Abbvie has bilked the American public and medicare out of $114 billion in five years.

In “How a Drug Company Made $114 Billion by Gaming the U.S. Patent System”, Nic Antaya writes:

AbbVie and its affiliates have applied for 311 patents, of which 165 have been granted, related to Humira, according to the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, which tracks drug patents. A vast majority were filed after Humira was on the market.

Some of Humira’s patents covered innovations that benefited patients, like a formulation of the drug that reduced the pain from injections. But many of them simply elaborated on previous patents.

For example, an early Humira patent, which expired in 2016, claimed that the drug could treat a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the joints, among other diseases.

Continue reading Medicine (and Patents), American style at uncoy.

There are some naive people out there. dbtunr writes about the mortality statistics presented for Covid-19:

Covid affects everyone differently. What it did to you or any one person does not matter. It has killed over 750,000 in the US alone.

In answer, Junk Silver sensibly remarks:

93.75% of all CoVid-19 statistics are utter bullshit. If CoVid killed 750,000 it did so largely by miraculously eliminating all deaths from pneumonia, flu and old age.

Correct. Mortality isn’t really up much in 2021 vs 2019. Overall mortality does not reflect a pandemic but a scamdemic. That’s not to say Covid-19 is not an unpleasant ailment with horrible side effects. The vaccines neither seem to stop its spread nor the side effects. The side effects of the vaccines are enormous, striking down even professional footballers in their prime.

Continue reading Naturally-Acquired Versus Vaccine-Acquired Immunity at uncoy.

Apparently Astra-Zeneca and Johnson and Johnson are working on a new ‘safer’ version of their Covid-19 vaccines which will reduce side effects. Most of us, including Stranger in a Strange Land, had heard the vaccines were already safe:

I don’t understand? Why would they need to work on modifications to reduce deadly side-effects? That makes no sense, because they told me it was completely safe and effective. Were they lying then, or lying now?

More amusing is the conversation the rats are holding among themselves:

Overhead in lab –

Rat 1: “Hey, have you gotten your Covid jab yet?”

Rat 2: “Nah, I’m waitin til the human trials are over”

It’s a rare treatment which is tested on humans first. Well there were animal tests, but some doctors allege many animals including cats and ferrets died.

Continue reading New ‘improved’ vaccines coming at uncoy.

We’ve all been watching the Covid-19 parade for awhile. Let’s go through the stages of lockdowns first and in context we’ll return for Dr Fauci’s sudden enthusiasm for vaccinating toddlers and babies.

First Lockdown

First, it was a temporary lockdown to “flatten the curve” and let scientists and medical doctors estimate the dangers and cobble together treatment plans for this new Coronavirus.

I was totally on-board with this step. Three month lockdown while the scientists figure out if the mortality rate is 0.1%, 1% or 4% (they already knew it wasn’t 10% – thank heavens). When it slowly became apparent that the mortality rate is more like 0.1% (1) Out of 1000 people who contract Covid-19, one will die. This is terrible. I have another statistic though which is quite depressing. Out of 1000 people, fourteen will die every year (assuming average lifespan of seventy years).

Continue reading Now US Chief Medical Advisor Dr Fauci wants to vaccinate babies at uncoy.

Should even Americans trust the US Army? Apparently not. They’ve just incinerated over 10 million kilograms of toxic AFFF in urban areas! AFFF is short for Aqueous Fire Fighting Foam.

AFFF contains contaminants known as perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS); exposure to trace amounts of these synthetic chemicals is associated with a variety of detrimental health effects, and some have argued that PFAS are so risky that they not only endanger public health but threaten to undermine human reproduction writ large.

The burn sites were apparently mostly in low income areas. It’s unlikely that Nancy Pelosi would countenance such activities next to her manor or her children’s manors.

Some commenters wanted to suggest that these deadly shenanigans are a recent phenomenon and that in the past the US military would never play with or endanger American lives.

Continue reading Should Americans trust the US Army? In a word, AFFF at uncoy.

Piotr Berman writes about his experience buying medicine in the US and Poland.

A New Congressional Budget Office Study Shows That Medicare for All Would Save Hundreds of Billions of Dollars Annually – Jacobin

In USA, healthcare sector has the total revenue at least triple of Military Industrial Complex, and it is extremely rapacious. Regulatory capture is rampant and costs are bloated, often beyond imagination of Americans, including those “well informed”. One should note that Australia makes it will less than half of USAian expenditures per capita with better outcomes. “Of course”, this happens with a single payer system that severely dampens regulatory capture etc., government has to balance the budget to some degree while getting pressure from the voters to actually provide quality care. By the way of contrast, market mechanisms cannot deliver any cost reductions except by reducing the “consumption” in response to “price signals”, that partly explains rather meager health outcomes in USA — when we compare with countries like Australia, Greece, Japan etc.

Continue reading How the US “Open Market” for Health Care inflates costs at uncoy.

dr ben goldacre bad pharma

Bad Pharma, a new book by Ben Goldacre, looks into the research practices of big pharmacy. Apparently any negative information about new drugs is systematically suppressed even in the academic environment:

In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Toronto found all the trials looking at five major classes of drug…: were they positive, and were they funded by industry? They found more than 500 trials in total: 85% of the industry-funded studies were positive, but only 50% of the government-funded trials were. In 2007, researchers looked at every published trial that set out to explore the benefits of a statin….This study found 192 trials in total, either comparing one statin against another, or comparing a statin against a different kind of treatment. They found that industry-funded trials were 20 times more likely to give results favouring the test drug.

Continue reading (Published) cell phone research indicates no radiation at uncoy.

Steve Jobs was given a strange family life. Given up for adoption himself, his biological parents had another go at it and a sister was born Jobs had a sister he met only as an adult, Mona Simpson.

In his own life, Jobs had a daughter born out of wedlock with artist Chrisann Brennan. For some reason Jobs rejected Lisa Brennan for a few years before finally naming a computer after her.

Writer Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Curiously both sister and daughter are writers. A high level of verbal communication appears to be in Jobs genes. As Jobs is biologically half-Syrian, the entire Jobs family are a poster child against the absurd jingois against the intellectual abilities of the Middle Eastern peoples. It really makes wonder if Nobel peace prize counts are not more a question of the restriction of opportunity to those from Western countries.

Continue reading Date Rape and Vegetarianism: Writings of Lisa Brennan-Jobs at uncoy.

Lately, a dear friend of mine has been trying to persuade me that too much tea is unhealthy, especially overly steeped tea. During nearly a decade in Moscow, I became accustomed to good Indian tea Russian style: that is to say, you create a tea concentrate which you drink all day long. Each cup you dilute to taste.

In short, over my life, I’ve drunk a lot of tea, much of it strong and filled with tannins. I’ve also always liked red wine especially cabernets (full of tannins) and natural apple juice (filled with tannin). I think it was my way of my body protecting itself.

My friend has gone so far as to say that tea drunk does not count as liquid, as it is a diuretic and actually dehydrates.

Continue reading Tea, Wine and Tannins: Drink Tea and Rejoice at uncoy.