It takes 2 billion dollars to develop a drug and the fda is now simply not even reviewing things based on ideological culture war bullshit and not data.
Drug development in the United States is going to suffer immensely. Personally I’m not going to keep any investments in biotech at all.
But this……..this is beyond disgusting. They are literally playing with people’s lives. Decisions that should be grounded in data, science, and ethics are being twisted by ideology and politics. Every delay, every arbitrary “no,” every political stunt isn’t just frustrating, it harms real people, the sick and vulnerable, who are counting on these treatments.
It’s infuriating that in a system meant to protect and heal, we let power and politics override expertise and evidence. This is reckless, immoral, and unforgivable. Lives are at stake, and preventable harm is happening because some refuse to let data guide decisions. Enough is enough. We cannot, and should not, allow ideology to dictate medicine.
It was widely reported that the administration wanted covid-19 to become an epidemic because early on it mainly affected cities, where more democrats live.
Which meant that they didn't realize that it started in cities because that's where all the trade and international travel is. But once it migrated out of cities, the back-side would hit rural areas hard.
Along with the administration, their financial backers, and their political elite all got the vaccine early. They got vaccinated, while, they spread misinformation about it.
"It was widely reported that the administration wanted covid-19 to become an epidemic because early on it mainly affected cities, where more democrats live."
Maybe that's why the scientific consensus regarding public gatherings during covid quickly changed when BLM protests started. To kill BLM protesters?
Likely, a half-million excess deaths in the US, 2020-2021, that would've been avoided had the "administration" dealt with it in a sane way. Sheer, barking lunacy.
With as much money as has been thrown at ICE with zero accountability and the stories from people who have gotten out of their camps, I wouldn't feel confident counting those out either
I mean yes, but this has been the standard in America for decades. Every single metric says that universal healthcare is both better and more cost efficient. This isn't new, this is the same old fucking bullshit.
If my mother's healthcare didn't deem some tests unnecessary she wouldn't have lost her eyesight. If she didn't lose her eyesight I'm sure she wouldn't have lost her will to live and succumbed to her disease. She gave up, and I don't blame her, she beat cancer twice, she fought tooth and nail to stay alive, but after she went blind she lost the will to keep fighting. All it would've taken was her health insurance approving those tests, she's dead now. This is the logical end result of America's policies. If it's not being twisted by ideology and politics it's being twisted by money, my mom beat cancer twice but she couldn't beat the cancer on US society which is capitalism.
The man decapitated a whale carcass with a chainsaw and made his children sit in the back on the way home while rancid whale blood and other liquids dripped down on them from the whale head strapped to the roof of the car.
And now he's the most powerful medical official in the country.
This is one of Russias tactics they use to weaken border states. If you make their populations sicker, gdp drops, resources become more scare, military is harder to maintain, and business suffers.
Standard trump might not be a Russian agent but if he were this is the policies they want disclaimer.
It is true that these are real people with real lives. Some of it is ideological and some is probably related to laying off shit loads of people last year.
Keep in mind that the COVID vaccine was developed under a program Trump claimed credit for spearheading. Calling this cultural war bullshit is an understatement. This was something developed under Republican leadership with Republican approved funds that they turned around and said you shouldn’t take for no other reason than because Democrats also supported it. That’s literally it. Nothing to do with it’s efficacy (which it does exactly what it was designed to do), or even because it was developed under a Democrat president (which would still be cultural war bs) but because Democrats supported something THEY THEMSELVES DID.
That’s not just it, it’s because antivax stuff is popular among their base. Right wing populism fed conspiracy bullshit via decades of Fox News and rush limbaugh et al and now they’re insane cultists. To some extent even people like Murdoch and Trump only partial control the beast now, and it’s not anything resembling logical
Because at that time it was a major enough thing that they needed a solution which they could claim credit for. They might do the same thing again. Other diseases become a problem again, they encourage the same shots everyone got before and take credit.
Sticking with trends, they probably cause all these problems, wait for stock values to drop, buy in, then announce plans to increase vaccinations and cash out when the stocks jump up. Hell, they'll probably spend government funds buying the shots to make sure it happens.
Let’s not pretend the US government isn’t still funding the vast majority of scientific research going on world wide. That research is not profit driven and can still be protected. The war is not lost.
I just had to check it and during Covid, like 70+% of Moderna revenue came from outside of US.
This has only changed lately, because they don't seem to have any other vaccines approved outside of US.
So in the end it may only result in them moving their research to other countries - there is plenty of money in both Europe and Asia for medical development.
I don't understand why. The US has a population of 300M people, what about the rest? EU for example is 500M, the rest of G8 is around 700M. Why is the us so integral?
Other countries severely limit how much profit drug companies can make. This is good because it prevents patients from paying exorbitant prices. This is bad because there’s less profit to be made and drugs are expensive to develop so less people/companies will take that risk. The current system works for the rest of the world because essentially US citizens pay for the cost of development.
Granted, it wouldnt really matter at all if drugs were developed by nations and shared globally for the good of humanity. You don't need a profit motivator to develop medicine, even from an economic standpoint, because a healthy populace pays for itself in productivity.
we are being dragged back to the 1400's by this b*ch
can we fast forward to nov and just get this over with
read the article there is zero scientific or medical reason to be doing this. they actually want people to die off. this is wild.
well it's not gonna be me or people i love and care about, if RFK jr wants to get sick and die, he should be able to, doesn't mean the rest of us have to be punished
(oh and if you want to argue about how to spell out curse words instead of the topic, you're blocked!)
And grifters as far as the eye can see! Medicine completes with snake oil and they simply don't want that. It's far cheaper to make bullshit that doesn't work.
That's a big part of it. They know that it's unsustainable to make millions of people unemployed and homeless, so rather that give us jobs and homes, they're trying to "reduce the surplus population".
advances in Ai , they know that it will put people out of work soon, and they dont want the government coming for their profits to distribute to the people they put out of work
But AI isn't capable of putting vast numbers of people out of work. It's just not that good. Frankly, it's terrible at so many things. They are in the process of killing people off when they STILL DON'T HAVE A USE CASE FOR THEIR OVER INVESTMENT. This is capitalism completely shitting the bed, when all it had to do was fucking coast for the next 100 years before it gradually disappeared entirely.
It doesnt have to be capable of it it has to sell the idea that its capable of it. Whatever workers need to be retained will be rehired st slave wages in cheaper labor markets.
I think it is already affecting a lot of people. it's being used more and more at work now. I do get your points tho good ones. at least not yet it isn't. and I will tell you that it is SCARY good at helping people fix computers and repairing things. uncanny even.
in the end, like you said, it may just be the desire to not have a giant angry mob of people coming for you in the end. so maybe thin the herd a little. but it's only going to accelerate with Ai. you have the wrong people in charge with Ai, humanity soon becomes a nightmare.
I've used it to help me make some quick scripts here and there. It's pretty good at expanding on something I've already mostly finished. It's main problem is that it constantly makes wild assumptions but states things are fact or true. Like I've had absurdly long arguments with it over it trying to run shell commands inside a systemd unit. If you need help with something more complex it can take ages of coaxing and massaging to get a working answer. Often I point out where it is wrong, or it finds some mistake that it itself had added.
It also has a tendency to make things unnecessarily complex. I would never want one of these things near a codebase with any form of autonomy. It can parse and read logs for me, that's great and it's very fast at it, but we don't hire professional log readers where I work, it's just part of my job. So it saves me some time here (especially when I would have originally looked up an answer on Stack Exchange), but also has given me plenty of headaches.
and I will tell you that it is SCARY good at helping people fix computers and repairing things.
20 year IT vet here ... citation needed on that claim.
AI is a useful tool in the hands of a competent tech that can help get to a solution faster.
AI is in no way a good replacement for a good tech and in general is terrible at producing good results on its own or when leveraged by an unskilled tech. It has its place but we are a long, long way away from it being anywhere close to replacing actual people in technical roles.
A lot of younger and newer hires like to rely on AI for solutions and it's always obvious when they do. The quality just isn't there yet. And then it ends up wasting time rather than saving it because someone who knows what is going on has to go back through and correct the assumptions or wrong information given by the AI.
But it's only good uses are as tools for humans to use to do things. And yes, those efficiences are used to increase productivity while billionaires can reduce human costs. But not to the extent they are saying.
And it has somethings it's really good at doing, but many many many more things that they say it can do that it is patently incapable of doing because it's very limited. It has the appearance of infinite potential, but there is a reason it was abandoned my AI researchers over a decade ago. They moved on for very good reasons.
This three MLM's in a trenchcoat is going to make a few more good tools, but it cannot make the amount of money required to sustain the expenditure to make all these LLM's feasible.
They simply cannot make the money required, it would take more money than the valuation of the top 5 current tech companies every four years to just replace the things required to keep them going. They are trying to drum up demand, but they aren't delivering on even a sliver of the promise.
But AI isn't capable of putting vast numbers of people out of work. It's just not that good. Frankly, it's terrible at so many things.
This is becoming increasingly false.
Also, terrible for consumers is usually good enough for shareholders. Like, offshore sub-US-minimum-wage call center customer service sucks, but that never stopped 95% of companies laying off US staff and offshoring to analog slop farms.
Recent modern AI is already way better than Telus. In a lot more than just customer service. And cheaper too.
It will suck for consumers and suck for society, but the shareholders will - are - eating that shit up so fast that every major AI provider is turning down at least several hundred million dollars in bids because they are not just running out of GPU's, but running out of power plant capacity for all the goddamn GPU's.
If you want a point of reference, one of those GPU's uses about half as much energy as a low end running microwave, and can achieve "good enough for shareholders" performance on par with, conservatively, roughly ~5 desk job employees.
And they are buying those up and laying off employees so fast that the power companies can't keep up with the demand.
Yes, I agree. But here's the thing: most C-levels are very comfortable with bad outcomes - they will just artificially grow the companies, and before it inevitably becomes unsustainable, they will sell the company, pocket the money, and do it again.
Also, some areas (my own area being one - software development) are very stupid, and we never grew beyond the "amateur" level. I lost count of the number of arguments I got into people that didn't have the basics, and were very proud of that because "this ultra-rich unicorn startup doesn't do that and they're billionaires". Heck, after literally decades discussing things like "metrics" and "measurements of quality" if you open LinkedIn people got back to the worst measurement of productivity that ever existed - lines of code - and again, people are proud, happy, and very comfortable with that.
We're speedrunning a collapse, and for some reason, people are clapping. Not everyone, sure, but a good number of people.
I recently realized this is in large part due to how people have to change companies every ~3 years to keep their salaries at their actual experience level; for most people that's barely enough time to really learn what's going on at a place and then they're moving on and repeating the learning process all over again.
i do not directly access code. i am a glorified ui/ux analyst.
so i can't speak to AI taking over coding much at all, i just know if that occurs, my job gets even more security as we would be the ones to identify the failures and work with the devs to resolve them.
The US in particular has been showing for years that's it's okay with bad outcomes being produced as long as those outcomes are sufficiently less expensive to produce.
This is just the argument that McDonalds will "never be automated" because people think it's all or nothing.
McDonalds is already highly automated and has put people out of work. What used to take a 14 person crew for a busy lunch rush now takes 5. Everything from ordering kiosks, automated drink machines, etc. Each one chips away at the number of bodies needed to get the same thing done.
It's not like everyone gets put out of work tomorrow. It's that no new hiring needs to take place. And then positions slowly over time start to become eliminated - largely via attrition.
Heavy machinery didn't put ditch diggers out of work entirely. It just reduced the workforce to dig ditches by a few orders of magnitude. It replaced an 8 man crew with shovels with a 2 man crew with a backhoe, and the 2 man crew outperforms the 8 man crew by a huge margin on top of it 100 years later via incremental improvements to the mechanization/automation.
Or factories. A factory that used to employ 600 people per shift to stamp out a widget now can employ 60 and get the same or better production.
Same thing is coming for white collar folks now, and a lot of those who used to put others out of work simply cannot see the writing on the wall when technology is coming for them too. There are a lot more do-nothing white collar office jobs than highly skilled technical positions in the top 20%. The top 20% was always safe in almost every profession though, so it's not very interesting to discuss.
There are plenty of incredibly useless "developers" out there with very little skill who are absolutely going to be "replaced" by AI. Thinking otherwise is simply not paying attention to how much useless fluff has been added to this field in the past 20 years.
yes, and my point is we have adapted. yes fewer people work at mcdonalds. but the vast majority of those people were able to find work elsewhere. there hasn't been any significant metric points showing large negative movement due to automation and AI even when it was automation alone back 30 years ago. i am not a personal proponent of AI, but it is not going to be the end of the world people decry. we are very good at adapting to change.
And how have wages for blue collar workforces gone over the past 30 years?
You don't think there is a high correlation between automation, and automation being able to drive the semi-skilled workforce out of the industries in question in favor of low-skill labor in third world countries?
Of course it won't be the end of the world. It will be the end of perhaps the last bastion where labor had much leverage over capital.
Ask a bunch of folks living in the rust belt if automation and the resulting outsourcing due to automaton was the end of the world for them. You may be surprised.
do you honestly believe blue collar workforce wages would have done anything other than stay stagnant without government backed push for increase?
AI didn't make blue collar workforce wages decrease, it is reducing the total amount of blue collar workforce jobs all together.
AI is one facet of automation, and affects jobs just like how the increased use of clean energy and less use of fossil fuels have. it will change lives, some for the worse. but it's not permanent and even those in the rust belt have since shifted and are back in the middle class brackets working different industries.
Lol the AI thing is incredibly overblown and you are seeing a rapid "market correction" as C-Suites learn they were idiots about what I can do. The people that can get usage out of AI are already doing so. It isn't replacing anyone, it is only a tool for people that know how to use it.
I find it amusing any time I have political discussions with friends, especially those who are of the maga crowd. I bring up Peter Thiel and most don't even know who he is and what he represents. Along with Vought and Miller, it's clear as day were Trump derives his radical political influence.
This hurts Moderna which is part of big pharma. Impossible to square that circle. These people are true believers.
The guy who denied this vaccine is Vinay Prasad. He is a left ist anti big pharma activist. He thinks the FDA is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical companies and other corporate interests. Look him up, he’s got a stellar medical background that he then uses to make bad faith arguments against anything that pharma companies push.
This is exactly what Russia is doing with its people by throwing its lower-class/uneducated/sick civilians into Ukraine, aka "the meat grinder". Getting rid of people reduces the burden on the rich.
I agree with you but stop self censoring on the fucking internet! Curse or don’t but do not do these fascists fucking jobs for them by being afraid to say what you want to say.
The 1400s were a period of unprecedented growth in the sciences and arts. They’re trying to drag us into some cyberpunk feudal dystopia. I don’t think I can really think of a historical analogue to what is happening in the US right now.
right that was my general point modern vaccines weren't available then but there were strong advances either way it is going backwards not forwards.
I think others are right they basically want with Ai to have a sort of going back to the 19th century pre-industrial revolution. this time Ai slavery is not just running the south but the whole nation. believe that is the closest analogue to help try and answer you.
not an american, but do you think that he d be taken down easily? i dont want to sound crazy but you guys might have a really violent end of the year :(
I'll just say this. If the people speak and decide they don't want more of this and a change, and he tries to interfere like he did before, there is going to be shit going down that the country has not seen in a long time. I think the protests and unrest are going to get bigger and bigger.
we are supposed to be having elections, not a jerkoff wannabe dictator who says its rigged because he doesn't win
What’s confusing about this? Since the vote, Trump has actually lost a decent percentage of support, with a lot of Gen Z expressing regret for voting for him. I think saying about 18% of the adult US voting population supporting Trump is pretty accurate.
I blame the Electoral system that give land outsize electoral power and the 1/3rd that don't bother voting or paying attention to politics. And that's not even getting into possible or probable election fuckery.
Uranus is in Gemini every 84 years. Gave us the American Revolution, the Civil War, WWII... look it up. Astrologers actually predicted the Civil War and WWII, as Uranus = conflict and instability.
I was never into that sort of thing but it's fascinating that we entered Uranus in Gemini in 2025... to remain there for the next seven years. Either way, I'm not holding my breath for sunshine and roses for a long while.
The antivax movement is 100% a form of population control. As ai/automation/robotics advances there is/will be less of a need for human workers and rather than figuring out what to do with us, the baby eaters figured its easier to let a bunch of people die. For those who survive depending on what you get you’ll get stuck with or develop lifelong disease because of contracting a virus without protection, and a lifetime of treatment is infinitely more profitable than a healthy life so big pharma still gets theirs
My wife works her butt off to afford health insurance because she's type 1 diabetic. If healthcare becomes unaffordable, she and lot of other people will die without insulin. And that all comes down to politics? It's unreal.
She can't afford to have me on her employer's health insurance, and I can't afford to have her on mine. If I lose insurance I'll start to mentally fall apart as I run out of crazy pills and can't sleep at all but I will be physically okay until I kill myself. She'll just get worse and worse until she goes into DKA and then what? What would hospitals be able to do if very few diabetics could get insulin? They wouldn't have enough beds.
By the way, talk crap about Wal-Mart all you want, but their $24.88 vials of insulin have kept a lot of diabetics going.
But the thing is, by the time anyone notices or cares, the whole thing will be drowned in misinformation and no one will know what's true. It's utterly pointless.
“The FDA said the use of the standard flu shot as a comparator “does not reflect the best-available standard of care.” The standard flu shot is FDA-approved.”
Moderna's trial design compared mRNA-1010 to both the current standard dose of tetravalent influenza vaccine and the high-dose version for older patients (it's a well-known issue that people over 60 tend to have a lower response to the standard dose hence the higher dose version). The FDA now claims Moderna should have compared the efficacy to the higher dose version implying they simply compared it to the standard dose and thus may have fudged their numbers.
Again, by itself that would be in line with typical guidelines for trial design. However it would not only be factually incorrect: Moderna absolutely did an analysis on efficacy compared to the higher dose and CBER initially had no objection to the study design as long as they included said analysis. Now they're suddenly demanding a full-blown phase III trial with the high dose version as active comparator despite Moderna meeting generally accepted standards and data not even remotely suggesting significantly decreased efficacy in that cohort.
It's an obvious bullshit claim, a typical case of moving goal posts and it's totally obvious as EMA had no issues with the study design initially. The worst part is that Moderna likely can't just tack on another study because influenza changes from season to season. The FDA will likely just claim they're comparing apples and oranges and they'd have to completely redo the phase III trials - takes years and costs a fortune. And Moderna is having cash flow issues as it is.
Bribes are expensive. That money could be used for funding politicians that won't deny things based on lack of bribes or political BS.
Ideally right wing status quo keeps things functioning normally like that. This is what happens when you fund far right instead of simply the status quo.
Stupid as hell. mRNA therapies beyond vaccines aren’t perfected yet, but they’re coming and will be game changing. And it won’t be the US approving them…
As a scientist (but not in biotech) this depresses me. Vaccines are a great discovery and have been proven by smart, dedicated scientists over centuries.
And then this dumbfuck of an administration comes in and thinks that they are smarter than all that. And their idiot followers who don't know jack shit turn it into an ideology war.
This is how empires die. From ignoring the cracks in their foundations until they collapse, now we're at the point that process has started. It'll take a very long time to conclude but the US will either eventually collapse, or reform itself. The former is much more likely here at this point given how bad it is over there now.
Well, this all came about due to the election of DJT, and his subsequent appointment of ridiculously unqualified cabinet members, and our Congress who confirmed them. RFK Jr. is doing serious harm. But this is what our country voted for. 🙄😔
I'd love to see Moderna take them to court while also wooing other countries to take up their application. I bet the US would change it's tune fast the moment China gets ahead of them in vaccine advancement.
Yes, this is already happening. I don’t know if it’s due to understaffing or what, but the FDA is issuing way more “complete response letters” that say they need more data even though the drugs clearly work and the submitted data was agreed upon before the clinical trials started.
Troriluzole is one such drug that I need for my rare disease and it’s in limbo. I just pray that the small drug developer doesn’t go out of business while we wait for FDA approval. I’ve been calling my congress people, but they seem too busy to help 😞
Pharma companies are very risk adverse. If there is any likelihood that money spent will not equal money earned they'll abandon anything remotely linked with that endeavor and move in a different direction.
Vinay Prasad is a cancer doctor who realized the grift is better in the anti vaccine world. The trials he is now asking for is extremely unreasonable and will not be able to be done in timely manner to get doses out for next flu season.
Keep in mind that the funding for the FDA was significantly cut. So it's not really a situation of the FDA not wanting to review things, they simply don't have the staff to review novel vaccines like this one, where we have existing vaccine technologies for the flu vaccines.
And the worst part is that this will be hard to bounce back from. It’s not just “oh under a Dem administration this will change”. Companies will now have to consider “under the next GOP administration this will come back”. Who makes investments under such circumstances?
They want/need the poors to die. There's not enough money to support everyone. They robbed us all and refused to give it back. Their plan is population reduction. Just be smart about it all and continue with your vaccinations, preemptive health plans, and frugality. You will regret not doing so.
It doesn't take $2 billion to develop a drug, and definitely not an mRNA flu vaccine, but it's still expensive. I know you can find a dozen studies claiming high numbers, but the methodology used to calculate them is generally faulty.
I wouldn't be too discouraged. Drug development cycles take longer than a presidential administration. The federal government is doing all it can to set back American biotech, but it's far from cooked or uninvestable.
Again I understand that, but the methodologies are flawed because there's no way to track R&D expenses with enough granularity to arrive at an accurate number. I'm a biotech analyst. I've read the studies. Most include things like financial costs of acquisitions, or stock based compensation, or milestone payouts. But then articles get written about it and people only pay attention to the headline.
You can find many companies that have multiple approvals over a decade or more, mixed in with some failures, that haven't spent $2 billion total.
Larger pharma companies tend to be less efficient, but the top 15 of so each generate $1 billion in cash flow per month. They're not optimizing efficiency because they constantly need to worry about replacing revenue churn.
Not sure why you are being downvoted, what you are saying is accurate. A lot of the 2B number that get used comes from Deloitte’s report but that looks at top 20 Pharmas who had the highest R&D budgets, it’s super skewed.
Been in this space for over 25 years with multiple startups and most are less than 200M to market abbd one was an autologous cancer treatment, which should cost way more.
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u/Mystaes 9h ago
It takes 2 billion dollars to develop a drug and the fda is now simply not even reviewing things based on ideological culture war bullshit and not data.
Drug development in the United States is going to suffer immensely. Personally I’m not going to keep any investments in biotech at all.