Pharmaceuticals

Post-Roe Abortion Bans force Pregnant People with Life-Threatening Complications to Travel Long Distances

By: Kelcie Moseley-Morris – An ultrasound image of Jennifer Adkins’ 12-week-old fetus that was diagnosed with Turner syndrome and hydrops fetalis, two defects that are often fatal to the fetus and dangerous for the pregnant person to carry. Adkins had to seek an abortion in Oregon because, like 13 other states across the country, Idaho […]

Drugs

Big Pharma spent more on Stock Buybacks and Dividends than on Research and Development even during COVID

F. Douglas Stephenson

Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) – The 14 largest publicly-traded pharmaceutical companies spent $747 billion on stock buybacks and dividends from 2012 through 2021 — substantially more than the $660 billion they spent on research and development. So argue economists William Lazonick, professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts, and Öner Tulum, a […]

Feminism

Abortion: The story of Suffering and Death behind Ireland’s Ban and subsequent Legalization

The Conversation

By Gretchen E. Ely, University of Tennessee | – Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that legalized abortion in the U.S., the nation may find itself on a path similar to that trodden by the Irish people from 1983 to 2018. Abortion was first prohibited in Ireland […]

Economy

160 mn. Fell into Poverty during Pandemic as 10 Wealthiest Men doubled Wealth to $1.5 Trillion (Oxfam)

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The charitable organization Oxfam reports this week that 160 million people fell into poverty during the past two years of pandemic, while the richest 10 men in the world doubled their wealth from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion. The authors of the report argued that this is not simply a […]

Addiction

Opioid Crisis: Purdue Pharma/ Sackler Family Fails in End Run around Justice

F. Douglas Stephenson

Gainesville, Florida (Special to Informed Comment) – In a seismic victory for justice and accountability that re-opens the deeply flawed recent September, 2020 settlement of the Purdue pharma bankruptcy case, the Sackler family will be forced to confront the pain and devastation they have allegedly caused. Judge Colleen McMahon of the U.S. District Court for […]

Brazil

Our Health depends on Indigenous Botanical Knowledge and Plants that are rapidly being Destroyed

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – While mainstream media celebrate the remarkable development in record time of vaccines spectacularly effective against the Covid virus, knowledge that might contribute to other medical breakthroughs is being steadily undermined. This decline is not the result of some dramatic lawsuit or corporate takeover. It is one of […]

Epidemics

Public Citizen: It Turns out Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine depends Heavily on Publicly-Financed Research

John Buell

Southwest Harbor, Maine (Special to Informed Comment) – Public Citizen recently uncovered “an agreement that the European Commission reached with Pfizer and BioNTech last November to purchase 100 million doses of the companies’ mRNA vaccine, which was developed with the support of https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-11-09/pfizer-vaccine-s-funding-came-from-berlin-not-washington”> government funding and U.S. taxpayer-financed technology. In the 104-page contract, Public Citizen […]