News: Ruthless capitalism, circular firing squad update, etc.

From the Business as Usual Files:

Brass knuckles capitalism poisons drug prices

The AP writes about a combination drug that just got FDA approval. The product is used to treat Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). ALS is an incurable neurodegenerative disease that’s usually fatal within five years. Its price is beyond shamelessly exorbitant:

In September, Relyvrio became only the third drug approved in the U.S. for ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, an incurable neurodegenerative disease that is usually fatal within five years. But patients and physicians who celebrated Relyvrio’s approval several months ago are now contending with the obstacles posed by the U.S. health care system.

Patients with insurance coverage say the $158,000 per year price tag set by drugmaker Amylyx Pharmaceutical is fueling insurance delays or denials, and sometimes exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses.

Even when Relyvrio is covered, some patients see themselves shouldering co-payments between $1,000 and $4,000 per month.  

Some patients who are already taking a do-it-yourself approach to the treatment see little reason to change.

A professional cost-benefit analysis indicates that Relyvrio should cost between $9,100 and $30,700 per year. The drug showed some effectiveness in slowing the progression of ALS for a few months compared to untreated control patients. The data on efficacy appear to be weak. The company is conducting a larger study to answer lingering questions about its effectiveness, including whether it really extends survival.

The approved drug is a combination of one known pharmaceutical drug and one over the counter nutritional supplement. The drug, sodium phenylbutyrate, can be bought separately for $550/month ($6,600/year) and the supplement, taurursodiol, costs about $30/month ($360/year) from online sources. Some ALS patients are considering this option instead of paying the exorbitant company price.

sodium phenylbutyrate - not a complex molecule

(it’s relatively expensive because it is an approved drug, and supplies,

prices and availability are controlled by suppliers and drug laws)

taurosodiol (tauroursodeoxycholic Acid) - a naturally-occurring bile acid

used to treat some liver and bile disorders (this molecule is low cost to buy)

Going the do-it-yourself approach (separately buying the two ingredients) costs about $7,000/year compared to the $158,000/year the company charges. As usual, the company vigorously argues that the high cost is needed to recover its R&D costs. The cost-benefit analysis indicates that is a typical, shameless drug company lie. That’s cruel, brass knuckles capitalism at work.

From the Pulling Heads out of Butts Files:

Democrats are waking up to their circular firing squads 

A really interesting NYT opinion piece by Michelle Goldberg suggests that at least some elite Democrats are starting to wake up to the party’s tendency to shoot itself. Goldberg opines:

It’s no secret that many left-wing activist groups and nonprofits, roiled by the reckonings over sexual harassment and racial justice of the past few years, have become internally dysfunctional.

In June the Intercept’s Ryan Grim wrote about the toll that staff revolts and ideologically inflected psychodramas were taking on the work: .... Privately, I’ve heard countless people on the professional left — especially those over, say, 35 — bemoan the irrational demands and manipulative dogmatism of some younger colleagues.

That’s why the decision by Maurice Mitchell, the national director of the progressive Working Families Party, to speak out about the left’s self-sabotaging impulse is so significant. .... he has a sharp critique of the way some on the left deploy identity as a trump card. “Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces,” he wrote last month in a 6,000-word examination of the fallacies and rhetorical traps plaguing activist culture.

Among many progressive leaders it’s been received eagerly and gratefully. It “helped to put language to tensions and trends facing our movement organizations,” Christopher Torres, an executive director of the Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice institute, said at a Tuesday webinar devoted to the article. 

All the problems Mitchell elucidates have been endemic to the left for a long time. Destructive left-wing purity spirals are at least as old as the French Revolution. .... It’s not surprising that such counterproductive tendencies became particularly acute during the pandemic, when people were terrified, isolated and, crucially, very online. There’s a reason Grim’s article was titled “Elephant in the Zoom.”

“On balance, I think social media has been bad for democracy,” Mitchell told me. .... These platforms can give power to the powerless, but they also bestow it on the most disruptive and self-interested people in any group, those likely to take their complaints to Twitter rather than to their supervisors or colleagues. The gamification of discourse through likes and retweets, he said, “flies in the face of building solidarity, of being serious about difference, of engaging in meaningful debate and struggle around complex ideas.”

Maybe some elite Democrats are waking up. If so, one of the very first things they ought to see is their own catastrophic failure to deal with immigration. The fascist Republican Party relies on heavily demagoguing immigration. The issue, especially when turbocharged by relentless demagoguery, resonates with lots of Americans. That includes more than a few independents and legal immigrants.

For context: From what I can tell, heavy demagoguery behind every major authoritarian movement in modern democracies plays heavily on illegal immigration and national ethnic identity. In majority White democracies, a White Replacement Theory (myth)[1] is typically emphasized.

From the Immigration Policy is Messed Up Files:

Chaos in El Paso

The Hill writes:

The mayor of El Paso, Texas, declared a state of emergency on Saturday, as migrants continued to pour into the southern border town in anticipation of the end of Title 42.

Migrants have converged on El Paso in recent days, overwhelming shelters and forcing some to sleep on the streets amid dropping temperatures. With more asylum seekers expected, El Paso Mayor Oscar Leeser said the city felt it was time to make the emergency declaration.

“I really believe that today our asylum seekers are not safe as we have hundreds and hundreds on the streets,” Leeser said at a press conference on Saturday. “That’s not the way we want to treat people.”

“We want to make sure that people are treated with dignity and being out in 20, 25-degree weather is not want we want to see,” he added.

We all know what the fascist Republican Party propaganda Leviathan will make of news like this. Right? Right. 

CBS 8 in San Diego reports: 

The number of migrants trying to cross into the United States is climbing daily, with Title 42 set to expire in less than a week. Title 42 allows the government to turn away migrants at the border with the goal of protecting the public from the pandemic. In Texas, more than 2,000 migrants are arriving daily. Closer to San Diego, local activists tell CBS 8 they too are seeing more migrants. Shelters in both Tijuana and the El Paso region are full. “There isn't a lot of infrastructure. They're sleeping in cold freezing weather,” said Pedro Rios, director of American Friends Service Committee.

Title 42 expires next Wednesday.

Immigrants rushing the US-Mexico 

border to cross into the US

Footnote:

1. White Replacement Theory (Wikipedia): The Great Replacement, also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory disseminated by French author Renaud Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced with non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview.