#nih

[reasonsforhope]

"The Biden Administration last week [early December, 2023] announced it would be seizing patents for drugs and drug manufacturing procedures developed using government money.

A draft of the new law, seen by Reuters, said that the government will consider various factors including whether a medical situation is leading to increased prices of the drug at any given time, or whether only a small section of Americans can afford it.

The new executive order is the first exercise in what is called “march-in-rights” which allows relevant government agencies to redistribute patents if they were generated under government funding. The NIH has long maintained march-in-rights, but previous directors have been unwilling to use them, fearing consequences.

“We’ll make it clear that when drug companies won’t sell taxpayer funded drugs at reasonable prices, we will be prepared to allow other companies to provide those drugs for less,” White House adviser Lael Brainard said on a press call.

But just how much taxpayer money is going toward funding drugs? A research paper from the Insitute for New Economic Thought showed that “NIH funding contributed to research associated with every new drug approved from 2010-2019, totaling $230 billion.”

The authors of the paper continue, writing “NIH funding also produced 22 thousand patents, which provided marketing exclusivity for 27 (8.6%) of the drugs approved [between] 2010-2019.”

How we do drug discovery and production in America has a number of fundamental flaws that have created problems in the health service industry.

It costs billions of dollars and sometimes as many as 5 to 10 years to bring a drug to market in the US, which means that only companies with massive financial muscle can do so with any regularity, and that smaller, more innovative companies can’t compete with these pharma giants.

This also means that if a company can’t recoup that loss, a single failed drug can result in massive disruptions to business. To protect themselves, pharmaceutical companies establish piles of patents on drugs and drug manufacturing procedures. Especially if the drug in question treats a rare or obscure disease, these patents essentially ensure the company has monoselective pricing regimes.

However, if a company can convince the NIH that a particular drug should be considered a public health priority, they can be almost entirely funded by the government, as the research paper showed.

Some market participants, in this case the famous billionaire investor Mark Cuban, have attempted to remedy the issue of drug costs in America by manufacturing generic versions of patented drugs sold for common diseases."

-via Good News Network, December 11, 2023

#united states #us politics #biden administration #executive order #prescription drugs #medical news #healthcare #healthcare access #biden #big pharma #drug prices #public health #nih #national institutes of health #good news #hope

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #pharma #incentives dont matter #incentives matter #drugs #uspto #nih #national institutes of health #cancer #patents #kei #knowledge ecology international #james love #jamie love #bayh-dole #bayh-dole act #tcr #scarlet tcr #t-cell receptor #Christian Hinrichs #entrepreneurial state #human papillomavirus #hpv #solid tumors #monopolies

[dosesofcommonsense]

Big Pharma AND our “health” organizations are corrupt and need to be disbanded.

#truth #common sense #msm is the enemy #globalist playbook #fda #nih #cdc #big pharma #healthcare corruption

[thefreethoughtprojectcom]

The Fauci 🐭 is laughing all the way to the bank…

🔥 Fuel Our Work: https://bit.ly/TFTPSubs 🎙 TFTP Podcast: https://bit.ly/TFTPPodcast

TheFreeThoughtProject #TFTP

#the free thought project #tftp #fauci #nih

[cbirt]

The All of Us Research Program, with its ambitious objective of creating a diverse cohort of one million volunteers and making their data available for research, has enormous potential for revealing new information about human health and illness. Researchers have discovered more than 275 million previously unreported genetic variants, identified from data shared by nearly 250,000 participants of the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program. However, underlying this transformational movement is a complicated network of approaches for data gathering, processing, and access. This blog post explores the unique characteristics, potential impact, and bright future of genetic medicine of the program’s groundbreaking data release.

One of the main objectives of research on human health is to completely discover genetic diversity and record its role in health and illness, together with environmental and lifestyle influences. A major problem that has plagued the field of human genetics for decades is the under-representation of diverse perspectives in large-scale genomics studies. This biased viewpoint may have slowed the development of personalized medicine for all patients by restricting our understanding of how genetic variations impact health and sickness across groups. To close this gap, the All of Us Research Program, a groundbreaking initiative in the US, plans to make the largest and most diverse genome collection accessible to the general population.

Continue Reading

#bioinformatics #genomics #genetic variants #nih #science news

[lasseling]

Rand Paul to Investigate Fauci’s ‘Secret CIA Visits’ Prior to COVID-19 Outbreak

The Kentucky senator intends to examine what he described as ‘secret off the books’ trips made by Dr. Fauci to the CIA.

#RandPaul #Fauci #CIA #InvestigateFauci #NIAID #FBI #NIH #Wuhan #WuhanInstitute

[jstor]

"Be alert to radiation hazards." Undated poster from the Images from the History of Medicine (National Library of Medicine) collection on JSTOR. Open access collection!

Creative Commons: Public Domain Mark

#national library of medicine #NIH #science #poster #don't let Marvel comics be your only source on the effects of radiation #why is this guy smiling #jstor #national institute of health

[kattiperkele]

Olin lapsenvahtina. Lapset oli puolivieraita. Kuvitelkaa se hämmästys kun ruokapöydässä totean (itselleni ominaiseen tapaan): "Hyvät naiset ja herrat, ponit ja dinosaurukset, tänään meillä on ruokana..." ja siinä silmän räpäyksessä tajuan ettei tää ole mun tavallista kohdeyleisöä.

"Ei tääl oo dinosauruksia." "NII! Dinosaurukstukset o kuallu!" "Toi ei tiiä et ne kaikki kuali ku se juttu, se se raateri iskeyty maahan." "Eksä ihan oikeest tiiä että ne o kuallu?"

Yritä siinä sitten kysyä kiltisti, että otatko paljon vai vähän ruokaa.

#lapset #dinosaurustukset on kuallu #nih #mun kohdeyleisö ei tavallisesti tunne tämmösiä faktoja #voitin luottamuksen takaisin kun tarjosin jälkkäriksi ihan lempparijätskiä #saatettiin lukea dinosauruskirjaa ja laittaa faktat kuntoon kaikin puolin

[pandemichub]

More information about Stanford research goals and the RECOVER Program/Initiative:

#covid-19 #covid 19 #sars cov 2 #covid #long covid #long haul covid #Stanford #Clinical Trials #Paxlovid #Antivirals #Research #RECOVER #RECOVER Program #National Institute of Health #NIH #Institutonal Review Board #IRB

[daisylovesrumble]

NIMH: Mind Your Manners and End Animal Experiments | PETA

#animalrights #animal rights activist #animal welfare #animal advocacy #activist #activism #endvivisection #endanimalexperiments #nih #take action #petition

[eternalistic]

See full article at archive.is “Ben Hu, a scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who had done  extensive laboratory research on how coronaviruses infect humans, was identified in U.S. intelligence reports as one of the researchers who became ill in November 2019 with symptoms that American officials said were consistent with either Covid-19 or a seasonal illness. None of the researchers died.” “The Federal Bureau of Investigation has assessed with moderate confidence that a lab leak was the most likely origin of the virus and the Energy Department came to a similar conclusion with low confidence. Four other U.S. intelligence agencies assess with low confidence that the virus arose naturally, while the Central Intelligence Agency has been agnostic.“ “The U.S. intelligence community is planning to declassify more information regarding its search for Covid’s origins as soon as this week, under a law that Congress passed and President Biden signed in March. It couldn’t be determined if the declassified intelligence would include the names of the researchers, and representatives for the director of national intelligence declined to comment.” “Hu is noteworthy, current and former officials say, because of his central role in coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Further, some of the projects he worked on were funded by U.S. government grants, according to documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act by the White Coat Waste Project, a nonprofit that opposes taxpayer funded research on animals.“ “The Government Accountability Office noted in a report last week that some of the research at the Wuhan Institute was funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the National Institutes of Health. Between 2014 and 2019, about $1.4 million was disbursed for work at the institute by both agencies before such grants were suspended.”

#wall street journal #wuhan institute of virology #wuhan #wuhan virus #virus #covid #covid19 #lab leak #gain of function #research #china #pandemic #ben hu #patient zero #nih #us government #biosafety #wsj

[blogparanormalexpresso2stuff]

IN THE PRESENCE OF EXTRATERRESTRIALS: TEN TRUE CASES

#ufo #ufology #nih #Preston Dennett #close encounter testimonies #Canada #Brazil #usa #europe #humanoid #Youtube

[cannabisnewstoday]

#cbd #glioblastoma #cannabis #marijuana #weed #pot #legalization #medical marijuana #mmj #medical cannabis #legalize #nih #national institutes of health

[impactofhealth]

Health Research & News: Navigating the Sea of Information

Staying informed about health research and news is crucial for making informed decisions about our well-being. With the abundance of information available, it’s essential to navigate through the sea of data and distinguish between reliable sources and misinformation. Let’s delve into the world of health research and news, exploring its significance, challenges, and impact on society. Read More...

#health #news #trending #healthy #wellness #healthresearch #research #healtharticles #science #covid #healtharticle #thetownwellbeing #medicalresearch #precisionmedicine #nih #joinallofus #wellbeinguk #wellnessuk #genetics #diversitymatters #psychologysay #data #mentalhealthcoaching #psychologyresearch #dna #cheatingpartner #genomics #psychologycoaching #cheatingwife #securerelation

[jstor]

"What are lab coats for?" Undated poster from the Images from the History of Medicine (National Library of Medicine) collection on JSTOR. Open access collection!

Creative Commons: Public Domain Mark

#Nice that they actually include the answer at the bottom of the poster #yes we know she shouldn't be wearing open-toed shoes #Notice the mouse in his pocket! #nih #national institute of health #poster #labs #safety #is that vanilla extract in her flask? #jstor

[awesomecooperlove]

💥💥💥

#coronavirus #patented #viruses #bioweapon #crimes against humanity #nih #biological warfare #health #Anthony FOUCI #depopulation agenda #gain of function #patriots #freedom fighters #truthers #digital soldiers #soldiers #these people are evil #standup #fight for justice #scam artists #corruption #please share #speak up #truth #wwg1wga #MAGA