Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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Memo to Elizabeth Warren

Those selfish drug companies . . . oh, the ones working on a coronavirus vaccine?

We don’t need a personal interview with the failed Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to know that she is just as devastated as the rest of us by the coronavirus pandemic. That much we can be sure of. But we do wonder whether she has finally had some second thoughts — rational thoughts — about the only long-term solution to the virus: a vaccine and a drug treatment.

She certainly let us know during her campaign what she thought of drug companies, which are one of the very few potential discoverers of a vaccine and treatment. Bret Stephens in The New York Times reminds what she said: “Giant drug companies only care about one thing: raking in profits on the backs of patients.”

No doubt, not every drug company is saintly — check Purdue Pharma and its criminal pushing of opioids, for example — but just who does Elizabeth Warren think are breaking their backs right now to find a vaccine and a treatment? It’s the giant drug companies. Just who have at their disposal the millions or hundreds of millions of dollars to pursue the sophisticated research? Just who have sought and trained the top scientists, the infectious disease researchers, without whose brilliance there will be neither vaccine nor treatment? It’s the giant drug companies.

Stephens writes of Diana Brainard, the head of antiviral clinical research at Gilead Sciences, precisely one of those giant drug companies whom Warren disparaged and would have closed down if she could. Brainard is engaged in a successful clinical trial of a drug to treat severe cases of COVID-19 in Chicago. It’s encouraging news. It’s all very preliminary, a small group, no control group, only anecdotal, etc. etc. But that is how science works. Slowly.

For those such as Warren, one of whose mantras is “listen to the science,” they have precious little knowledge of the money and the time and the methods of distribution it takes for science to produce something worth listening to.

Giant drug companies only care about one thing: raking in profits on the backs of patients. Stephens writes: “I wonder if the Massachusetts senator [Warren] would have the nerve to say that to Brainard and every other private-sector scientist laboring to find cures under the intense strain of this global emergency.”

Amen.

Stephens also summons Bernie Sanders, who would provide Medicare for all. Provide — say what? Sanders can provide everything he wants to anybody, but only if there is something to provide. Right now, with or without Medicine for all or for anybody, there is nothing to provide to prevent the coronavirus, and not enough to provide to treat the severest cases. Sanders’ solution is to rant. Vaccine and treatment, however, “typically emerge from profit-seeking companies operating in fiercely competitive and well-regulated marketplaces,” writes Stephens.

Amen.

Copyright © 2020 by the Intermountain Jewish News




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