Time to read THE LAST CENTURION?

Joat42 wrote:Salk didn't patent the polio-vaccine, so there where no-one who could really profiteer from it and even better, polio was eradicated.

You are entirely correct, in that Salk never patented his vaccine, he had apparently turned his research over to the publicly funded Foundation that had been established to combat the disease.
But the times were different then. I doubt that individuals like Salk and Flemming could with compete with the large institutions and companies.
I do recall having read years ago Salk’s statement as to why he hadn’t applied for a patent; long before the current malaise, something to the effect of: “It would be like trying to take out a patent on the curative effect of sunlight!”
The link below does give a good picture of the why and wherefores. It also has some relevance to the current crisis, and vis-à-vis the problems with patenting a vaccine.
https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/th ... ccine.html
On a side note, this is the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to ask a Swede; and your avatar states that you are from Sweden, your reactions to your country going solo in their handling of the Covid 19 epidemic?
That its attempt to carry on with hand hygiene and social distancing, and relying on people to act reasonable, while at the same keeping restaurants, bars and public institutions open, is asking for trouble. Myself I tend to agree, one has only to look at Great Britain where they attempted the same method.
Over here on the other side of Øresund, the consensus is that you are simply batshit crazy, but most of that is just part of the usual Danish-Swedish banter!

Joat42 wrote:

Imaginos1892 wrote:Enough with the panic already!

This year, as in any other year, almost 1% of everybody in the United States is going to die of something. That is INESCAPABLE. That is NORMAL. That is, by the way, one of the LOWEST percentages in the world. Can you begin to understand the meaning of that fact? I know most ‘graduates’ of our leftist-controlled government schools can’t.

The mortality-rate is ~4% on average for COVID-19, if every inhabitant in the US gets infected that's about 13 million deaths but lets be generous and take other limiting factors into account and drop it by half - that's still 6,5 million people which would triple the average mortality rate for the US.

Somehow I get the feeling you think it's totally okay for someone who have contracted the virus to work anyway and infect other people just to keep the economy going. Because that's what you are arguing should happen.

I think your figure is skewed high, Joat. Probably the number of people who die from the virus is going to turn out to be less than 1 percent when all is said and done. But that depends on how you develop your percentage. If how take it as percentage of those who contract the infection as opposed to those who actually get sick, your percentage looks different. My thinking is to proceed from those who test positive. The trouble with that is that we have to assume that there are way more positives than we've found given our anemic testing routine. Hence my comment.

Don

-

Not to mention the fortunate unfortunate fact that many people who have/had the virus don't even know it because of mild symptoms, and recover on their own.

Imaginos1892 wrote:Enough with the panic already!

This year, as in any other year, almost 1% of everybody in the United States is going to die of something. That is INESCAPABLE. That is NORMAL. That is, by the way, one of the LOWEST percentages in the world. Can you begin to understand the meaning of that fact? I know most ‘graduates’ of our leftist-controlled government schools can’t.

It means that almost 1% of the people who do NOT catch the ‘pandemic’ are going to die. It means that almost 1% of the people who DO catch it will die of something ELSE, something completely unrelated to one particular cold virus. It means that if 40 million people catch that virus, and 345,000 of them die, THAT IS JUST HOW MANY WOULD DIE ANYWAY!

How is it possible that this far into this pandemic you are still this clueless?

Yes, people die. People die all the time. Lots of people because we have lots of people.

The problem is our system is set up to handle a normal number of people getting sick and dying at a normal rate. It is not set up for that number to almost instantly multiple by several times all at once. It's overwhelming hospital capacity. It's endangering healthcare workers. And that is *with* all the extraordinary measures some of the state governors and mayors at the center of the current hot spots are taking to slow down the transmission rate and spread things out as much as possible. Do you have any idea how bad things would be getting right now if those people weren't taking the steps they've been taking?

This is not the Doomsday Plague. This is not ’The Last Centurion’ or ‘Contagion’ no matter how many idiots scream that it is. The facts are finally starting to come out, and they show that the panic is senseless.

Who the hell is actually seriously saying this is a doomsday plague? Nobody. The title of this thread aside which is clearly tongue in cheek not a single person here, or anywhere else I have seen, has said this is going to wipe out most of the human race or something. They are just capable of recognizing that what it is capable of doing is really really REALLY bad.

gcomeau wrote:Yep. He did literally nothing to push increased production of medical equipment.

What should he have done?

Ummm, ORDER SUPPLIES in advance in anticipation of it not being contained in China?

How about that as a freaking minimum?

Start contracting with existing manufacturing facilities to retool to start making critical equipment?

Or, you know, do anything that was in the pandemic response playbook they inherited from the last administration and then ignored?

The government does not have mask and glove factories sitting empty, waiting for Trump to start them up. Most of the factories are in China, because of idiotic tax laws. How was Trump supposed to ‘push’ them? The government does not MAKE anything, it just meddles. The best thing Trump can do right now is STOP the government from meddling.

gcomeau wrote:A pandemic playbook that outlined steps for dealing with all of this specifically including instructions to prep stockpiles of PPE

There was a stockpile. 0bama used them up, and did nothing to replace them.

Ummm, no.

The Trump administration shipped 17 tons of critical medical supplies to China in early February then THEY did nothing to replace them.

https://www.state.gov/the-united-states ... ronavirus/

And btw, the shipping the supplies to China part? That wasn't a stupid thing to do. It was in fact one of the only intelligent things they did, trying to fight it and slow it down at the source before it broke out is a very effective time saving strategy.

But then they did NOTHING with the time. Trump just kept saying it wasn't a problem. They didn't develop and produce tests. They didn't replenish stockpiles. Even after cases started showing up in the US Trump was all over tv saying it was nothing and the cases would go to 0 in no time like magic and everyone should just conduct business as usual. They they had it completely contained and under control. His only concern was thinking if the numbers in the US were *reported* as going up it would make HIM look bad for ffs. Because his ego is always and forever his primary overriding concern.

Which is why the US is now on the path to becoming the global epicenter of the outbreak.

Imaginos1892 wrote:
Developing one new drug can cost TEN BILLION dollars. European drug companies are not permitted to make the ‘windfall profits’ that are required to recoup those costs, so almost all new drugs are invented in the United States. Then the Europeans demand to be given them for next to nothing ‘to be fair’.

I won't comment to this other than to say that I would like to see a drug company spreadsheet including money spent on R&D AS A percentage of expenses and profits. Right now I won't claim to understand whether they are price gouging or not.

Don

-

The E wrote:

Atlantean wrote:Surely you don't think the LOGISTICS of dealing with this thing is anywhere comparable between our countries. Germany has about a quarter of our population. With a land mass smaller than one of our states. You can stand in the middle of Germany and THROW food to everyone.

Many of the other factors Imaginos mentions are the same (or, in his mind, worse) than they are for you though. We do have a more authoritarian government. We do have higher taxes. We do have a massive social security network. We are treating this disease as if it is actually dangerous for a large portion of the population. Our businesses have adapted to just-in-time delivery and production methods just as much as US businesses have, and yet? There is no fear of rioting, of the country breaking down irrecoverably.

Not yet anyway. I hope it stays that way for your country and all others.

I live in the southeastern part of the US. I'm accustomed to grocery store panic. Simply the mention of snow in my backyard starts panic at the grocer. If a few flakes fall, the stores empty.

My brother rang me up "I think we're going to have a huge snow. The grocers are empty."

However, to understand panic buying, one city in the US, Greensboro, NC has ended trips to the grocery store. Last Friday was the cutoff until further notice. In light of that news, I can understand panic buying.

Atlantean wrote: SNIP
Which is why I wonder if you were inebriated during many of your posts.

Surely you don't think the LOGISTICS of dealing with this thing is anywhere comparable between our countries. Germany has about a quarter of our population. With a land mass smaller than one of our states. You can stand in the middle of Germany and THROW food to everyone.

The 320M population in the US does not count the actual number of people who are IN the US at any given time.

Locking Germany down can be achieved with ONE squad car.

The infrastructure of our countries differ by night and day.

Altantean/Cthia

1) so Germany is much more densely populated than the States and therefore much more prone to falling to C19 issues, mandating efficient handling - I wish our [UK] gov was half as efficient - of course in cities the density is probable about the same. So it will be very informative to compare.

2)Shame we did not have that one squad car in WWII then

Arol wrote:On a side note, this is the first time that I’ve had the opportunity to ask a Swede; and your avatar states that you are from Sweden, your reactions to your country going solo in their handling of the Covid 19 epidemic?
That its attempt to carry on with hand hygiene and social distancing, and relying on people to act reasonable, while at the same keeping restaurants, bars and public institutions open, is asking for trouble. Myself I tend to agree, one has only to look at Great Britain where they attempted the same method.
Over here on the other side of Øresund, the consensus is that you are simply batshit crazy, but most of that is just part of the usual Danish-Swedish banter!

I think it all boils down to Jantelagen in some sense, plus our tendency to be a bit introvert in how we act socially - which really helps with the social distancing.

Another thing that helps is our geography, the spread outside the big cities are very slow and in some cases slowing down from the available data I have, although it's a bit early to say if that's a general trend or not.

I think the reasoning behind the handling is not to stop the spread in it's tracks but to keep it at an manageable level to build up a populace with immunity - if it is the right call I can't really say and I can't really judge if it will claim less lives than the alternatives in the end.

Joat42 wrote:The mortality-rate is ~4% on average for COVID-19, if every inhabitant in the US gets infected that's about 13 million deaths

Those numbers mean nothing because nobody knows how many people HAVE the disease. They’re only testing people who have serious symptoms AND meet several other conditions. For every ‘confirmed’ case, there are another 4 or 5 or 6 people who had it, but dismissed it as just another cold, or didn’t get sick enough to ‘qualify’ for testing.

The Italian government is trying to claim that EVERY death is due to coronavirus.

At worst, this coronavirus is 1/5th as bad as they claim. Could be less than 1/10th.
———————————
Governments can only print money; they can't make it worth anything. They can make it worth nothing.

After my last post, I did a bit of googling. No point in complaining that I don't know the answer to a question if I'm too lazy to look, after all...

At any rate, here is what I found...

Drug company profits tend to range from 20 to 42 percent. That does seem high, but one needs to be cautious with that judgment since they do need enough profit to attract new investors.

17 percent of budget is spent on R&D.

20+ percent is spent on advertising. Coming up with a figure here can depend on how the numbers are sliced and diced. I tried to err on the more conservative side. I suspect that It's really higher...

There you have it. Make of it what you will...

Don

-