Tag: big pharma

MERCK SELLS FEDERALLY FINANCED COVID PILL TO U.S. FOR 40 TIMES WHAT IT COSTS TO MAKE

A FIVE-DAY COURSE of molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a “huge advance” in the treatment of Covid-19, costs $17.74 to produce, according to a report issued last week by drug pricing experts at the Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London. Merck is charging the U.S. government $712 for the same amount of medicine, or 40 times the price.

Last Friday’s announcement that the new medicine cut the risk of hospitalization among clinical trial participants with moderate or mild illness in half could have huge implications for the course of the coronavirus pandemic. Because it’s a pill — as opposed to monoclonal antibodies, a comparable antiviral treatment that is administered intravenously — molnupiravir is expected to be more widely used and, hopefully, will cut the death rate. In the first 29 days of the trial, no deaths were reported among the 385 patients who received the drug, while eight of the people who received a placebo died, according to the statement put out by Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, the two companies that are jointly launching it.

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Twitter Fact Checkers Just Revealed Their Whole Entire Backside as Shameless Shills For Big Pharma

Fact checkers at Twitter and elsewhere furiously took to their keyboards yesterday in defense of America’s Big Pharma Covid profiteers. This time, the fact checkers circled the wagons around Pfizer, which is developing an expensive drug that serves a suspiciously similar function to the cheap, time-tested, generic drug ivermectin. This time, Twitter’s approved fact checkers trafficked in deception, misinformation, and carefully worded lies, as they so often do, in order to “debunk” an article from ZeroHedge.

Let’s dissect their work.

Here is what Twitter highlighted at the top of their “fact check”:

Pfizer is not developing a version of ivermectin to treat COVID-19, according to fact-checkers and medical professionals

A new oral drug being produced by Pfizer is not a repackaged version of the antibacterial medication often used to prevent parasites in animals, according to PolitiFact, Snopes and Full Fact. While the drugs share similar functions and effects, this does not mean they are identical or interchangeable, according to fact-checkers. Pfizer’s new oral drug “is not similar to that of an animal medicine and is not the same mechanism,” according to a statement from the company.

Further on down the page, Twitter deigned to tell us “What We Need to Know.” Thanks, Twitter!

What you need to know

– Pfizer told Snopes that the new drug is “designed to block the activity of the main protease enzyme that the coronavirus needs to replicate”

– Dr. Stephen Griffin, a virologist at Leeds Institute of Medical Research, told Full Fact that the two drugs “are extremely structurally different”

– Health agencies around the globe have declined to authorize ivermectin for the treatment of COVID-19, and studies on its potential use have been inconclusive, according to FactCheck.org

Here’s more from the Twitter-approved fact checkers, who we can obviously trust so much. They are overly fixated on the fact that  ivermectin and the new Pfizer drug do not share the same chemical structures.

So, Twitter and our highly trusted “Fact Checkers” tell us that the two drugs are totally different, because they have a different chemical structure, which makes the Zero Hedge totally false, right? An open and shut case?

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