Citizens for Financial Justice have a new article out!
Who are they? You mean you don’t know?
Citizens for Financial Justice is a diverse group of European partners – from local grassroots groups to large international organisations. Together, we aim to inform and connect citizens to act together to make the global financial system work better for everyone.
We are funded by the European Union and aim to support the implementation of the Sustainable development Goals (sDGs) by mobilising EU citizens to support effective financing for development (FfD).
A cosy arrangement. Thank God the UK is out of it. Here is the article:
World Hepatitis Day: How Gilead Science Profits from Hepatitis Deaths
Alternative title #1: How Gilead Science Profits from Ending Hepatitis Deaths
Alternative title #2: How the Profit Motive Led Gilead Science to Find a Cure for Hepatitis C
Guys, my apologies. I have to do some work – work work, can you believe that? – so when I remembered that I had already written a post that said what I wanted to say about about this lethal idiocy, I decided simply to post it again. It is seventeen years old. It does not require updating.
An extract:
Now, just possibly you the reader aren’t very sympathetic. Just possibly you opine that the slaveowners had only themselves to blame – “Well, of course,” you are saying, “it’s no surprise that if people are forced to work for nothing then they don’t bust a gut.”
So why do so many people expect these familiar laws of human behaviour to suddenly change when the time is now and the work to be done is AIDS research?
In this link Stephen Pollard quotes Roger Bate, writing in the Wall Street Journal, as saying that AIDS drug development is trending downwards.
Why the decline?
Because the drugs companies no longer believe that they are going to get rich out of AIDS research. In fact they begin to doubt they will get any compensation at all. They read the newspapers, they study the speeches of politicians, and they sense that the popular wind is blowing against them. They think, probably rightly, that governments will either force them to sell at a loss drugs that were developed at huge expense or will bypass them and the law entirely by buying generic copies of patent drugs. Governments, after all, are the ones who can change the law when it is inconvenient. One minute the authorities will come down like a ton of bricks on pirate music or pirate videos. The next minute they will say that it is ‘unacceptable greed’ for companies to actually want to profit from patents on medical discoveries. I accept that there are subtleties and genuine conflicts of principle in the field of intellectual property – but the bottom line is that if pharma companies get nothing but abuse for the work they put in they bloody well won’t put in much more of it. Just as for the slaves, it’s no surprise that if people are forced to work for nothing then they don’t bust a gut.
The thing about this stuff is that it is really straightforward and easy to understand, yet there are still people who don’t understand it.
According to several DOCTORS cited by Rudy Giuliani a combination of two common medicines and zinc is an effective treatment for most cases of Covid 19 – IF the disease is caught early.
Please remember that Mr Giuliani is the President’s lawyer – and, as such, is fanatically hated by the Democrats. They would be delighted to watch him burn alive – if you doubt me, then read the comments on his Twitter feed.
Rudy Giuliani lives in New York City – the DOCTORS he cites live in New York City.
The legal system in New York State and, especially New York City, is totally controlled by the far left (as the “Proud Boys” discovered – they were attacked by leftists, and they were outnumbered by their far left attackers, but it was the Proud Boys who were prosecuted).
If Rudy Giuliani and the DOCTORS he cites were lying they would be arrested in a “New York Minute”. The Democrats would be delighted to arrest them – and, if possible, have them raped to death in prison (as the media laugh). So why have they NOT been arrested? Is it just possible that they are TELLING THE TRUTH?
Think about this – this means that many tens of thousands of people who have died could-have-saved. Not all of them – but most of them.
It is true that the left (the Democrats, the “mainstream” media, the “experts” who said it was evil to go to work but GOOD to riot, loot, burn and murder in the name of “anti racism”) want to maximise Covid 19 deaths – in order to blame them on President Trump, but that may NOT be the only factor at work here.
The treatment that the doctors Mr Giuliani cities does not include any drug that is still on PATENT – the total cost of the treatment is 20 Dollars.
20 Dollars – no one is going to get rich out of treating people at that price.
“No Paul it can not be that simple”.
Perhaps not – but there is still the fact that certain doctors in New York and elsewhere have been suggesting and USING this treatment for MONTHS.
They claim it works – if it does not work the Democrats would be delighted to arrest them.
They have not, so far, been arrested.
Months – over three months.
I am most certainly no medical expert – but I have waiting for months for Mr Giuliani and the doctors he cites to be arrested for making false medical claims.
So far they have not been arrested.
Of course they may still be arrested – their claims may be totally false. But SO FAR they have not been arrested.
As I say – over the last three months I have waited, and waited, and waited for these doctors to be arrested for making false medical claims, but it has not happened.
At least not as I write these words.
See this article on the Conservative Woman website:
The doctor who’s curing Covid-19 with zinc and hydroxychloroquine
By Edmund Fordham dated July 6, 2020.
Since we are talking about economics that doesn’t make sense, explain this to me:
1. As the country has descended into chaos, as it is beginning to close down again for Covid, as the prospect of a Biden presidency is becoming more real with promises of huge tax hikes, $15 minimum wage, tax funded healthcare for everyone including foreigners and industry crushing green new deal policies and taxes; despite this, every day the stock market continues to rocket upward.
2. As Trump borrows insane, endless amounts of cash, and as the democrats promise to outdo him in profligacy (who remembers when a trillion dollars was considered a lot of money?) despite all this borrowing, interest rates are practically zero.
Did the law of supply and demand get overruled by the Supreme Court?
I am still waiting for the medical doctors (qualified and experienced) who say they can cure most cases of Covid 19 with medicines that cost TWENTY DOLLARS (if they catch the sickness early) to be arrested.
It is now almost four months since they started saying this and they live in the Democrat controlled far left New York City.
If they are making false medical clams – why have they not been arrested?
And if they are TELLING THE TRUTH – then……
VAST NUMBERS OF PEOPLE WHO COULD HAVE BEEN SAVED HAVE DIED.
Why do people not regard this as important?
So Social Justice is replaced by Financial Justice, or… ? Hard to keep up.
Financial Justice is when I decide how and where I shall invest my money, not having that decision made for me by a bunch of parasitical, unemployable imbeciles.
I don’t know, cause of the 1st amendment?
If there is a cure for COVID, we’ll hear this by scientists
“If they are making false medical clams – why have they not been arrested?”
The only law I can think of that might be applicable is the one on false advertising, and I don’t think it applies if you’re not selling anything.
So, I can claim that the power of prayer can cure cancer, and not be prosecuted. But if I offer to pray for your cure in exchange for a dollar, saying that it actually works, that’s fraud and false advertising. You can say it, but you can’t sell it.
With regard to Hydroxychloroquine, Azithromycin, and Zinc, (in various combinations, doses, and circumstances), the doctors doing the research generally don’t claim that it has been shown to work. They claim that when they tried it, the people who received it got better faster or more often. But that doesn’t mean that it works and cures the disease. It might be because the people who got the treatment also more often got other treatments at the same time. It might be because those who got the treatment were less ill to start with. It might be that those who got the treatment were at a particular hospital, or on a particular ward, or had a particular nursing team, or all came from a particular neighbourhood with higher risk factors.
That’s why the only way to be sure that it’s the drug having the effect and not some unknown factor is to assign patients to have the treatment or not randomly, and otherwise treat the two groups identically. Ideally, nobody should know until after the outcome has been measured who had the drug and who didn’t, to prevent subconscious bias affecting the way doctors judge improvement. That way, you can be sure that the only factor distinguishing the two groups was the drug, and you can see if it works. It’s called a double-blind randomised trial.
There are lots of proposals and claimed candidates floating around, but until they have passed double-blind randomised trials, they are considered ‘unproven’. None of the doctors doing research on Hydroxychloroquine reporting good outcomes when using it are claiming to have used randomised trials. Randomised trials on many drugs are underway, but so far as I know none of the randomised Hydroxychloroquine trials (in any combination) have reported success. It was certainly worth checking, but so far it appears not to work in practice. The only drug to have been shown in randomised trials to improve outcomes is dexamethasone, which is also an out-of-patent, dirt-cheap drug.
It’s a corticosteroid that reduces inflammation. COVID-19 turns fatal when it causes excessive inflammation of the lung tissue – the body’s immune system gets over-stimulated and goes crazy, starting to damage healthy tissue and not just infected cells. Dexamethasone turns the inflammation down, but it only works on people who are having that excessive inflammatory response.
The fact that the first drug to pass the randomised trial standard is a cheap generic strongly suggests that the conspiracy theories about drug companies rejecting or hiding cheap cures are wrong. There are hundreds of drug trials going on, a lot of people are testing Hydroxychloroquine combinations, not all of who work for drug companies. If it worked then randomised trials by enough of them will prove the point.
Until that happens, there’s nothing wrong with saying it should be considered, and tested. There’s nothing wrong with telling people about hopeful candidates that are in the process of being tested – hope and optimism are politically important at the moment. But it’s also important for people to understand that until it has proven itself in randomised trials, it’s just a hypothesis that might turn out not to work, or even to do more damage than it cures.
@Nullius in Verba
So, I can claim that the power of prayer can cure cancer, and not be prosecuted. But if I offer to pray for your cure in exchange for a dollar, saying that it actually works, that’s fraud and false advertising. You can say it, but you can’t sell it.
Well obviously you can use the hooker’s excuse here. They weren’t paying me for curing their disease, they were paying me for spending time with them. Any curing of disease between consenting adults is unrelated to the payment.
As believers in free speech, we believe in Trump’s right to say, “this treatment looks good” and the MSM’s right to say, “Anything Orange Man advises is certain to kill you.” We know the MSM beclowned themselves (out of malice – we all know that if Trump had said hydroxychloroquine sounded like rubbish to him, the MSM would have come near claiming it cured the common cold). It can certainly be argued that the MSM did harm and cost lives. Free speech gives us the right to say that. It may also give us the right to compare some case where the MSM accused right-wingers of liability – to say that by their low standards in another case, they are incredibly liable.
A much more interesting case is when they did the same over UV – because YouTube, Vimeo and Twitter censored the video. Biased disagreement, malicious mocking – these are very different from censorship.
So I wonder if it is legally relevant to any ‘common carriers can’t censor’ discussion?
“Dr Caligari” the Democrats and their “justice” system in New York hate and despise the 1st Amendment.
As for “scientists” – what do you think qualified medial doctors with decades of experience are?
They are scientists, you silly person.
Nullius – you construct a “Straw Man” of what you claim these doctors are saying, and you totally ignore what they are actually saying. Including all the published studies – which you do not bother to refute, you just pretend the studies do not exist.
If I have not pointed it out before I will point it out now – you are despicable Nullius.
“Nullius – you construct a “Straw Man” of what you claim these doctors are saying, and you totally ignore what they are actually saying. Including all the published studies – which you do not bother to refute, you just pretend the studies do not exist.”
Then make the argument. Provide links to your evidence, explain what it means and why my answer doesn’t serve, *show* everybody that that you’re right.
I’ve seen a whole bunch of studies cited, and when I’ve chased them down to their source, every single one so far has turned out to be an unrandomised, anecdotal, flawed study. (This is not surprising. That’s how research is.) And the published scientific papers I’ve seen by the doctors doing the research don’t pretend otherwise. The media and the internet commentators frequently report more definite conclusions, but they all allude vaguely to the evidence without presenting it, and when you try to track it down to its source, the reporting too often proves inaccurate or incomplete. So far as I can see so far, it’s all rumour and wishful thinking.
Medical research is particularly sensitive to the issue, because when people are worried about their survival you get a lot of ‘snake oil’ cures popping up, all of them sounding plausible and convincing to the public, and some of them have done a lot a damage. Initial research first has to come up with candidates to test. Such proposals are usually based on poor quality evidence, with a lot of guesswork and iffy statistics and wishful thinking and wild extrapolation. These are then examined with slower, more expensive, more rigorous testing to separate the wheat from the chaff. Most published research is chaff. Only the papers that survive critical challenge by sceptics motivated to debunk them should gain any trust.
But if you think otherwise, then I want to know about it. This is why we have debates. You’ve been researching it too, you don’t have the biases and preconceptions I do, so you may indeed have good reason to think I’m wrong. Great! So present it! Then we can both have a look, and see what’s true.
Airily asserting that there are “studies” that I don’t refute is useless. That tells me nothing. That doesn’t give us anything to check. For all I know you might have made it up, or be talking about the stuff I’ve already seen. It’s not evidence, and could not possibly convince anyone of a rational turn of mind.
I’ve explained that my issue is that current studies showing an effect are not randomised double blind trials. Your best move, therefore, is to present several examples of randomised double-blind trials showing a strong positive effect. If what you say is true, and you have checked your sources, that should be easy. Political “sides” in a scientific argument are irrelevant – whether it’s “us” or “them” proposing a theory has nothing to do with whether the evidence supports it. This is not about what we *want to believe* is true, it’s about what *we can prove with evidence* is true.
And do you really want to tell people that you think caring about truth and evidence is “despicable”?