Thursday Morning: Trouble, We Haz It
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Drug makers struggle with ‘supply and demand’ concept
Speaking of trouble, the World Economic Forum meets at Davos, Switzerland this week to engage in its annual circus of the wealthy. Big Pharma piped up and said it wants money to develop antibiotics to replace/augment their current lineup to which bugs have become resistant. Extortion, much?
Hello? Your drugs don’t work any longer, which means sales will go down. They don’t work because you oversold them, jackasses. You don’t get to change ‘supply and demand’. Your incentive is and always has been profits, which only happen if you sell a working product. Too bad you screwed your golden goose — and us.
Here’s an idea: in the meantime, the U.S. government should fund a competing government-owned drug research and manufacturing facility the way it funds DARPA. The public will benefit directly from the research it bought, and if private drug companies can do better, even using freely available public research, they can knock themselves out.
Still want incentives? Sure. We get a chunk of the company in exchange for a handout, just like General Motors. Now beat it and get back to research or bean counting, whatever it is you really do.
Speaking of drugs, Chinese caught spying on pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline
Along with four others, a senior-level manager and biotechnology expert based at Glaxo’s Pennsylvania facility was charged with conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, and theft of trade secrets. An interesting spin on this story is the involvement of a twin sibling used in money laundering. Glaxo has been at the heart of a couple other corruption stories in China, including reports of bribery and industrial espionage. These Glaxo-related stories all read like telenovela scripts.
Hey, look! A leaky backdoor built into encrypted phone calls
Shocking, just SHOCKING, that a backdoor might be so flawed that a single master key could allow the holder access to ALL phone calls in an encrypted system. It’s not shocking that GCHQ is pushing this system’s security protocol it developed in-house.
Android phones used for banking may be infected with two-factor defeating malware
Wow. This is pretty creepy. You’d think your voice would be your bond in banking, but it can be used to access your account even though your voice is part of a two-factor authentication system. Android.bankosy is the bug in question; better read this article because it’s pretty complex stuff.
Internet of Things via search engine — including your Things?
You want more creepy trouble? Here you go — but I sure hope your home doesn’t appear in these webcam feeds.
That’s enough trouble for now. Make some of your own.
On the Glaxo spying case, I notice that all five perps have Chinese names. Don’t tell Trump — he’ll shut down immigration for that reason also. Or, maybe, that’s good? I wonder what Glaxo’s “potential new employee vetting process” is.
bloopie2 — read those other two links, it’s like there’s an ongoing tit-for-tat between Glaxo, as a transnational entity, and China. Hard to say it’s just China here when we know Big Pharma has not acted above board in US or EU.
Declining sales of increasingly worthless antibiotics? I suppose that means drugs manufacturers will fight tooth and claw to keep selling their drugs to animal feed lots that give daily doses of antibiotics to industrial animals, which happens, btw, to be a major cause for the increase in drug resistant strains of bacteria harmful to humans. A perfect storm for humans, a happy cycle of sales and subsidies for drugs companies. Sounds like a promo from big oil or big tobacco. What’s not to like?
earlofhuntingdon — Except there has been increasing pressure to avoid using antimicrobials in livestock, including antibiotics (link circa June 2015). Pretty sure this is the driver behind Big Pharma’s ask at Davos. We are so close to catastrophe right now, no silver bullet drugs any more, that we MUST change practices. So now they have us over a barrel: Pay up or we just can’t make a silver bullet. Bastards.