The Coronavirus thread

Quote: Gandler

Source?

Google Fauchi lied

Quote: Evenbob

Google Fauchi lied

I might start by spelling his name right. Also, if that's not a goal-oriented search, I've never heard of one. That is true, though, as in, the story. They wanted to secure as much as they could for medical personnel...I remember the big thing on Facebook was, "Don't buy up all the masks, masks don't help you!" There were even a few memes when we went from that to, "Everyone wear masks!", in like fourteen minutes, or something.

With that said, I don't know that the lie was entirely unjustifiable, or to what extent he knew it was a lie. This is for a few reasons:

1.) They probably didn't want people going out and panic-buying all masks like people did with toilet paper and (snicker) Hydroxychloroquine.

2.) You definitely want medical personnel to have masks before anyone else. While the mask does indeed mitigate you from spreading it if you have it more than they are for protecting yourself, they do offer a non-zero amount of protection and healthcare workers are the ones most exposed to people with the virus. Furthermore, you don't want the healthcare workers spreading it to already sick (or at risk) patients who DO NOT have the virus. We see the substantial number of deaths related to nursing homes backing up that theory.

3.) I imagine he knew that masks offered non-zero protection for anyone wearing them and certainly prevent the spread, to some extent, but I'm not sure the extent that it could be spread was fully known. They may not have been aware that the virus (in the form of droplets) can survive in the air for as long as it does. From anything I have seen, which could be wrong, (IANAD) some doctors actually seemed surprised by this thing's survivability.

Quote: Mission146

With that said, I don't know that the lie was entirely unjustifiable

It put people at risk, of course it
was unjustifiable. He could have
told people wear cloth masks,
he didn't even do that. When
this whole thing started I said
several times here Foochi was
a fraud and don't trust him.
I remembered how he screwed
up the AIDS 'epidemic' by
screaming we had to shut the
country down immediately
till we found a cure. How did
finding that cure work our for
ya, El Quacko Fooch?

Quote: Evenbob

It put people at risk, of course it
was unjustifiable. He could have
told people wear cloth masks,
he didn't even do that. When
this whole thing started I said
several times here Foochi was
a fraud and don't trust him.
I remembered how he screwed
up the AIDS 'epidemic' by
screaming we had to shut the
country down immediately
till we found a cure. How did
finding that cure work our for
ya, El Quacko Fooch?

You can't tell people to wear cloth masks without simultaneously telling them that they should be wearing masks, because a cloth mask is still a mask. There would have been a run on them and there was a run on them anyway, in lots of places.

My fiancee works in a pharmacy, trust me. You had doctors, I swear to God, literally prescribing family members hydroxychloroquine so that they could hoard it all in case they needed it for something. It got to the point that India said they weren't sending us (as a country) anymore of the stuff or they'd run out of it.

I didn't know anything about the AIDS thing. Probably won't look into it, won't lie.

Quote: Mission146

You can't tell people to wear cloth masks without simultaneously telling them that they should be wearing masks, because a cloth mask is still a mask. There would have been a run on them and there was a run on them anyway, in lots of places.

My fiancee works in a pharmacy, trust me. You had doctors, I swear to God, literally prescribing family members hydroxychloroquine so that they could hoard it all in case they needed it for something. It got to the point that India said they weren't sending us (as a country) anymore of the stuff or they'd run out of it.

I didn't know anything about the AIDS thing. Probably won't look into it, won't lie.

That we are getting our pills from India is very concerning.

Quote: AZDuffman

That we are getting our pills from India is very concerning.

We get pills from India, we get them from China...we get them from basically everywhere.

Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) actually come from China, to a large extent. In fact, they're the world's largest supplier of APIs. You have to keep in mind that pharmaceuticals don't exist in a vacuum, they can come from molds, flowers, animal proteins and all sorts of other things. That's actually why the medical industry is often concerned (at least when we weren't so much in the toilet that it wasn't a super minor thing) about deforestation--because we could be killing the only source of future treatments for things that we don't even know about.

China then sends many of these API's to India, which then manufactures them into drugs. More than half of India's APIs come from China, and then a not insignificant percentage of our generic drugs come from India. I want to say it's something like 40%.

So, without India and China in some way involved...if you think the price for prescriptions is high now...just you wait and see what happens when you cut them out of the picture.

I've read that there is no pill in the US that costs more than one dollar to produce.

Also read a story about mark ups at the pharmacy. Some places, even WMT, marks up some drugs 3000%.

Costco was the best all around with the least mark up.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/daraprim-turing-pharmaceuticals-martin-shkreli/406546/

Much R&D for medicines is paid for by taxpayers, then production is sent to Pharm company's, who make a killing on it.

We should nationalize medicine, with large bonuses for researchers that find new and good medicines. There is plenty of room for big bonuses and nationalized medicine.

Quote: petroglyph

I've read that there is no pill in the US that costs more than one dollar to produce.

Also read a story about mark ups at the pharmacy. Some places, even WMT, marks up some drugs 3000%.

Costco was the best all around with the least mark up.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/daraprim-turing-pharmaceuticals-martin-shkreli/406546/

Much R&D for medicines is paid for by taxpayers, then production is sent to Pharm company's, who make a killing on it.

We should nationalize medicine, with large bonuses for researchers that find new and good medicines. There is plenty of room for big bonuses and nationalized medicine.

What you're saying in the first part may well be the case, but even then, I'm sure only takes into consideration direct production costs. You brought up, "Much R&D," but much certainly isn't all.

The fact of the matter is that we have the Federal Government, as well as many State Governments, essentially setting an absolute demand floor when it comes to healthcare. The way they do this is by simply providing the healthcare (money-wise) which creates an artificial demand. I should imagine that, without insurance or Governmentally paid for healthcare, many people would simply not seek out treatment as often or for as many things.

In many cases, it would be simply because they couldn't afford any such treatment. In other cases, it would be because they wouldn't consider it a serious enough problem to be worth paying for if they had to eat the full cost of the treatment.

Because of this artificial demand floor, you have a certain amount of baseline demand which essentially enables you to charge anything that you want to for the product. Why? Because you have a captive market (the Government) who literally has no other choice but to purchase the product.

The product then becomes so expensive that you have insurance companies that get created because the consumers who are not protected by the Government might run into something that they could not afford to pay for outright, in the event that they lacked insurance. Of course, the insurance companies themselves are not going to be structured in such a way (on net) as to fail to make a profit, so the ultimate result just ends up being added costs at that level. Hell, I could only imagine how much money gets spent just by way of the Government simply talking to healthcare providers and insurance providers talking to healthcare providers. Prescriptions needing approved, etc. etc.

Some drugs get high mark-ups at the pharmacy level...and I can't speak for WalMart...but there are actually several individual types of drugs where the pharmacy actually loses money on the sale. Now, you might wonder why they would eat such a loss, but the answer is pretty simply that it is better than losing the customer outright. If you have a customer who ONLY gets that particular drug from you, then a pharmacy...particularly an independently-owned one...might decide to cut that customer loose and tell him/her to find somewhere else.

For these reasons, while the states can do as they wish, we need to get the Federal Government 100% out of medicine. When the artificial demand floor gets eliminated, or at least substantially lowered, the result will be lower demand and the pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies having to reduce their costs so that they can continue to be profitable at all. They definitely need some semblance of volume, but they're not going to be able to charge more than absolutely anyone can afford.

Granted, this will be a problem for people who have some sort of obscure ailment for which you really couldn't mass produce the treatments. Those costs are going to be fairly substantial. One mechanism to deal with this is to have some sort of separate insurance that's kind of an insurance people take for the possibility of needing long-term care as relates something. In the meantime, you'd have a good many people who would take care of your more routine things with cash, so the price of it would go down---if for no other reason---because you're cutting down on the different layers between the patient and the final bill.

Another problem is the fact that medicine is simply overly regulated, in general. You have doctors who spend more time filling out paperwork for having seen a patient than they actually spend with the patient. Because of that, potential volume plummets. Because patient volume has plummeted, the costs per patient need to be increased to continue to have a profitable model.

I mean, you could nationalize healthcare, but if you do that; you're going to guarantee that everybody is a customer. When everybody is a customer, the companies can REALLY charge as much as they want to, unless you're going to regulate that as well. If you nationalize the medicine, though, you might as well nationalize the research because any incentive isn't really going to be enough compared to having the rights to a particular drug for a certain amount of time.

Personally, I think the answers are deregulation of the industry and getting the Federal Government entirely out of healthcare with exception only to those people who are active military, or direct employees of the Federal Government. Get rid of the artificial demand floor. Make the providers, at all levels, have to price compete not only for all customers---but also to entice any customers at all.

Quote: Mission146

Personally, I think the answers are deregulation of the industry and getting the Federal Government entirely out of healthcare with exception only to those people who are active military, or direct employees of the Federal Government. Get rid of the artificial demand floor. Make the providers, at all levels, have to price compete not only for all customers---but also to entice any customers at all.

If that worked there should be examples somewhere in the world. I don't think there is.

I don't think you can get healthcare down to affordable prices in a free market.

When you need a procedure that's expensive, it's likely both rare and complicated. Two things that don't bring cheap prices in material, often need specialized equipment and can't be done on cheap skills.