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Saturday, January 30th, 2021

Pharmaceutical giants not ready for next pandemic, report warns

Author:     Julia Kollewe
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Tue 26 Jan 2021 09.29 EST
 Link: Pharmaceutical giants not ready for next pandemic, report warns
Stephan:   I have been telling my readers for over a year, since before the Covid-19 Pandemic began, that it is inevitable that as climate change progresses viruses and bacteria will mutate to meet the evolving conditions, and that America's illness profit system is not prepared for this, because it is very costly to develop vaccines, and preparing for pandemics that have not yet emerged is not profitable. Now the World Health Organization confirms what I have been saying. What should, of course, be happening is that real healthcare systems need to anticipate and prepare for what may be coming, and that some of the vast wealth we pour into defense corporation coffers should be redirected to that end.

The world’s biggest pharmaceutical firms are little prepared for the next pandemic despite a mounting response to the Covid-19 outbreak, an independent report has warned.

Jayasree K Iyer, executive director of the Netherlands-based Access to Medicine Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation funded by the UK and Dutch governments and others, highlighted an outbreak of the Nipah virus in China, with a fatality rate of up to 75%, as potentially the next big pandemic risk.

“Nipah virus is another emerging infectious disease that causes great concern,” she said. “Nipah could blow any moment. The next pandemic could be a drug-resistant infection.”

Nipah can cause severe respiratory problems and encephalitis, swelling of the brain, and has a mortality rate of 40% to 75%, depending on where the outbreak occurs. Fruit bats are its natural host. Outbreaks in Bangladesh and India were probably linked to drinking date palm juice.

It is one of 10 infectious diseases out of 16 identified by the World Health Organization as the greatest public health risk where there are zero projects in pharmaceutical firms’ pipelines, according to the foundation’s biennial report. […]

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2 Comments

  1. Philip W. Askenase on Saturday, January 30, 2021 at 2:48 pm

    This is the 4th pandemic I have participated in. AIDS, Lyme, Ebola and COVID SARS-2. The next one within say 10 years is inevitable and governments are totally unprepared. Philip Askenase, Yale Medial School,

  2. Rev. Dean on Monday, February 1, 2021 at 4:28 am

    We need to take at least half of the money we spend on the “war machine” and put it to better use: fostering wellbeing.