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March 29, 2021 Coronavirus - Alternate

Anyone active on social media is aware that there is a great deal of passionate but ill-founded opposition to vaccination, including to the new COVID-19 vaccines. How could that be? Physicians and the public health establishment are constantly promoting vaccination, especially as we try to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic. It turns out that the anti-vaccine sentiment is the product of what can only be described as an industry whose principal protagonists are an organized group of professional propagandists. As recently reported in the...

March 24, 2021 Policy Proposals

By Robert Popovian and Wayne Winegarden The time has come for us to think about incremental, evolutionary, and targeted changes to the healthcare system to reduce costs rather than focusing on grand bargains. It is time for practical solutions that will likely have broad consensus amongst patients, providers, employers, and policymakers. While the debate over the merits of private sector healthcare solutions versus government control of healthcare continues, a group of policy experts with support from the Arnold Ventures and Tobin Center...

March 22, 2021 Coronavirus

President Joe Biden recently toured a Pfizer plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., where workers are churning out millions of lifesaving COVID-19 vaccine doses. During his remarks, he mentioned that in mid-February he had “toured the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institutes of Health . . . [where] I met world-class doctors, scientists, and researchers who were critical for discovering the vaccines in record time.” Frankly, the president is giving the government too much credit. While federal grants and purchase agreements certainly helped...

March 17, 2021 Briefs, Price and Costs, Studies

A commonly-used analysis to determine a medicine’s value is based on flawed methodologies that would diminish innovation and access, finds a new report released today by the nonpartisan Center for Medical Economics and Innovation at the Pacific Research Institute. “Cost effectiveness reports may provide precise estimates, but there is no reason to believe that these estimates accurately reflect the value of medicines,” said Dr. Wayne Winegarden, the brief’s author.  “The documented biases in their value assessments should raise serious concerns that...

March 15, 2021 Coronavirus-Alternate2

Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller "Science, at its core, is a social phenomenon." This observation, from Alondra Nelson, the newly appointed deputy director of President Biden's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), certainly qualifies for a prominent place in the Pantheon of Inane Statements. The core of science, in fact, is the scientific method—posing and testing hypotheses; carefully gathering, examining, and generating experimental evidence; and finally, synthesizing all the available information into logical conclusions. Dr. Nelson's assertion is inauspicious, but perhaps...

March 10, 2021 Coronavirus

Dr. Henry Miller, PRI's senior fellow, joins the nationally-syndicated Lars Larson Show to talk about the difference in COVID-19 vaccine efficacy or intended result between the Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, with the vaccines ranging from 60 to 90 percent. Miller explains that there is more context to the vaccine efficacy explanation, which depends on when they were tested, approved for emergency use, and available testing at the time of the clinical trials. Miller also talks about the roles...

March 4, 2021 Coronavirus - Alternate

During the past year, many thousands of articles and commentaries have been published on almost every imaginable aspect of the SARS-Cov-2 virus and the COVID-19 pandemic it has caused. They have appeared online, in journals, on preprint servers, in newspapers, and on Facebook and Twitter, to say nothing of local electronic bulletin boards. TV news programs continue to feature prominently the latest developments and statistics. As the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines has progressed throughout the country, a prominent issue is vaccine hesitancy –...

March 4, 2021 Coronavirus

By Henry Miller, M.S., M.D. and John Cohrssen Over the weekend, the FDA issued an emergency-use authorization for Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine, clearing the path to market for the third coronavirus vaccine. The FDA had previously approved the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Covid vaccines in record time—mere weeks after their makers submitted results of the clinical studies demonstrating safety and efficacy. When the FDA wants to, it can get desperately needed products expeditiously to those who need them. But for some other...

March 4, 2021 Coronavirus

Dr. Henry Miller joins the Dan Proft Show to discuss the latest re-openings of states like Texas and how they may pose challenges to stopping the spread of COVID-19. Miller and Proft discuss the different lockdown measures in other states and how that impacts lockdown policies throughout the United States. ...

March 4, 2021 Coronavirus-Alternate2

A just-announced policy change from the newly reinvigorated CDC specifies that persons who may have been exposed to COVID-19 no longer need to quarantine if they've been fully vaccinated within the previous 90 days. (People who aren't vaccinated are still supposed to quarantine for 14 days after they have been in close contact with someone who has COVID-19.) The new policy states: At this time, vaccinated persons should continue to follow current guidance to protect themselves and others, including wearing a mask, staying at least 6 feet away...

March 4, 2021 Blog, Industry Trends

Patent trolls have been a plague on innovators for too long. Patent trolls are entities that obtain patents (sometimes obscure patents) for the sole purpose of threatening or filing lawsuits in court and then using the prospect of costly litigation to extort unwarranted payouts from an innovative company. The risks and costs created by these entities are a clear and present danger to entrepreneurship and innovation. A goal of public policy should be to make it more costly for frivolous patent...

March 1, 2021 Industry Trends

BY ROBERT POPOVIAN & WAYNE WINEGARDEN President Joe Biden should take advantage of a bipartisan opportunity to meaningfully reduce patients’ out-of-pocket spending on biopharmaceuticals. Seizing this opportunity requires the president to recognize that the drug cost problem exists because the current system inappropriately shifts too much of its expenditures to patients. Consider that hospitals’ total expenditure in 2019 was $1.2 trillion, or three times the total of the spend on pharmaceuticals. However, patients’ out-of-pocket spending on drugs in 2019 was $54 billion, or 50 percent higher than...

March 1, 2021 Coronavirus

Why AstraZeneca and J&J’s Vaccines, In Use Elsewhere, Are Still on Hold in America By Sarah Jane Tribble The World Health Organization greenlighted emergency use of AstraZeneca and Oxford’s covid-19 vaccine this month, following in the steps of the United Kingdom, the European Union and others, who are already injecting it as quickly as possible into the masses. But the United States is still waiting. . . . . . This moment — as Americans question why more tested vaccines like AstraZeneca and J&J’s vaccines...

February 22, 2021 Coronavirus-Alternate2

By Henry Miller and Regina George We’ve all had that one doctor we really didn’t like, the one who didn’t listen, was brusque, and gave you what turned out to be bad advice, right? You know, the one whose bedside manner was somewhere between Don Rickles and Bill Maher. Well, there’s a dirty little secret that most doctors hide: They’re people, too. They have that cringe-worthy patient whose name on the schedule ruins their day, the one whose presence requires a...

February 18, 2021 Coronavirus-Alternate2

What happened to coronavirus, flu 'twin-demic'? Experts weigh in By Alexandria Hein With coronavirus cases soaring in late summer, experts warned about the potential for a so-called "twin-demic," which they said would've seen hospital systems overwhelmed by both COVID-19 and the influx of flu patients, but the surge never came. In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is reporting that flu activity in the U.S. "remains lower than usual for this time of year," which is typically the peak of illnesses. Since Oct. 1, 2020,...

February 11, 2021 Coronavirus

By Henry Miller, M.S., M.D. and Kathleen Hefferon There is ongoing disagreement between the popularly elected European Parliament and the executives in the European Commission over approvals of “genetically modified” (GM) crops, which are made with modern molecular genetic engineering techniques. In December, members of the European Parliament objected to authorizations of no fewer than five new GM crops — one soybean and four corn (maize) varieties — developed for food and animal feedstock. These objections follow dozens of others that have been...

February 9, 2021 CoronaVirusSlide3

Title: Prescription Drug Prices in the U.S. Are Twice as High: Here’s Why By Christopher Curley Most people in the United States know that prescription drugs can be expensive. How expensive? Prescription drugs in the United States on average cost around 2.5 times more than those same drugs do in other Western countries, according to a new report from the nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, RAND Corporation. . . . . . “Since gross prices have been growing much faster than net prices — in fact, over...

February 8, 2021 Coronavirus - Alternate

Dr. Henry Miller joins the John Batchelor Show talks about Israel's success in vaccinating their population and how it compares with COVID-19 vaccine rates in the United States and Europe. Miller and Batchelor also talk about some troubling news out of South Africa, where small studies have shown coronavirus reinfections, resistance to current treatments, and a story out of the Brazilian city of Manaus about supplies and resources being depleted. Miller explains that despite original herd immunity in Brazil, a...

February 5, 2021 Coronavirus

This week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released alarming data on COVID-19 vaccine uptake among some healthcare workers. Fewer than 40% of staffers across 11,400 skilled nursing facilities chose to get the vaccine in December and January. That's a big problem. Front-line workers are among those at highest risk of contracting the coronavirus. By holding off on getting the vaccine, they're risking the health of the people they serve. And because they're often first in line, their hesitancy could sow unwarranted doubt about...