501–510 of 569 posts
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When I studied pharmaceutical sciences ten years ago, the rule-of-thumb was that it cost around 1 billion dollars from idea to the product being launched. That's only r&d costs and regulations have become stricter over the years, so I imagine the cost has risen since then
> regulations have become stricter over the years Not this year!
How many different viruses are there that cause the common cold? About 200? If we can get an effective vaccine for this coronavirus in under a year why aren't we working on all the other coronaviruses and rhinoviruses? I know nothing about biology but let's say it costs $1 billion to develop and test a successful vaccine for a common cold virus, worldwide for $200 billion that isn't that much to not have to deal with…
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No, the cutter incidence was worse than the disease, because the activated virus was injected into a population, whereas naturally only a tiny part would be exposed at the same level, and the rest would be exposed at a much lower level - that would give them immunity but not disease. Cutter was, most definitely, much worse than the disease if you look at it from a population perspective. The 1976 Guilian barre was at…
> No, the cutter incidence was worse than the disease, because the activated virus was injected into a population, whereas naturally only a tiny part would be exposed at the same level, and the rest would be exposed at a much lower level - that would give them immunity but not disease. This is a more reasonable assessment, but it is still patently false . According to Wikipedia, 0.04% vaccinations resulted in paralys…
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine#1950%E2%80%93195... : "The Cutter vaccine had been used in vaccinating 200,000 children in the western and midwestern United States.[76] Later investigations showed that the Cutter vaccine had caused 40,000 cases of polio, killing 10.[76]". So, 20% incidence; mentions 250 "paralytic illness", so 0.125% paralysis (no idea where you took the 0.04% - it does not appear in the Wikipedia text).
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio#Paralytic_polio : "In children, nonparalytic meningitis is the most likely consequence of CNS involvement, and paralysis occurs in only one in 1000 cases." ; So, for children, the incidence of paralysis is 0.1%
Who got the cutter vaccine? Mostly children. See e.g. from https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/04/14/cutter-pol... "By April 30, within forty-eight hours of the recall,” Offit wrote. “Cutter’s vaccine had paralyzed or killed twenty-five children: fourteen in California, seven in Idaho, two in Washington, one in Illinois, and one in Colorado."
So, I just tried to check your numbers, and I couldn't; Could you post references?
But I also wanted to check my memory, and Wikpedia seems to agree with me, Go on, please do check my quotes.
still patently false. pfft. Perhaps false under some assumptions, definitely not "patently false".
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> Expensive, inaccessible except to the rich I don’t think the data bears this out exactly. US healthcare tends to optimize for access and quality to the detriment to cost. As the saying goes: access, quality, or cost... you only get to choose two. The US tends to measure better than any comparable country of its size on those two metrics (and quite poorly on cost...but some of that is because the US funds about 50%…
The US healthcare is good only when considering those who can pay to access it. But since large swathes of the US population cannot afford to have access (expensive insurance costs, even with Obamacare support), this becomes a mute point. If that is the metric, then even Brazil (and many other 3rd word countries) also has good medical care, because it works for the small percent of the population with money to access…
False: The third leading cause of death in the US is believed to be preventable medical errors. You can go to the best institutions in the US to get care, along with seeing the very best doctors, but you cannot evade a statistic like that, even if you are in the 1%. See: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/05/03/4766361...
Also, this article: U.S. life expectancy will soon be on par with Mexico’s and the Czech Republic’s: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2017/0...
Also this: 42% of new cancer patients lose all of their life savings in two years because of treatment. The average amount a cancer patient lost was $92,098.: https://www.insider.com/half-cancer-patients-lose-their-enti...
The truth is that you can be in the top 1%, sitting on a mountain of cash, and still lose an unfathomable amount of money, even while insured, if you have cancer or a rare disease. Both of which are actually common.
It is not the doctors who are the problem here with respect to the medical errors: it’s the healthcare system. A good read on what’s wrong with the system is the short book Our Malady by Timothy Snyder.
If you want to stay alive long term, you may want to consult HealthData.org which analyzes each country’s healthcare systems in depth along with outcomes. The group is world renowned. Ironically, it is also the IMHE group that does the coronavirus statistics that everyone consults.
Personally, I am an American culturally, but I became an EU citizen (Croatia) over the US healthcare system. I never plan on working in the US. I do select the country I am working in now due to healthcare.
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90% of start ups fail, so the numbers in that case would be about correct.
No. GP said idea to product costs 1B just for r&d. That and 1B amortized over failures (and including marketing) cannot be true at the same time unless there are no failed attempts and unless marketing cost is zero.
I'm also not sure what you would define as a failure. Drug development often starts with several candidates for a target. Over the cause of development the list is trimmed, as candidates show lack of affinity for the target or have side-effects that make them unviable. Would you consider each of the excluded candidates a failure?
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Regarding vaccines and altruism I suggest you read up on Jonas Salk, who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines[1] Money quote from linked article: "News of the vaccine's success was first made public on April 12, 1955.[7] Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker", and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distribution." [1] https://en.wikiped…
Not to take anything away from his contribution, but it's a bit more complicated with Salk. The organizations who funded the research looked into the viability of a patent and concluded it wouldn't have succeeded. "the idea of patenting the vaccine had been directly analyzed and the decision was made not to apply for a patent mainly because it would not result in one."[1] The distinction should also be made that a pa…
It doesn't really scratch at his integrity though, since it was the institution he worked for that raised the issue.
If he was just a brilliant salesman (apart from a brilliant scientist) we never know.
What is beyond dispute is that his discovery saved (arguably) millions of people from a life in misery.
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I've also mentioned the cutter polio vaccine and the 1976 swine flu vaccine which seems to have caused an uptick of GBS. > There have been tens of billions of vaccines given during this time period and this is the only example where there may have been long term side effects. No, there are other examples, the other two I just mentioned are from memory, I suspect if I go research I will find more (I don't have the tim…
> I've also mentioned the cutter polio vaccine and the 1976 swine flu vaccine which seems to have caused an uptick of GBS. That Polio vaccine wasn't a side effect of the vaccine though, it was an issue with people accidently getting injected with a live virus. Since no live virus is even remotely involved in any COVID19 vaccines it has zero relevance here. Even if they were, we have 60+ years of history with no simil…
Your omnipotent knowledge is inspiring. We have absolutely zero years of experience with RNA based vaccines. We had incidents with vaccines, not of the same kind. Ergo, there's a non zero probability we will have incidents in the future, by any reasonable inference.
> I qualified my original comment with "in most people's living memory" and didn't include the '76 swine flu vaccine because, frankly, I don't think pointing to an issue that happened 44 years ago in a field that has seen pretty significant technological advancement in knowledge, methods, and manufacturing processes really makes sense.
That's really painting a target where your arrow landed. Most people's living memory does not include e.g. the 1918 pandemic or the bubonic plague, or atomic bombs, or thousands of other things we're proactively defending against and of which we have better understanding but are still an issue. If "living memory" is your criterion ... well, I wouldn't describe it as anything but completely arbitrary.
Within living memory you have totally understandable and preventable things like Fukushima, the nestle mother milk fiasco in Africa, and others. We had enough understanding to stop all of them, and yet they happened. Every single SARS-COV-2 vaccine manufacturer has gotten government immunity from future claims, which aligns their incentive differently compared to vaccines they have produced in the past. They have become too big/important to sue - much like e.g. the fukushima reactor operator. Given this distinctly different incentive structure, rushed schedule, novel RNA delivery system - your belief that the past is a good predictor of the future is unscientific (at the very least, unbayesian without a ton of nontrivial priors you don't bother stating).
> And both those risks are, of course, many orders of magnitude less than your chance of suffering long-term effects from catching COVID19.
Ah, about that. Do you have any actual data about that? Because the best summary of "long covid" evidence I found was written by an MD, is summarized here[0], and can further be summarized by the word "lacking". I spent a lot of time looking for actual data about long covid (not anecdotes), and this summary is better than what I was able to find myself (but I do urge you to read it - do introduce it to your "living memory").
[0] https://sebastianrushworth.com/2020/11/17/what-is-long-covid...
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Here comes my old publicly traded corporation rant: a company with a well defined owner, even with a well defined group of owners, would, given the opportunity, profit handsomely. But not overdo it. They'd rather be seen as a global saviour, not as a global ransomer. Enter public trading: the opportunity alone for global ransoming will inevitably become the projection that defines the street price for shares and once…
I don’t think this is a very good rant. Private companies have investors too, and board leadership varies from company to company.
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> if someone needs to treat cancer, it doesn't make any good to go to an emergency unit That's because the ER is meant to stabilize a patient, not cure chronic disease. Which is to my point: people will forgo preventative medicine until their condition deteriorates and they need to be stabilized in an ER. People get their non-emergent conditions treated all the time in American emergency rooms. E.g., if I have diabet…
And how would anyone know if he has diabetes (for example) if the person doesn't have regular visits to medical facilities? In such a case they will go to emergency only when an emergency happens, probably when it is already too late. By saying that such a person has access to health care, you're just redefining health care to "emergency health care". If this was not enough, hospitals are catching up to the "loophole…
You may not understand the nuances of the article you referenced. Take Detroit, one of the cities used to support the claim in the article. The baseline decade used is the 1960s. Detroit has only about a third of the population it had in the 1960s so it's not rational to think they would maintain their previous healthcare infrastructure. Further, much of that population left for the suburbs of metro Detroit, meaning the healthcare facilities being built are just following the population demographics. Add onto that the point that healthcare has changed dramatically over the last 60 years with much more emphasis on outpatient care, and there are rational, non malevolent reasons to decrease the number of urban hospitals