}
Matt Taibbi is a journalist that we used to follow a decade ago or so and stumbling across one of his articles again reminded us how good he really is. Although the MSM portray him as a liberal, to us though he sounds more like a libertarian. He just goes after corruption wherever every he sees it, and regardless of the side of the fence.
After reading Matt Taibbi's article, we definitely went through a "wow-moment". If this does not doom Big-Pharma completely at some point, then we'll have the evidence that humankind is truly walking on tight ropes. Criminals are running loose and millions (if not billions) of people may die from the cure. Life is nothing for such a level of psychopathic greed.
It is not about just Gilead but the whole industry of course, and we too believe that the scale of such gouging is in the larval stage since it is projected that world populations will be administered back-to-back vaccines. Though Gilead is not into vaccines but the "hydroxychloroquine" business.
According to what we read here and there, there currently are 23 firms working on vaccines, one of which is Moderna, which has already shown its true colors. Last May, Moderna execs dumped nearly $30 million worth of stocks, after announcing encouraging news. In fact, they just spread a rumor, waited for stocks to skyrocket 30%, and then they liquidated their holdings.
This mentality of doing business is beyond "business as usual". Beyond anything we can imagine. Bigpharma and biotech clearly make the rules. And unless we take them down, lawmakers are not going to do a thing. It is very possible that Gilead's hydroxychloroquine will too be as good as a placebo.
We wouldn't put the Hoover Institute on our list of favorites, but this interview gives numbers that are closer to the truth, we think, while for sure echoing the Independent German Investigation Committee blasting the media and their fear porn.
We are not going to paraphrase Taibbi because it is a very long article and our goal is to report on this topic as we come across articles that the mainstream will not spin on TV. Monetarism has destroyed the meaning of altruism for good. And there is no going back to normal.
PHARMA: GREED, LIES, AND THE POISONING OF AMERICA 1/3 (AUDIOBOOK)
Award-winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author Gerald Posner traces the heroes and villains of the trillion-dollar-a-year pharmaceutical industry and uncovers how those once entrusted with improving life have often betrayed that ideal to corruption and reckless profiteering - with deadly consequences.
The only way to stop greed is to let go of.
Remember what we said a few blogs ago, that without profits, salaries could not be paid. Profits
demand growth and growth requires "endless growth". It is indeed time to end this nonsensical quagmire!
Taking of non-sense, we thank George Carlin for reminding us that laughing is no longer an option.
Big Pharma’s Covid-19 Profiteers. How the race to develop treatments and a vaccine will create a historic windfall for the industry — and everyone else will pay the price By Matt Taibbi (Aug 13 2020)
To recap: Gilead, a company with a market capitalization of more than $90 billion, making it bigger than Goldman Sachs, develops an antiviral drug with the help of $99 million in American government grant money. Though the drug may cost as little as $10 per dose to make, and is being produced generically in Bangladesh at about a fifth of the list price, and costs about a third less in Europe than it does in the U.S., Gilead ended up selling hundreds of thousands of doses at the maximum conceivable level, i.e., the American private-insurance price — which, incidentally, might be about 10 times what it’s worth, given its actual medical impact.
Why? As articulated by Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, no sick person will ever see anything like a bill for the real cost of the drug. “The hospitals have to eat the cost of treatment use,” McEnany said. “The patient will not see the cost.”
This sounds great on the surface, but of course, Americans, through their tax dollars, will pay for treatments like remdesivir and for potential vaccines. Recent House and Senate emergency-spending bills allocate as much as $20 billion or more for vaccine development, and another $6 billion for manufacturing and distribution. “The public will pay for much research and manufacturing,” says Doggett. “Only the profits will be privatized.”
With remdesivir, “nobody in the Trump administration complained” about price, says Gerald Posner, author of Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America. “Just as nobody in a Biden administration likely would have complained. Does anybody care?”
Profiteering over the coronavirus pandemic is still in the larval stage. The average news reader has heard some enraging stories — a man busted for a $45 million scheme to defraud New York City through phony PPE sales, another arrested for hoarding 192,000 N95 respirator masks and 598,000 medical gloves, a third caught trying to bilk the VA out of $750 million — but the giant-scale gouging will take place later. And it will all be legal.
Soon enough, the infected and uninfected alike will pay any price to try to stave off illness through vaccines and cocktails of expensive treatments. It is an unprecedented profiteering opportunity, because most everyone on Earth is destined to become a customer of some kind — in fact, the United States is already a massive buyer of Covid-19 treatments despite no evidence of efficacy.
“We’re in the extraordinary position of spending billions on vaccines before we know if they work,” says Doggett. Full article
George Carlin - Germs, Immune System
