..
This might be a hard one to follow...
Republican senator introduces Fauci Act
The White House health advisor was previously caught on a hot mic calling the lawmaker a ‘moron’
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kansas) plans to introduce a bill dubbed the Fauci Act, aimed at making government officials’ financial information readily available. This is after the senator clashed with Dr. Anthony Fauci at a hearing.
Marshall will introduce a bill called the Financial Accountability for Uniquely Compensated Individuals (FAUCI) Act, a spokesperson revealed on Friday. The measure would require the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) to publish the financial records of officials like Fauci on their website, making them available to the public.
Fauci was questioned about his personal finances by Marshall during a recent hearing in which the health advisor accused Marshall of being “misinformed” as his personal finances were publicly available. He was also caught on a hot mic referring to the senator as a “moron,” which was just one of Fauci’s numerous testy exchanges with Republican lawmakers.
Marshall’s argument is that the information on Fauci and others is not readily available enough. A recent report from the Center for Public Integrity found that a reporter had obtained the requested financial records, but it was a two-month process involving a Freedom of Information Act request and the reporter “politely badgering” for the requested documents.
Marshall had previously requested information on Fauci’s personal finances – he is the highest paid federal employee – and investments during the Covid-19 pandemic in a letter to Fauci following their heated exchange, claiming his office could not find the requested information.
“At a time when multiple federal officials have stepped down due to questionable financial transactions during the pandemic, these questions are both reasonable and relevant,” Marshall wrote.
=========================================================================================
This should be a requirement for emergency approval of experimental drugs
Withholding vaccine safety data ‘morally indefensible,’
medical journal says
The British Medical Journal criticized Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers for ‘reaping vast profits’ without proper independent scrutiny
for their Covid-19 vaccines. © Getty Images / NurPhoto
The British Medical Journal (BMJ) has urged public health regulators and pharma majors to immediately release all raw data from Covid-19 vaccine trials for independent scrutiny, arguing that “complete data transparency” was a matter of “public interest.”
Branding Big Pharma as “the least trusted industry,” a recent op-ed by BMJ editors stated that it was “morally indefensible” that this information remains inaccessible to doctors, researchers and the public, despite the global rollout of vaccines and treatments.
In the scathing editorial, the writers – senior BMJ editor Peter Doshi, former editor-in-chief Fiona Godlee and her successor Kamran Abbasi – accuse pharmaceutical companies of “reaping vast profits without adequate independent scrutiny of their scientific claims.”
At least three of the many companies making Covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars. One pleaded guilty to fraud. Other companies have no pre-Covid track record.
In particular, the editorial collective calls out Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca for not providing “timely access” to “anonymized individual participant data” from their clinical trials. This granular data is available to regulators like the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which told a judge last month to give it 75 years to publish all data relating to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Because it will take that long to edit out the horror stories????
But the BMJ said Pfizer – whose trial was “funded by the company and designed, run, analyzed, and authored by Pfizer employees” – has indicated that it will not entertain data requests until May 2025, a full two years after the primary study is completed.
Pfizer, it appears, has better editors.
This lack of access to data is “consistent across vaccine manufacturers,” the editors write, noting that the industry is not “legally required” to honor requests from independent researchers.
Further, they point out that regulatory bodies like Health Canada and the European Medicines Agency do not even “receive or analyze” trial data, whereas the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency does not “proactively release” such info.
“The purpose of regulators is not to dance to the tune of rich global corporations and enrich them further; it is to protect the health of their populations,” they concluded.
Yeah! Right! But the regulators are all run by Big Pharma, so protecting the health of people falls well behind profit-making.
========================================================================================
Billionaire Mark Cuban Opens Online Pharmacy
To Slash Cost Of Meds
January 24, 2022
It's common knowledge at this point that drug prices in the United States are completely out of control.
Billionaire Mark Cuban has wanted to do something about it for quite some time now, and that desire has finally translated into action, as the Dallas Mavericks owner announced that he's opening his own online pharmacy with affordable drug prices.
How expensive can drugs be?
According to some estimates, prescription drug prices in the United States are more than 250% higher than prices in other countries.
Brand name drugs are even more expensive. This means that for many Americans, getting the prescription they need is impossible.
Enter Mark Cuban.
Cuban is an entrepreneur who's known for making big splashes. From humble beginnings, he made his fortune in tech in the late '80s, invested in various startups and eventually bought the Dallas Mavericks NBA franchise for $285 million in 2000.
Now, he's founded the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs Company (MCCPDC).
It's a legitimate pharmaceutical wholesaler that buys generic drugs directly from the manufacturers, getting bulk discounts and cutting out the middleman, and then selling to consumers. The only goal, Cuban has bluntly stated, is to charge the lowest price possible.
You can thank Martin Shkreli for the inspiration.
Remember Martin Shkreli? The 'Pharma Bro'? He made headlines for hiking the price of a life-saving drug from $13.50 to $750 per pill.
Cuban, along with MCCPDC CEO Alex Oshmyansky, saw this, realized drug prices were out of control, and pledged to fix the problem.
It's only a partial fix, however, as drugs under copyright can still charge what they want.
=========================================================================================
No comments:
Post a Comment