Emily Hutto, Associate Video Producer - MedPage Today
Stephan: Big Pharma is one of the most corrupt parts of the illness profit system that passes for healthcare in the United States. You and I fund the development of drugs, then pay obscene overcharges to get access to them. This interview presents an excellent explanation of the current situation, and why it must change.
In this video, Jeremy Faust, MD, editor-in-chief of MedPage Today, discusses the U.S. patent system with Priti Krishtel, JD. Krishtel is the co-founder of I-MAK, a non-profit focused on building a more just and equitable medicines system in the U.S.
Krishtel reveals how the patent system rewards pharmaceutical companies that try to prevent competition and keep prescription drug prices artificially high.
The following is a transcript of their remarks:
Faust: Hello, this is Jeremy Faust, medical editor-in-chief of MedPage Today. Thank you for joining us.
We’re joined today by Priti Krishtel, a health justice lawyer. She’s the co-founder and co-executive director of I-MAK, Initiatives for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge. This is a non-profit that works on equitable medicines systems and patents and issues surrounding that. Priti Krishtel is also the recent recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award.
Well, thank you so much for joining us.
Krishtel: Thanks for having me.
Faust: Let’s dive into your work and what you do. Obviously COVID changed everything in terms of how I spend my time, and to some extent how you spend your time, I imagine. Can you […]
Stephan: My original plan for today's issue was to commit the entire issue to the stories about the Thanksgiving mass shooting and murders. Think about that, But, when I laid it out it was just too much, so I am doing just this one article. In the United States so far this year we have had 608 mass shootings and murders, and nearly 40,000, that's right not a typo, 40,000 have died by gun fire. We have gotten to a point in this country where if you are non-evangelical Christian, LGBTQ, or of any race but White, and you gather socially someplace, you are at significant risk of being killed or wounded by some hate-filled, resentful, fearful individual -- almost certainly a White man, usually armed with an AR-15 style military weapon. There is no other country in the world unless engaged in open warfare, where this kind of random murder occurs. And it just goes on and on. Other than President Biden, do you hear anyone in Congress, particularly a Republican member, talking about creating gun controls? No, neither do I. And that is the problem. Are you as sick of these mass murders as I am? Then I urge you to write your Representative and senators and tell them to pass real gun control.
Visitors hug Wednesday at makeshift memorial near the scene of a mass shooting in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Credit: David Zalubowski / AP
It was the final hour of extended store opening on Tuesday at the Walmart Supercenter in the commercial heart of Chesapeake, Virginia’s second-largest city. Shoppers scrambled to make last-minute purchases for Thanksgiving. Then shots rang out.
Shortly after 10pm an employee, said to be a manager, entered a break room at the back of the store where staff were gathering at the start of the overnight shift, and according to an eyewitness “just started spraying”. The gunman used a pistol to shoot his victims and then turned the weapon on himself, all within minutes.
Donya Prioleau, a worker at the store, captured on Facebook the horror of the moment. She expressed not only her own trauma at seeing three friends killed by a silent gunman right in front of her, but also a wider despair at yet another mass shooting two days before a holiday meant for reflection and celebration.
She wrote: “Somebody’s baby, mom, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, […]
Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute - Independent Media Institute
Stephan: What becomes ever more clear as I read the scientific and professional literature is that humanity, and particularly the United States, are not only not properly planning for dealing with climate change, the allocation of resources for the task is badly screwed up because politicians simply won't face the reality of what is happening. This article lays out one of the major failings.
Vast quantities of minerals and metals are required for the renewable energy transition. Credit: AleSpa / Wikimedia Commons
Despite all the renewable energy investments and installations, actual global greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing. That’s largely due to economic growth: While renewable energy supplies have expanded in recent years, world energy usage has ballooned even more—with the difference being supplied by fossil fuels. The more the world economy grows, the harder it is for additions of renewable energy to turn the tide by actually replacing energy from fossil fuels, rather than just adding to it.
The notion of voluntarily reining in economic growth in order to minimize climate change and make it easier to replace fossil fuels is political anathema not just in the rich countries, whose people have gotten used to consuming at extraordinarily high rates, but even more so in poorer countries, which have been promised the opportunity to “develop.”
After all, it is the rich countries that have been responsible for the great majority of past emissions (which are driving […]
Stephan: The illness profit system of healthcare, on the basis of objectively verifiable evidence (see the SR archive), is failing. And it is only going to get worse as health issues become more extreme as a result of pandemics, lack of staff, and healthcare "deserts" in rural areas where there are no hospitals, as well as few practitioners. But fundamental of all of this is the economic structure of healthcare in the United States. It is not meeting the needs of the people of this country and the government is so corrupt as a result of Citizens United legalizing bribery, that nothing is being done.
An intensive care nurse cares for a patient suffering from respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) who is being ventilated in the children’s intensive care unit of the Olgahospital in Stuttgart, Germany on November 25, 2021. Hospitals in the U.S. are reporting a surge in RSV cases. Credit: Marijan Murat / picture alliance / Getty
Pediatric health experts are sounding alarms regarding a surge in respiratory viruses among children, with more than three-quarters of pediatric hospital beds now full as respiratory syncytial virus cases hit more than double the number of infants who were affected last year.
In a letter to President Joe Biden and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra American Academy earlier this week, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) called on the administration to declare a public health emergency, which would give hospitals flexibility to free up beds.
The White House signaled that it would not declare an emergency, only saying Thursday that officials were “ready to provide assistance to communities who are in need of help on a case-by-case basis.”
Stephan: For fearful resentful Whites, Trump is still their leader, as this article describes. The problem they face is that this cohort is a shrinking minority. The problem the rest of us face is that as these people recognize they are a shrinking minority they are likely to get more violent. We've had four mass shootings during this Thanksgiving period and I fear this is a precursor for what is coming because we are not dealing with America's obsessive gun psychosis.
Armed attendees listen to speakers during a Proud Boy rally on Sept, 26, 2020 in Portland, Oregon Credit: Nathan Howard/Getty
For the past six years, I’ve been grappling with the same unsettling mix of feelings: horror at Donald Trump’s presidency, incredulousness at what happened at the capital, relief when the most damning evidence of Trumpian misdeeds came to light and a near-religious hope that the GOP might return to something resembling sanity. My nervous optimism persisted through the run-up to the midterms, with its loud predictions of an apocalypse, and after the election, had a brief moment of actual confidence. But this week, as I watched Trump announce his candidacy for 2024, that optimism was eclipsed by a more persistent, nagging realization: Trump was never president.
I don’t mean literally. He did serve a term, though he violated so many oaths and protocols of the office — and of simple decency — that many Americans (including me) took to saying that he was not president, as a kind of protest.
