skews13
Diamond Member
- Mar 18, 2017
- 9,556
- 12,026
- 2,415
- And Made It Nearly Impossible For Us To Develop New Vaccines
American taxpayers fund the research and development of many drugs and vaccines, and even risk their own bodies to participate in clinical trials that determine both the safety and efficacy of these drugs. But in a preposterous twist, we must then pay exorbitant prices to pharmaceutical companies just to use the very drugs we helped develop. This is in effect socialism followed by highway robbery for Big Pharma, which Azar knows all too well since he infamously more than tripled the price of insulin when he was the Vice President of Eli Lilly. This was in spite of the fact that the doctors who discovered insulin, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, sold their patent for $1 for the public good to help those suffering from diabetes.
Protecting the rich at the expense of the poor does nothing to fight a contagious disease that attacks the weakest and most vulnerable links in society to bring down the whole chain. But even beyond the economic inequality of American healthcare, this brings to the fore an even deeper issue when it comes to our country’s drug and vaccine development pipeline. Republicans have been waging an ideological war against science in the name of religion for many years that has been hampering our efforts to combat new and emerging infectious diseases. Nothing illustrates this case more than the Republican war on medical research involving fetal tissue.
Opinion: As a doctor, I've watched Republicans make the US more vulnerable to coronavirus than it ever should have been
Now that it's here, just wait until a lot of those ideologues come down with it. They won't be waiting on thoughts and prayers then.
American taxpayers fund the research and development of many drugs and vaccines, and even risk their own bodies to participate in clinical trials that determine both the safety and efficacy of these drugs. But in a preposterous twist, we must then pay exorbitant prices to pharmaceutical companies just to use the very drugs we helped develop. This is in effect socialism followed by highway robbery for Big Pharma, which Azar knows all too well since he infamously more than tripled the price of insulin when he was the Vice President of Eli Lilly. This was in spite of the fact that the doctors who discovered insulin, Frederick Banting and Charles Best, sold their patent for $1 for the public good to help those suffering from diabetes.
Protecting the rich at the expense of the poor does nothing to fight a contagious disease that attacks the weakest and most vulnerable links in society to bring down the whole chain. But even beyond the economic inequality of American healthcare, this brings to the fore an even deeper issue when it comes to our country’s drug and vaccine development pipeline. Republicans have been waging an ideological war against science in the name of religion for many years that has been hampering our efforts to combat new and emerging infectious diseases. Nothing illustrates this case more than the Republican war on medical research involving fetal tissue.
Opinion: As a doctor, I've watched Republicans make the US more vulnerable to coronavirus than it ever should have been
Now that it's here, just wait until a lot of those ideologues come down with it. They won't be waiting on thoughts and prayers then.
