Since 1976 “Project Censored,” a U.S.-based nonprofit media watchdog organization, has been identifying “the news that didn’t make the news,” the most significant stories it believes are being systematically overlooked. Slashdot ran stories about its annual list of the year’s most censored news stories in 1999, 2003, 2004, and in 2007, when they’d presciently warned that the media was ignoring the…
Tag: Pharma
The World’s Most Loathed Industry Gave Us a Vaccine in Record Time
An anonymous reader shares a feature report: At the end of 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic started, the two best-known faces of the pharmaceutical business were the imprisoned Martin Shkreli and the lawsuit-laden opioid makers at Purdue Pharma. The rest of the industry was perhaps best known for the skyrocketing prices of its medicines. In a Gallup Poll of the public’s…
Why It’s a Big Deal If the First COVID-19 Vaccine Is ‘Genetic’
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from Wired: On Monday morning, when representatives from the drug company Pfizer said that its Covid-19 vaccine appears to be more than 90 percent effective, stocks soared, White House officials rushed to (falsely) claim credit, and sighs of relief went up all around the internet. […] The arrival of an effective vaccine to fight SARS-CoV-2…
Vaccine Hopes Rise as Oxford Jab Prompts Immune Response Among Old as Well as Young Adults
One of the world’s leading COVID-19 experimental vaccines produces an immune response in both young and old adults, raising hopes of a path out of the gloom and economic destruction wrought by the novel coronavirus. From a report: The vaccine, developed by the University of Oxford, also triggers lower adverse responses among the elderly, British drug maker AstraZeneca Plc, which is…
Could Open Source Licensing Stop Big Pharma Profiteering On Taxpayer-Funded Covid-19 Vaccines?
Two professors at the University of Massachusetts have co-authored a new essay explaining how open source licensing “could keep Big Pharma from making huge profits off taxpayer-funded research” in the international, multi-billion-dollar race for a Covid-19 vaccine: The invention of the “General Public License,” sometimes referred to as a viral or reciprocal license, meant that should an improvement be made, the…
Could Open-Source Medicine Prepare Us For The Next Pandemic?
“A new, Linux-like platform could transform the way medicine is developed — and energize the race against COVID-19,” reports Fast Company, while arguing that the old drug discovery system “was built to benefit shareholders, not patients.” Fast Company’s technology editor harrymcc writes:
Drug development in the U.S. has traditionally been cloistered and profit-motivated, which means that it has sometimes failed to tackle…
Will China Seize an American Company’s Drug For Fighting Coronavirus?
“Chinese researchers reportedly have applied for a local patent on an experimental Gilead drug that they believe could help fight the novel coronavirus outbreak — and also significantly bolster Gilead’s bottom-line going forward…” reports The Street. “If granted, Gilead will need to get Chinese patent owners on board when it wants to sell the drug for treating the novel coronavirus infection…
Exploring curiosity with Simon Brown, Chief Learning Officer at Novartis
Coursera sits down with Novartis’ Chief Learning Officer, Simon Brown, to learn how he and his team are fostering curious minds and a desire to learn across 130,000 employees in pharmaceutical and healthcare. Coursera: What drew Novartis to Coursera as a preferred learning solution? Simon: At Novartis our mission is to reimagine medicine, and we […]
The post Exploring curiosity with Simon…
Purdue Pharma Offers $10-12B To Settle Opioid Claims
The maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, and its owners, the Sackler family, are offering to settle more than 2,000 lawsuits against the company for $10 billion to $12 billion. From a report: The potential deal was part of confidential conversations and discussed by Purdue’s lawyers at a meeting in Cleveland last Tuesday, Aug. 20, according to two people familiar with the…
$572 Million Decision Against Johnson & Johnson in Landmark Opioid Trial
An anonymous reader shares a report: A judge in Oklahoma on Monday ruled against Johnson & Johnson, the deep-pocketed corporate giant, and ordered it to pay the state $572 million in the first trial of an opioid manufacturer for the destruction wrought by prescription painkillers. Johnson & Johnson, which contracted with poppy growers in Tasmania, supplied 60 percent of the opiate…