Pharmaceuticals

My master that was thrall to Love
Is become thrall to Death.
— “A Ballad of Death,” by Algernon Charles Swinburne, Poems and Ballads, First Series, 1866

For all the rhetoric and all the charities regarding America’s children, the U.S. stands at the very bottom of western nations and some other countries as well, in terms of youth well-being. The U.S.’s exceptionalism is clearest in its cruelty to children. The U.S. has the highest infant mortality rate of comparable OECD countries.

Public health experts have been warning for decades that overuse of antibiotics reduces the effectiveness of drugs that cure bacterial infections. At least 2,000,000 Americans get antibiotic-resistant infections per year.
Notably, gluttonous overuse of antimicrobial drugs to combat bacteria and fungi via hospitals, clinics, and farms is backfiring and producing superbugs or “Nightmare Bacteria,” which is especially lethal for people with compromised immune systems and autoimmune disorders that use steroids to suppress bodily defenses.

The first major trial of whether pharmaceutical companies bear responsibility for the opioid crisis is slated to start in Oklahoma on May 28.  Three major drug manufacturers and 10 of their subsidiaries tried to convince Cleveland County District Judge Thad Balkman to delay the jury trial for 100 days, but Balkman ruled that it will move forward as scheduled. [1]
Following a nearly 2-hour hearing in his Norman, Oklahoma, courtroom, Balkman said:

The Democratic Party won a majority in the House of Representatives in the November 2018 elections by making health care one of its top “messages.” Yet events from Bernie Sanders’ bill of 2017 to legislation that “progressive” Representative Pramila Jayapal introduced on February 27, 2019 show that the Party is on its way to destroy Medicare.

For many people with diabetes, living with the disease requires multiple needle sticks a day to inject insulin and control their blood sugar. But in the future, diabetics might be able to take their insulin in pill-form. Two groups of researchers are working to make this possible in the future.
The groups, from MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, have developed an insulin delivery system that still uses a needle, but it’s so small that it can be swallowed, pain-free.

It is the year 2019, and American health care is in a state of profound crisis. While oligarchic parasites from the pharmaceutical industry and health insurance companies make enormous profits, bankruptcy and the fear of being denied care hang over the American people like a sword of Damocles. This diabolical order, predicated on greed and placing profit-making over human life, has stripped doctors of their autonomy and given birth to an inhuman and deeply unjust multi-tier system.

The pharmaceutical industry, as usual, is doing whatever it can to profit off the suffering of Americans. Recent filings show ‘Big Pharma’ spent a record amount of money on lobbying in 2018. While you and your family are struggling to figure out how to pay for prescriptions, pharmaceutical companies are trying to figure out how to dig an even deeper hole in your wallet to make theirs fatter.

Medical marijuana is a touchy subject and many people are still on the fence about whether it’s a legitimate medicine and should be legalized. If you’re one of those people who remain unconvinced, perhaps this new study will change your mind.

The dictatorship’s mistake was to torture but not kill.
— Jair Bolsonaro, Radio interview, 2016
I won’t get voted out of office.
— Bill Gates, Bill Moyer Interviews Bill Gates
I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life.