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> billions of dollars have been poured into big pharma, instead of public health and policies My biggest pet peeve is this idea that the human race or even som

> billions of dollars have been poured into big pharma, instead of public health and policies My biggest pet peeve is this idea that the human race or even some large swath (“investors”) are doing one thing instead of another. How does one “pour billions in to policies” anyways? How do investors investing in bigpharma in any way impact public health policy? It’s as if the author wants to take the entire human race aside and say “hey buddy, you’re making some mistakes”. Who? What? When! Planting trees isn’t great for carbon offset but it’s probably great for a dozen other reasons - and guess what - we can do lots of things simultaneously! If the worst miscalculation you can point at the human race making is accidentally planting too many trees - well - I think the author is perhaps the myopic one! Of course they immediately confuse other complex topics (wildfires bad is an extremely naive understanding of California!) so pulling apart any of this is hopeless.

agentultra 4y ago
> it was capitalism that doomed us and capitalism that saved us Saved whom? As I understand what happened it was the biggest wealth transfer in the history of humanity. The disaster investments pouring into the pharmaceutical industry before the pandemic wasn't the reason that the vaccines existed at all; there was decades of research that went into mRNA based vaccines. The pharmaceutical industry was more than profitable already and able to meet demands without the influx of investment. It seems to me that while it was beneficial to have the vaccines we had rolled out it didn't "save" all of us. It protected a good number of people. It wasn't evenly or fairly distributed. And it made a very few number of extremely wealthy people even more wealthy while increasing the number of already financially precarious people in the world.
- landemva 4y ago
  The covid shots were quickly rolled out because of the emergency use authorizations which exempt the manufacturers and providers from safety regulations and liability. It's not a fair market when a favored industry can provide products without liability. That would be like an airplane manufacture not caring if the planes are unsafe. FDA is still issuing the EUAs. https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...
ElectricalUnion 4y ago
> Public policy was mostly a disaster and thank god for all the taxpayers who poured R&D funds into “big pharma”. FTFY. You mean the estimated USD 39.5bi taxpayer dollars that went into big pharma R&D just in the US? Or the US 3.6Bi, Europe 1.9Bi of taxpayer money invested in the first 2 years in big pharma? Big pharma doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone needs to be interested in large scale research, purchasing and applying all those vaccines, or their effectiveness is hampered.
kerkeslager 4y ago
> My biggest pet peeve is this idea that the human race or even some large swath (“investors”) are doing one thing instead of another. How does one “pour billions in to policies” anyways? How do investors investing in bigpharma in any way impact public health policy? You're asking these questions as if they're rhetorical, relying on the simplicity of the "One doesn't! They don't!" answer to get that answer which you want. But that's not the true answer, the true answer is just more complicated. People are investing billions into getting policies passed (lobbyists) and implementing them (compliance, government contracting, etc.). These are multi-billion-dollar economies. Big pharma affects drug policy through lobbying, drug pricing, choosing what drugs to research and make publicly available, etc. > If the worst miscalculation you can point at the human race making is accidentally planting too many trees - well - I think the author is perhaps the myopic one! The miscalculation being pointed out by the author is that we're paying fraudsters for environmental interventions like removing carbon from the atmosphere, and they aren't doing it. Even if planting trees is a good, it's not the good we're paying them for and it's not getting the results we intended. And if you read the article with the intention of understanding it rather than with the intention of picking it apart, you might have noticed that it points out that the trees aren't even getting planted in many cases. > Of course they immediately confuse other complex topics (wildfires bad is an extremely naive understanding of California!) so pulling apart any of this is hopeless. "Wildfires bad" is an extremely naive understanding of this article. Perhaps pulling apart the article is only hopeless for you because you're trying to pull it apart without bothering to understand it.

agentultra 4y ago

> it was capitalism that doomed us and capitalism that saved us Saved whom? As I understand what happened it was the biggest wealth transfer in the history of humanity. The disaster investments pouring into the pharmaceutical industry before the pandemic wasn't the reason that the vaccines existed at all; there was decades of research that went into mRNA based vaccines. The pharmaceutical industry was more than profitable already and able to meet demands without the influx of investment. It seems to me that while it was beneficial to have the vaccines we had rolled out it didn't "save" all of us. It protected a good number of people. It wasn't evenly or fairly distributed. And it made a very few number of extremely wealthy people even more wealthy while increasing the number of already financially precarious people in the world.

landemva 4y ago
The covid shots were quickly rolled out because of the emergency use authorizations which exempt the manufacturers and providers from safety regulations and liability. It's not a fair market when a favored industry can provide products without liability. That would be like an airplane manufacture not caring if the planes are unsafe. FDA is still issuing the EUAs. https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-legal-regulatory-and-policy-framework/emergency-use-authorization https://www.fda.gov/emergency-preparedness-and-response/mcm-...

ElectricalUnion 4y ago

> Public policy was mostly a disaster and thank god for all the taxpayers who poured R&D funds into “big pharma”. FTFY. You mean the estimated USD 39.5bi taxpayer dollars that went into big pharma R&D just in the US? Or the US 3.6Bi, Europe 1.9Bi of taxpayer money invested in the first 2 years in big pharma? Big pharma doesn't exist in a vacuum. Someone needs to be interested in large scale research, purchasing and applying all those vaccines, or their effectiveness is hampered.

kerkeslager 4y ago

> My biggest pet peeve is this idea that the human race or even some large swath (“investors”) are doing one thing instead of another. How does one “pour billions in to policies” anyways? How do investors investing in bigpharma in any way impact public health policy? You're asking these questions as if they're rhetorical, relying on the simplicity of the "One doesn't! They don't!" answer to get that answer which you want. But that's not the true answer, the true answer is just more complicated. People are investing billions into getting policies passed (lobbyists) and implementing them (compliance, government contracting, etc.). These are multi-billion-dollar economies. Big pharma affects drug policy through lobbying, drug pricing, choosing what drugs to research and make publicly available, etc. > If the worst miscalculation you can point at the human race making is accidentally planting too many trees - well - I think the author is perhaps the myopic one! The miscalculation being pointed out by the author is that we're paying fraudsters for environmental interventions like removing carbon from the atmosphere, and they aren't doing it. Even if planting trees is a good, it's not the good we're paying them for and it's not getting the results we intended. And if you read the article with the intention of understanding it rather than with the intention of picking it apart, you might have noticed that it points out that the trees aren't even getting planted in many cases. > Of course they immediately confuse other complex topics (wildfires bad is an extremely naive understanding of California!) so pulling apart any of this is hopeless. "Wildfires bad" is an extremely naive understanding of this article. Perhaps pulling apart the article is only hopeless for you because you're trying to pull it apart without bothering to understand it.