If this is true, why doesn’t the drug industry stop advertising non-stop on the evening news to save a little money? I’m not sure what the actual ratio is but it seems that during a half hour of “NBC Nightly News,” two-thirds of the ads are for some prescription drug.

The cynical among us might say that this is the main reason that the mainstream media is so hostile to health care reform. They know where their paychecks are coming from.

Perhaps it will be shat out later today.

What blows my mind is just how big a bullet we appear to be dodging. And what a colossal wake-up call this is (no,not a call, a fog horn blast sent thru a bullhorn).

What if this H1N1 strain was as deadly as it was in 1918?

The 1918 strain of H1N1 had a mortality rate of 2.5%. I think our society would freak had such an event occurred today (with Fox News fueling the hysteria, of course, but only if the pres were a Dem. Otherwise it would be un-patriotic and hating America to question the president.)

The 1918 bug came and had killed most of those who were to die by the end of October. If we were facing the same strain of H1N1, we’d still be waiting for vaccine.

(An argument can be made that we might have seen a 2.5% mortality for our strain of H1N1 if we had the same level of medical knowledge and the same kinds of drugs available as in 1918. Most 1918 pandemic deaths were from pneumonia as side effects of the flu, not from the bug itself.)

Schools have been closing here (for a few days at a time) because most of the kids were out sick with influenza. Can you imagine what would be going on socially and politically in this country if 2.5% of those kids died?

And Jebus help us if this had been H5N1, which has a mortality rate of 60%. And that is with modern medicine.

We seem to be no better prepared now to protect ourselves from deadly pandemics than in 2003, when everyone freaked about SARS.

The explanations for the H1N1 vaccine shortages have varied (Shortage? What shortage? No, wait, it’s because of outdated equipment. No its because gubmint regulates us and red tape slows it all down. No, it’s because incubating the virus takes longer than normal. No, we actually told the government the truth about realistic production targets and it is they who lied to you).

Any thing with drug manufacturers involved is reason enough to expect lies, especially they considering they are not happy about government efforts at health care reform.

Are some of these the same manufacturers who were paid millions make and deliver the H1N1 vaccine, the shortages of which now require rationing here in WI to the most at-risk young children and pregnant women?

The H1N1 vaccine was available in April—a cousin of mine who lives in Illinois got herself and her kids vaccinated at her doctor’s office then. (She just confirmed with her doctor that the H1N1 vaccination she and her kids got in April will still work—the virus, surprisingly, hasn’t mutated enough yet.)

So back in April the manufacturers had the knowledge of what it takes to produce the H1N1 vaccine and would have known of the necessity of longer production time.

Now they have produced only 1/2 to a 1/3 the amount they said they would be able to deliver by November. They claim they had no idea it would take longer to manufacture than the seasonal variety.

Whocoodanode!

Of course without missing a beat the Fox News teabaggers are ranting online about how this highlights the failures of socia-lized medicine and is proof obamacare will doom us all.

It really isn’t supposed to work that way. The price should ideally go down after a drug has proven itself to be relatively safe and effective and more people start using it. Isn’t there an existing agency in the government that actually enforces things like anti-trust and racketeering laws?

Crickets.

It’s pretty much an open secret on the research side that the big drug companies don’t produce in house any of their drugs. What they don’t buy off the universities who do tax-payer funded pubic research, they get by buying biotech companies that create successful drugs. Hell, that’s how the entire biotech industry is structured these days. You work at a firm for about a year or three. If you develop a marketable drug, the company is sold off to a drug giant and it becomes “one of their drugs”. If you are not, the company declares bankruptcy and you find another firm to work with. The private sector is incredibly volatile because it’s all based on being absorbed by the big drug companies or failing.

So yeah, research, mm hm. On a sadder note, it’s appalling how many industries exist that are strictly there to parasitize the hard work of others. Wall Street, insurance companies, big drug companies, big box stores. It can’t be sustainable to have this much of our GDP going to entities that don’t actually do anything other than make life worse for everyone else.

In all those soc!alist European countries where health care costs about half of the US, advertizing drugs to the general public is not allowed, except for over-the-counter drugs like painkillers, cough medicine and muscle rub. Must be a coincidence.

Science Daily, January 7, 2008:

A new study by two York University researchers estimates the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends almost twice as much on promotion as it does on research and development, contrary to the industry’s claim.

The researchers’ estimate is based on the systematic collection of data directly from the industry and doctors during 2004, which shows the U.S. pharmaceutical industry spent 24.4% of the sales dollar on promotion, versus 13.4% for research and development, as a percentage of U.S. domestic sales of $235.4 billion.

[. . .]

The researchers used 2004 as the comparison year because it was the latest year in which information was available [from IMS and CAM].

[. . .]

“Even our revised promotion figure for 2004 is apt to be understated, as there are other promotion avenues that are not likely to be taken into consideration by IMS or CAM, such as ghost-writing and off-label promotion,” says Gagnon. “Also, seeding trials, which are designed to promote the prescription of new drugs, may be allocated to other budget categories.”

IMS and CAM data were used for comparison purposes because data from both are publicly available, both operate globally and are well regarded by the pharmaceutical industry, and both break down their information by different promotion categories. Most importantly, the two organizations use different methods for gathering their data, allowing the researchers to triangulate on a more accurate figure for each promotion category.

The authors focused their study on the United States because it is the only country in which information is available for all of the major promotion categories, and it is also the largest market for pharmaceuticals in the world, representing approximately 43% of global sales and global promotion expenditures.

And—no links yet, but I’m looking—I seem to remember reading somewhere that the big pharma companies’ marketing budgets are uniformly larger than their R&D budgets.

But drug companies say they are having to raise prices to maintain the profits necessary to invest in research and development of new drugs as the patents on many of their most popular drugs are set to expire over the next few years.

If this is true, why doesn’t the drug industry stop advertising non-stop on the evening news to save a little money? I’m not sure what the actual ratio is but it seems that during a half hour of “NBC Nightly News,” two-thirds of the ads are for some prescription drug.