Which industry spends more than any other in Washington? Big Pharma
Over the last 20 years no industry spent more than Pharmaceuticals and Health products on lobbying and campaign contributions. Fully $4,700 million dollars traveled from pharmaceutical giants to politicians, parties and lobbyists.
In 2018 the citizens of the US spent $345 billion on prescription drugs in pharmacies… which works out to about $1,000 per person per year. Adjusted for inflation, that has doubled since 1999 which is not that long ago. Despite competition, discovery and efficiency gains, Americans are spending more than ever.
Maybe Americans are getting much better painkillers, antibiotics, and blood pressure medications than ever before, or maybe government regulations are doing more to protect profits rather than people?
All that lobbying is quite legal, but it isn’t enough. Somehow Big Pharma keep getting caught being naughty as well, lying and hiding things from customers. And if there is no reputational damage from outright deceit and fraud, perhaps the billion-dollar fines are just another cost on the balance sheet. (If only The Media wanted to shine a light on that…)
From 1999 to 2018, the pharmaceutical and health product industry recorded $4.7 billion—an average of $233 million per year—in lobbying expenditures at the federal level, more than any other industry. Of the spending, the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America accounted for $422 million (9.0%), and the other 19 top companies and organizations in this industry accounted for $2.2 billion (46.8%). The industry spent $414 million on contributions to candidates in presidential and congressional elections, national party committees, and outside spending groups. Of this amount, $22 million went to presidential candidates and $214 million went to congressional candidates. Of the 20 senators and 20 representatives who received the most contributions, 39 belonged to committees with jurisdiction over health-related legislative matters, 24 of them in senior positions. The industry contributed $877 million to state candidates and committees, of which $399 million (45.5%) went to recipients in California and $287 million (32.7%) went to recipients in 9 other states. In years in which key state referenda on reforms in drug pricing and regulation were being voted on, there were large spikes in contributions to groups that opposed or supported the reforms.
Which company had the highest spend on lobbying and campaign “contributions”? That would be Pfizer, with $220 million from 1999 to 2018. But there are plenty of others following suit: Amgen spent $190m, Eli Lily — $162m, BIO — $150m, Merck — 143m and so on….
What does Big Pharma spend on advertising in The Legacy Media and on Facebook and Twitter and does that help buy one almost non-stop long advert dressed up as “news”?
Public Health England say viral loads appear similar among people infected with the Delta variant in both groups, meaning, theoretically, they are equally contagious.
But health chiefs insisted the current crop of vaccines still cut the risk of catching the virus in the first place.
Vaccinated people may be less likely to catch Covid (at least for a few months until it wears off) but when vaccinated people do get infected the viral loads are pretty much the same as when unvaccinated people do. In other words, fully vaccinated people can still be dangerous to the people around them. And if they fly in without quarantine, they can bring outbreaks and new mutants too. So much for the freedom jabs. Though, in fairness, at the moment, they still offer some freedom from hospital, just not freedom from masks, quarantines, and restrictions.
Vaccination clearly isn’t going to stop the spread, eliminate the virus, or do a lot to protect your loved ones or work colleagues. It makes it hard for companies to justify mandatory vaccination “for the greater good”. The question, “Would you sit next to an unvaccinated person” isn’t quite the loaded probe it was. And you can always reply: “Would you work with someone who was Vitamin D Deficient“? I mean really, they are defenceless.
When will companies set up mass Vitamin D testing and free supplements?
A couple of weeks ago the Israeli data suggested only 16% of people were still protected from infection six months after vaccination. Presumably Governments will argue that vaccines still reduce the burden on the health care system but new mutations may render that moot too.
The lines that matter in the graph below are the three in the bottom right. That’s the viral loads of the vaccinated, and unvaccinated, with Delta variant. The lines trailing up on the right are probably the last vestiges of the old alpha (UK) variant which only exists anymore in long recovering patients with low viral loads.
The graph shows the Ct values for people who catch the Alpha variant (called SGTF, shown in orange, red and brown) compared to those who catch the Delta variant (called All3P, shown in blue, green and purple). Ct values reflect the amount of the virus found in people’s positive nose and throat swabs, with higher numbers equating to lower levels of the virus. Public Health England compared levels between unvaccinated people, those who have had one dose and those who are double jabbed. It found that Ct values were almost identical, regardless of a person’s immunisation status
Being low on this graph is bad (for us, if not for viruses). The lower the Ct value, the higher the viral load. When there is hardly any virus (or fragments thereof) it takes a lot more cycles to detect and so has a higher Ct value.
NHS Test and Trace data – published in the PHE report – showed daily average Ct values for unvaccinated people who caught the Delta strain was 17.8.
Meanwhile, it was only slightly higher for fully-vaccinated Brits (18).
There are qualifiers, but it is an act of some optimism: We don’t know if the ages of both groups were the same, and if the vaccinated group were older they might have lower viral loads than unvaccinated people their own age. We need to follow both groups through their infections as they progress to know what the real peak is. These groups may have got tested as different points on the curve.
But the figures are similar to the US findings and the US CDC said “wear your masks” to the vaccinated:
The people don’t really want Electric Vehicles, so the US Government is thinking of forcing them on the buyers by squeezing the industry that makes them. There is talk of new rules which apply to the companies selling cars. The control of production could be hidden in something called the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards. By averaging the fuel consumption across a whole company, those brands will have to find a way to sell more EV’s and to limit their own sales of gas guzzlers. It’s a supply and demand thing, if a company can only make so many large internal combustion engine cars, the prices of those will be artificially high. Only the wealthy will be able to afford them. The poor will still pay more for cars than they do now, but the cheapest cars on the market will be EV’s — subsidized by inflated prices on petrol driven cars.
This is just a thought bubble for now, but obviously, the message is to buy your big cars and look after them. They’ll be hot property in the second hand market.
Say goodbye to the free market: The Soviets would be proud of it
Technically these are the Corporate Average Fuel Economy or CAFE standards. The way they work is hidden in the name. They do not govern the average fuel use of cars used by corporations, which the name “corporate average” suggests. No, they govern the average fuel economy of cars MADE by corporations.
The way it works will be well hidden. Instead of telling you and me what we can buy, they in effect tell the car makers what they can make. I am not making this up.
The result is rationing and it has been for many years. The car makers limit the production of bigger cars and trucks, with higher fuel consumption, to stay below the standards. In reality what is rationed is stuff like power, size and safety. I have even heard that they raise the prices of big cars to cut the prices of little ones. This is called a cross subsidy.
So it sounds like the CAFE standards are going to be ratcheted down over less than a decade, until 40% of the vehicles sold are EVs.
Hopefully this abuse of the efficiency standards will be found to be illegal.
But as David goes on to explain, the Brits have their own form of weird plans to make big trucks run off electric overhead wires? See “Trolley Trucks” and read it at CFACT.
Imagine having hot wires strung just above all the nearly 50,000 miles of interstate highways, carrying enough juice to power all those big trucks. Massive accidents waiting to happen? How about them ice storms?
Seems like the wires will only run over the slow lanes, so maybe just 100,000 miles worth.
Blackouts due to unreliable electricity grids will clog up the roads and cripple the country. Good target for foreign adversaries.
How badly do our Health Ministers want to reduce Covid infections and deaths? Not much. If they were at all serious — before they hand out free vaccines, they’d hand out free Vitamin D supplements.
In a study conducted in a Galilee hospital, 26 percent of vitamin D-deficient coronavirus patients died, while among other patients the figure was at 3%. — Times of Israel
If only black lives mattered? Dark skins are so much more likely to be deficient, this is one of those absolutely easy wins for any politician, yet none of them are doing it?
Nearly half the people in the study were deficient, and half of those who were seriously deficient in Vitamin D would go on to develop a severe case. These were the people with levels below 20 ng/ml. Of all the people above that, only 10% would get a severe case. And just being “above 20ng” would still be classified as moderately deficient by many measures, yet it made such a huge difference.
It was a life and death thing — the mortality rate was 25%, fully five times higher for those who fell below the 20ng/ml bar.
The Israeli study looked at the Vitamin D levels of 1200 patients in their medical records before they got infected with Covid. This is important because although studies like the Indonesian study last year showed that people with low levels of Vitamin D were much more likely to die of Covid, those patients weren’t assessed until they turned up at hospital when they were already sick. We couldn’t be sure that something about Covid itself wasn’t chewing through the Vitamin D levels and causing the deficiency. So an Israeli team looked back through their records for up to 2 years to see what their last blood tests showed.
People with the lowest Vitamind D levels were the most likely to get severe Covid.
It’s a retrospective study, so the blood levels of D might have changed, yet despite that, the results still pop out of the data. Ideally we’d measure them just before they got sick.
Don’t wait til you’re in ICU to fix that deficiency. And definitely don’t wait for the CDC or Anthony Fauci to suggest it.
The biggest disadvantage with Vitamin D is that there’s no money in it.
Vitamin D levels also correlate with lower rates of cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma,heart disease, dental caries, preeclampsia, autoimmune disease, depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Vitamin D influences over 200 genes. It’s so crucial, it was likely the reason northern Europeans evolved whiter skin. The lack of sunlight and the introduction of grains in diets (as opposed to eating liver and whales) meant that Europeans weren’t getting enough D from either food or sun. The selective pressure was so strong that lighter skin rapidly took over all the northern communities. Eskimos didn’t need to go white — they were still getting D from offal and plenty of fish.
How cheap was it for the Chinese Communist Party to buy the American media? Like adding a room to a house.
Practically nothing.
The New York Times, the “paper of record” since 1851 in the USA became a tool for China for just $100,000 a month. It put stories out for years that were essentially nothing but Communist advertising. They and other newspapers had a deal with state run China Daily which sanitized and covered up human rights abuses like Uighur concentration camps.
The New York Times quietly deleted hundreds of advertorials that the Chinese Communist Party paid to publish on its website.
China Daily, an official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, has been purchasing advertorial spaces in the pages of mainstream U.S. media outlets for the last decade, using the space to disseminate Chinese propaganda to millions of unassuming Americans. In return, U.S. newspapers such as the Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal received millions of dollars.
The NYT has run over 200 advertorials over the last decade,
Key newspapers helped to hide that SARS 2 was lableak and a potential bioweapon. There is blood on their hands.
Last summer, as the COVID pandemic raged throughout the United States, people who still read the New York Times began to notice something very strange happening at the paper. Hundreds of articles that had appeared there, going back nearly a decade, suddenly vanished, they disappeared. There was no way to find them. Nothing like this had ever happened. The New York Times considers itself–very self-consciously– a living historical record. The paper maintains meticulous, searchable archives going back to 1851. Yet last August, a huge number of articles just disappeared. What was in them? We know the answer because a handful of history-minded readers preserved them when they were in print. Every one of them was a propaganda piece paid for by the Chinese Communist Party, designed to look like a news article.
One of them reads “China Watch: Diaoyu Islands Belong to China.” That’s the headline. Why would the New York Times, America’s paper of record, print propaganda’s from a totalitarian regime and pretend it was a news article? For money. …
What’s twenty million to buy the wealthiest country in the world?
Since 2016, the Chinese government paid $20 million to outlets like The Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Washington Post.
Imagine if the New York Times and others had reported rumors of the Chinese Bioweapon back in the days when President Trump wanted to shut the borders. The world could have kept the virus out. The UN WHO would have been recognised broadly (instead of just on skeptical blogs) that the organisation served China, was a public health menace and was culpable.
When China needed help to cover up the lab leak and bioweapon news, the supposed cream of the US Media were only too happy to help.
In the opening months of the pandemic, the lab leak hypothesis was actively discredited by the media and scientific establishment, with anyone associated with it smeared as “racist”.
At the start of the pandemic, the Times set the news and policy agenda on the lab leak hypothesis, discrediting it and anyone who explored it. The Times did so while taking money from Chinese state-owned propaganda outlets, such as China Daily, and while pursuing long-term investments in China that may have made the paper susceptible to the CCP’s strong-arm propaganda tactics in the first months of the pandemic.
As someone who has spent years researching the history of the Times, I was struck by the paper’s markedly pro-China bent at the start of the pandemic. It opposed Trump’s travel ban to and from China as “isolationist”. It all but ignored the unparalleled success of China’s arch-enemy, Taiwan, in containing the virus. It downplayed China’s economic war against Australia,…
Over the months, the Times’s coverage grew even more strident — and more in line with Chinese propaganda.
The Times, which used Daszak as a key source in over a dozen articles, has never mentioned that Daszak’s organisation funded the Wuhan lab, in particular research into bats and coronaviruses, a flagrant conflict of interest.
The Times set the tone by calling anyone who asked about the lab leak as being a tinfoil hat nutter…
The CCP also controls access to a vast market, and The Times, like so many other corporations in the US was happy to sell out it’s own standards in order to gain access:
In 2012, seeking to capitalise on China’s burgeoning middle and upper classes, the Times launched a Chinese edition of its daily paper followed by the launch of a luxury lifestyle magazine.
In investing so heavily in China, the Times unintentionally handed the rapacious CCP an editorial lever to sway coverage. The Timeslearned this first-hand when, in 2012, the CCP blocked Chinese access to the Times online in retaliation
The elite media was China’s best friend, and a traitor to the USA.
The culture of hating-the-US-as-a-fashion-statement probably meant the editorial board didn’t even feel like they were selling out their own nation.
Despite headlines declaring the World is Committed to Cutting Emissions, and that ( pick a nation) is an “isolated pariah” — the truth is they were all supposed to “update their emissions targets” but 42% of nations, including the two largest, haven’t. Worse, the updates were supposed be done by the end of 2020, and the UN extended the deadline, so they are already double late. And since China effectively promised to do nothing til 2030, all it had to do was say it would do nothing again, so that’s double-late on a non-promise, and it can’t even do that?
In a warning shot across the bows of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, China, India and 85 other nations have decided to ignore a UN deadline to submit its pledges for cutting CO2 emissions in time for the UN climate summit in Glasgow later this year.
South Africa hasn’t put in its own update, but it has asked for money:
Nothing is more important than saving the Earth, and everyone is doing it except (… where you live…).
Glascow COP 26 could end up as another dud. Except even when it’s a dud it’s a success. The junket is the point. It’s the two week glorious reward for all the Climate Fans. Plus the headlines are already written, the late night prolonged finale will still “affirm” the commitment of blah, every nation, blah. Large meaningless numbers of dollars and gigatons will be massaged into subheaders to woo the distracted into thinking something important just happened.
And in the end, a group of bureaucratic grifters will have forged out a lifestyle of foreign flights, heroic subsidies and unaccountable grants.
And the weather will have done whatever the weather was going to do, while they all pretended they could control it.
We are installing wind and solar power at a great rate and the expectation is that this will go on and RE will increasingly penetrate the system as coal power fades away. In the SE we still have just enough conventional power to get by almost all the time but the tipping point will come when we lose another couple of coal stations and we will need to have a continuous supply of RE. There will not be enough conventional power to keep the lights on through windless nights.
Note from Jo: With the sad demise of Catallaxy, I invited Rafe to continue here blogging about energy and electricity in Australia. So the format of the blog will flex somewhat to try to fill some of that void.
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