Portside

As Pfizer and Moderna prepare to roll out their COVID 19 vaccines, the problems associated with publicly funded vaccines in the hands of private companies are already on the horizon, as the drug industry seeks to control global efforts for a cure.

Pharmacists across the U.S. warn that the push to do more with less has made medication errors more likely. “I am a danger to the public,” one wrote to a regulator.

...now is the time for bold long-term solutions that can help secure the future health and well being of our communities. Public pharmaceuticals can play an important role in constructing that future we so desperately need.

The intrepid New Yorker pulls back the curtain on how private companies profit from taxpayer-funded research

The groups that received pharmaceutical funding—like the US Pain Foundation and the Academy of Integrative Pain Management—in turn issued guidelines minimizing the risks of opioid addiction, lobbied to change laws aimed at curbing opioid abuse, and sought to protect doctors sued for overprescribing painkillers, according to a Senate report released Monday by Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill (D).

Opioid overdose claims 175 Americans each day, but powerful pharmaceutical companies continue to promote their sales.

The ongoing and increasing revolving door phenomenon clearly suggests excess coziness between industry and government, now to the extent that industry and government leaders of health care are becoming interchangeable. true health care reform would cut the ties between government and corporate leaders.

Not only do patents push higher prices onto consumers, they burden the research world with the increased costs of paying for the intellectual property needed to do further research . . . If anything, the neoliberal approach to academic research is a return to the privately funded, pre-tenure origins of the university system when numerous schools were simply research labs and promotional arms for private industry

“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”