Two recent books that may be of some interest (I haven’t read either of them, so I can’t say):
The pharmaceutical industry is broken. From the American hedge fund manager who hiked the price of an AIDS pill from $17.50 to $750 overnight to the children’s cancer drugs left intentionally to expire in a Spanish warehouse, the signs of this dysfunction are all around. A system that was designed to drive innovation and patient care has been relentlessly distorted to drive up profits.
Medicines have become nothing more than financial assets. The focus of drug research, how drugs are priced and who has access to them is now dictated by shareholder value, not the good of the public. Drug companies fixated on ever-higher profits are being fined for bribing doctors and striking secret price-gouging deals, while patients desperate for life-saving medicines are driven to the black market in search of drugs that national health services can’t afford.
Sick Money argues that the way medicines are developed and paid for is no longer working. Unless we take action we risk a dramatic decline in the pace of drug development and a future in which medicines are only available to the highest bidder. In this book investigative journalist Billy Kenber offers a diagnosis of an industry in crisis and a prescription for how we can fight back.
Why was the UK so unprepared for the pandemic, suffering one of the highest death rates and worst economic contractions of the major world economies in 2020? Hilary Cooper and Simon Szreter reveal the deep roots of our vulnerability and set out a powerful manifesto for change post-Covid-19. They argue that our commitment to a flawed neoliberal model and the associated disinvestment in our social fabric left the UK dangerously exposed and unable to mount an effective response. This is not at all what made Britain great. The long history of the highly innovative universal welfare system established by Elizabeth I facilitated both the industrial revolution and, when revived after 1945, the postwar Golden Age of rising prosperity. Only by learning from that past can we create the fairer, nurturing and empowering society necessary to tackle the global challenges that lie ahead - climate change, biodiversity collapse and global inequality.
Reveals why the UK was so lacking in resilience after decades of neoliberal economics that it was unable to respond effectively to the pandemic
Argues that Britain’s history, going right back to the reign of Elizabeth I, demonstrates that welfare spending has always been a vital stimulus for, not a burden on, economic growth
Presents readers with practical proposals, inspired by our own history, which provide a blueprint for building an empowering society that will enable us to tackle the bigger challenges that are coming after COVID-19
(Disclaimer: I foresee several possible criticisms, some of which I even agree with, but “Virus? What virus?” isn’t one of them.)
Have you found a genuine source of a physically-demonstrated, purified SC19 virus then, T? A sample that we can see under an electron microscope, not just get assured about by computer GIGOs? I’ve heard tell of unicorns, by romancers. But I don’t necessarily believe them. It may be so. Show me. Let me see and touch.
The thing that really does come as a surprise is the assertion that England - and presumably Cymru too, though not Eire, I doubt - began to get a social safety net through the efforts of Elizabeth Tewdwr. That’s a new idea to me though. Wonder what they have to offer on that head?
“The thing that really does come as a surprise is the assertion that England - and presumably Cymru too, though not Eire, I doubt - began to get a social safety net through the efforts of Elizabeth Tewdwr. That’s a new idea to me though. Wonder what they have to offer on that head?”
I wonder if this query about the perhaps un-isolated virus applies to all viruses?
I.e., is this one of these disagreements that scientists can have about the fundamentals, that doesn’t stop the subject from ‘working’ - like whether a particle is a wave or energy, or the ‘slits’ conundrum, which although unresolved don’t impede quantum mechanics exploitation.
If they have ‘disease’ wrong on some theoretical level does it invalidate everything else? As there still seems to be a lot of working science built on top of it, I just wonder how useful it is (from a tactical point of view) to use it for denial, as it competes with all the top medics who are trying to publicize cures for covid.
Cheers
Exactly how it works, Evvy: the history of ideas is replete with theoretical structures which were taken as self-evident by society at large, or at least by that minority intellectual priesthood and its attendant bourgeois-laity penumbra who concerned themselves with such abstractions. These ‘obvious truths’ then turned out to be fatally injured by palpable, easily-replicated facts which simply wouldn’t fit into the favoured theory, and which ended up in bringing about its general junking by the ‘intelligentsia’; two of my favourite examples being the phlogiston theory of combustion, and the geo-centric cosmology.
Meanwhile, the bemused commons looked on in mystification, content to just live in ways of commonsense pragmatism, and pay only scant attention to the chattering classes’ flights of theoretical clat-fartery.
A key point about theory-killing anomalies is that they take time to penetrate and puncture the moribund theory. It’s a process rather than a sudden collapse. And sure: at the moment, defeating the global scam that’s been floated on the back of the covi-flu is pretty clearly more important than showing that ‘vaccine’ theory is probably on the skids, and likely before long due to be replaced by something like a ZachBush-style ‘benign exosome messenger within a constantly self-correcting benign ecosphere’ hypothesis; which will then need a whole lot of further scientific exploratory and experimental work, to get it firmly founded as a new orthodoxy. We have some damned villains of the global gickate to beat out of power first. But this is how scientific revolutions go.
And then, if history is anything to go by, rinse and repeat…
Hi folks, I seem to recall Kaufmann and maybe Sam Bailey actually argued that because it could not be isolated then it could not be regarded as existing. Most other naysayers who agree it has not been isolated within the Koch’s postulates but do not claim it does not exist rather they say it cannot be scientifically proven to have been the cause of any illness - Zach Bush is one of these.
Certainly the absence of evidence for its existence ( or that of any virus) cannot be used as evidence of absence (i.e. that it does not exist) - proving a negative is regarded as impossible. But similarly the absence of evidence cannot be used to say “therefore it cannot exist” - if the conditions of inquiry or the science behind it change then new evidence could be introduced to prove something exists and has always existed, until that point the absence of evidence only leaves the matter uncertain or as Scottish law has it “not proven”.
[•••] thing that really does come as a surprise is the assertion that England - and presumably Cymru too, though not Eire, I doubt - began to get a social safety net through the efforts of Elizabeth Tewdwr. That’s a new idea to me
Very crude summary: the Poor Law of 1601 consolidated some piecemeal provision by obliging parishes to provide ‘relief’ to the poor. The deserving poor were distinguished from ‘paupers’ who had to submit to institutionalisation of one kind or another. Later formalised by the creation of the workhouse.
One of the many side effects was that people were encouraged to not stay long in a particular parish (I am euphemising like mad, no doubt some very firm methods were adopted) which exacerbated the problem of vagabondage. See Orwell’s reportage in Down And Out In Paris And London for how that ended up.
I worked in welfare rights for quite a few years, and for a while in a “spike” (short term hostels for homeless men, dreadful, but slightly better than sleeping rough in the colder months). They continued to be run by the DHSS until ±30 years ago.
The whole deserving -v- undeserving poor binary lives on in the modern welfare state.
Coming soon: Universal Basic Income for cooperative citizens. Plus ca change (etc)
Thanks @Twirlip for the first recommendation which I’ll add to the ever growing list of “I’m going to read during my next beach holiday”. The second book, I’ll definately pass on.
For @RhisiartGwilym and @Evvy_dense (or anyone else), here is a video to watch at your leisure. It’s Tom Cowan interviewing a guy called Tommy John (whom I had never heard of). It’s along the lines of challenging the medical orthodoxy, but nothing at all to do with Coroni or germs! I’ll leave it there so as not to steal his thunder.
