that? Do you mean to assert that 75% of all pharmaceutical research spending world wide is supplied by the US government?
Sources like statistica.com (https://www.statista.com/statistics/309466/global-r-and-d-expenditure-for-pharmaceuticals/) report that 2019 research spending was $186 billion US dollars. If your assertion is correct, then the US government is spending $139.5 B per year on pharmaceutical research.
The Michael J. Fox Foundation says (https://www.michaeljfox.org/news/congress-passes-fiscal-year-2020-budget-some-medical-research-funding-increases) that the total budget of NIH is $41.46 B. I am unable to find any published sources that cite federal R&D spending at anything like $139.5B/year (the highest amounts I find are in the $10-30B range).
Please share with us the source of your claim.
“Indeed, roughly 75% of so-called new molecular entities with priority rating (the most innovative drugs) trace their existence to NIH funding, while companies spend more on “me too” drugs (slight variations of existing ones.)”
Here is the context of the sentence you offer:
You are talking about something called “drug discovery”. Even if we stipulate that this opinion piece is correct, you’ve egregiously misrepresented the meaning of this paragraph.
If somebody shows that 75% of new high-efficiency low-emission lightweight automotive power trains come from Germany, that does not mean that “75% of new automobiles come from Germany”.
The phrase “molecular entity” has a very specific meaning (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/molecular-entity):
The same molecular entity is often the basis for entire families of drugs. The reason why those “small biotech companies … do most of the hard work” — and the reason why NIH funds such research — is that each NME (New Molecular Entity) is the result of basic research and spurs entire markets and industries.
A molecular entity is often discovered by a PhD candidate, long before its utility or value is widely known. That’s WHY university research exists. Upon receiving their degree, that candidate often founds a “boutique” drug discovery company in order to commercialize their research. Unlike startups in other technology domains, there is seldom any intent of building a viable business with customers, products, sales, and costs. Instead, a drug discovery company pursues the rigorous and difficult steps needed to meet the staggering documentation and safety requirements needed to obtain eventual federal approval. The exit strategy for such company is to identify a corporate partner who will acquire the company and its new compound and continue development.
There is an entire ecosystem of biopharmaceutical companies who acquire portfolios of such entities. Some focus on particular diseases, some strive for a broad portfolio. Those companies are in turn bought and sold along with their portfolios.
The identification of a new molecular entity is the very first step of a ten+ year journey to a new drug. Most of those NMEs prove worthless — it often costs billions of dollars to gain that knowledge.
Americans pay higher prices for these drugs because Americans get the first safe access to the most advanced and effective drugs in the world.
I really wish you had left off number 4. I for one believe that nobody who works should live in poverty AND additional education is a good way to get ahead and make even more.
On most of our dog walks I wonder: when Grizzly barks to the other dogs inside their homes, what is he saying?
On #6. I agree that most charter supporters couldn’t recite dissemination efforts of particular schools.
Though perhaps broadly true of many things we support. I support MA’s vaccine efforts but couldn’t describe the outreach efforts.
FWIW, here’s a list of some of those dissemination efforts. I’m sure they’re all flawed.
https://www.doe.mass.edu/charter/bestpractices/archives.aspx
I haven’t been on BMG for a while. I remember ~2004 when there were some fun charter debates. Pablo, Sabutai et al would critique others including me would respond. Sometimes a little heated but generally civil.