Big pharma

Thursday

Neal Pollack

Oprah’s obesity gene claim is hard to swallow

From our US edition

Appearing yesterday on The View, a show that couldn’t possibly exist without the trail she blazed, Oprah Winfrey, promoting her new book, ‘Enough,’ had this to say about her recent, semi-permanent, GLP-1-induced weight loss: “All these years I thought I was overeating. I was standing there with all the food noise, what I ate, what I should eat, how many calories was it going to take. I thought that was because of me and my fault. Now I understand that if you carry the obesity gene, if that is what you have, that is what makes you overeat. You don’t overeat and become obese. Obesity causes you to overeat.” “Right,” say the ladies of The View. “Obesity causes you to have all of that food noise.

Oprah

Thursday

Jennifer Bilek

The gender hydra is about technology, not ideology

From our US edition

I hope this is the year people fighting the gender hydra, with its proliferation of harms across society, finally recognize that this is not a culture war. It is a war against a rapidly expanding industry built on the deconstruction of sex and, like any profitable industry, it will continue growing until it is stopped. Calling it a medical scandal, misogyny, or social contagion will not create a sustainable resistance unless people understand it as an industry. At the heart of the matter is the fact that industries in capitalist systems must expand to survive. And once they do, once a market forms, they’re near-impossible to erase. They begin to multiply, as others see opportunity. Consider pornography: despite widespread harm, eliminating it has proven impossible, so far.

Thursday

Neal Pollack

The medical emergency in the Oval Office

From our US edition

The buzzword in politics, in the wake of the socialist takeover of New York City, is “affordability.” That was certainly on Donald Trump’s mind today during an Oval Office announcement for cheaper GLP-1s, or, as Trump called them, “fat drugs.” Trump took brief potshots at Gavin Newsom and the Obama Presidential Library, and, of course, continued to urge pregnant women not to take Tylenol.  Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, when Trump called him out, said he was “not yet” on GLP-1s. “Good,” Trump said, adding “CMS administrator Mehmet Oz, he doesn’t take it” – obviously, since we can all agree Dr. Oz looks great. Trump did, however, roll call the quite large White House head of communications Steven Cheung. “He’s taking it,” Trump said.

Trump

Monday

Ross Clark

Will Trump’s war on Big Pharma work?

From our US edition

Cynics will scoff at Donald Trump’s latest initiative: issuing an executive order forcing pharmaceutical companies to lower the prices of medical drugs used by US patients by between 30 and 80 percent. The President wants to impose what he calls a “most favored nation” rule, under which drugs companies would be allowed to charge US consumers no more than they charge in the lowest-priced country where they sell their product. That could have serious consequences for campaigns to fight disease globally, given that cheaper versions of drugs are often sold in developing countries which might not otherwise be able to afford vaccination programs and the like. Isn’t Trump supposed to be against price-fixing?

Trump

Thursday

Neal Pollack

The good energy philosophy of Casey Means, Trump’s Surgeon General pick

From our US edition

Casey Means, President Trump’s nominee to become the next Surgeon General of the United States, describes herself on her stylish website as a “medical doctor, writer, tech entrepreneur, and aspiring regenerative gardener who lives in a state of awe for the miracle of existence and consciousness.” Big points to you if you had that on your Second Trump Era Bingo card, but it really shouldn’t be a surprise if you were paying attention during the campaign. Dr. Means is a close friend and ally of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and gave a series of extraordinary interviews during the campaign, most notably with Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson, where she talked about the “chronic disease epidemic” in America, particularly among children.

Means

Wednesday

Ben Domenech

RFK survives assault from Big Pharma-loving Democrats

From our US edition

My friend Dan Foster voiced a theory about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. today that strikes me as particularly accurate. In response to a comment from the New York Times’s Ross Douthat giving credence to RFK’s belief that Lyme disease could be the result of a materially engineered bioweapon, he noted: “The reason I think Kennedy gets confirmed is because every single American agrees with him on one of his fringe things. He’s like the Captain Planet of kook.” This is the ultimate expression of voter antipathy toward traditional politicians, laid atop suspicions that everyone holds about something on the edge of appropriate discussion. It goes like this: “Well, yeah RFK’s probably wrong about X, and definitely about Y, but Z? He’s the only guy who tells the truth about Z!

Friday

Jennifer Sey

Sam Bankman-Fried and the scam of woke capitalism

From our US edition

For anyone seeking direct proof that woke capitalism is nothing but a scam, look no further than Sam Bankman-Fried, founder and former CEO of the now bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, who says as much in a direct message exchange with Vox reporter Kelsey Piper. He calls “ethics” a “dumb game we woke Westerners play” — presumably to avoid any scrutiny from journalists, employees, investors and consumers. I’ve worked for and with these people for decades. They want to convince you and the employees in their company that they are in it out of the goodness of their philanthropic hearts. They are just trying to make the world a better place, you see.

bankman-fried

Thursday

Horatio Clare

The treatment of mental illness continues to be a scandal

There is much more desperation in this searching and enlightening history than there are remedies. Andrew Scull is a distinguished sociologist and scholar of psychiatry. He comes across as wise, sanguine and unsurprised by his findings in this survey of how American – for which also read British – psychiatry has understood and treated the insane, distressed and traumatised from 1820 to the present. His book, however, will leave readers who are unfamiliar with the story horrified and aghast. Since my own breakdown and sectioning in early 2019 I have been working with sufferers, social workers and psychiatrists on improving the understanding and treatment of mental distress.

Thursday

Grace Curley

The boosters will continue until morale improves

From our US edition

What better way to mark the two-year anniversary of “fifteen days to slow the spread” than by getting a fourth Covid shot? In an interview with CBS’s Face the Nation, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told Margaret Brennan, “Right now, the way that we have seen, it is necessary, a fourth booster right now.” Bourla, who made $17.9 million in 2019 before the pandemic, wasn’t even wearing a white lab coat as he made his diagnosis. No stethoscope from the studio prop room either. “The protection that you are getting from the third, it is good enough, actually quite good for hospitalizations and deaths. It’s not that good against infections, but doesn’t last very long.

boosters

Thursday

Kate Womersley

TB is back with a vengeance

If you were a teenager before 2005, one reminder of tuberculosis in British life is that small circular scar on your bicep. Maybe you’ve explained to your children why it’s there, if you ever knew. The BCG is no longer a routine vaccination in the UK, a revision which signalled to many that TB was over. What used to be known as consumption became treatable, preventable and ostensibly consigned to medical history as a threat of the past. We tell stories about diseases as if they are constant things. ‘It’s no worse than flu’ has become a familiar phrase; but flu is not all that common, it varies wildly in severity and changes strain every year. Pathogens evolve and mutate, avoiding the risk of staying the same for too long.

Thursday

Will Self

Why America’s attitude to mental illness is dangerously deluded

A friend who works in social care speaks to me earnestly about a troubled young colleague: ‘Of course, she’s got a borderline personality disorder...’ I check her there: ‘What do you mean by that?’ She thinks for a moment and continues: ‘Well, she’s very emotional, she can’t maintain relationships, and she’s very defiant…’ I wait for a moment to see if there’s anything else before I say my bit: ‘Perhaps she just has a bad character — because fundamentally that’s all a personality disorder is: epithetic psychiatry. There’s no defined organic basis for these so-called disorders, no psycho-dynamic aetiology either, no progression — and, of course, no cure.

Thursday

Taki

Trauma has become as American as apple pie

Gstaad Lord Belhaven and Stenton, a wonderful man and the quintessential English gentleman, died at 93 just before the end of the crappiest of years. But Robin was lucky in a way: no tubes, no hospital beds, not another virus statistic. His widow, Lady Belhaven, gave me the bad news over the telephone, and although she was devastated after a very long and happy marriage, she is very smart and realises that it was a perfect death. He asked for a gin and tonic, went to bed, and never woke up. Acknowledging the death of others is one thing, accepting one’s own demise quite another. That’s why old men send young men to die in war, a confidence trick perfected after the Napoleonic Wars. Greek and Roman generals led from the front, as did many subsequent kings.

Monday

Dr Kristina M.L. Acri

Criminal gangs are making billions from fake medical supplies during COVID

From our US edition

While it’s great news that Pfizer, BioNTech, AstraZeneca and other pharmaceutical companies are developing vaccines to prevent people from getting the coronavirus, we should remember that international criminal entities are taking advantage of the fear, uncertainty and desperation created by the coronavirus pandemic to expand their illicit footprint. Since early June, Customs and Border Protection has seized more than 107,000 FDA-prohibited COVID-19 test kits, 750,000 counterfeit face masks, thousands of EPA-prohibited anti-virus lanyards, 11,000 FDA-prohibited chloroquine tables and more than 67,000 ACCU-CHEK test strips. When demand outstrips supply, it creates an environment in which substandard and counterfeit medical supplies proliferate.

fake medical

Wednesday

Cockburn

DC coronavirus newsletters get assist from Big Pharma lobby

From our US edition

News outlets across the globe are grappling with how to expand or adapt their operations to adequately provide readers with the latest news about the novel coronavirus. In the US, for example, various digital publications have reduced their paywalled content so that more people have access to their reporting. Cockburn’s masters at The Spectator are even giving away three months’ free digital access. Away from home though, Cockburn has particularly enjoyed Politico’s nightly newsletter dedicated COVID-19 news, aptly named, ‘POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition.’ However, while settling into his fourth scotch one evening, Cockburn noticed something in his Politico email that greatly disturbed him: the newsletter is sponsored by PhRMA.

phrma big pharma

Thursday

Amber Duke

Peter Navarro blasts ‘Swamp Creature’ opponents of ‘Buy American’ order

From our US edition

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro is hitting back at a group of Big Pharma lobbyists, medical organizations, and free trade groups for opposing President Trump's proposed 'Buy American' executive order reshoring the medical supply chain. Navarro, the assistant to the president for trade and manufacturing, told The Spectator that Big Pharma's opposition to the executive order, which would require government agencies to purchase pharmaceutical products made in the US, because it wants to 'preserve its offshore oligopoly'. 'All the EO would do is ensure that government agencies, including the VA, HHS, and DoD, Buy American,' Navarro said.

Peter Navarro