People like Marc Andreessen, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are actively supporting the administration, including hundreds of millions in donations to MAGA political campaigns in recent months.
Should we hold these people accountable for the damage they're indirectly doing to public health? If not, why?
That said:
1. Funding hasn't been pulled for mrna vaccines for cancer. rfk has been equivocal about the topic. NCI is stilling rewarding grants for mrna-vaccine cancer trials.
2. Pulling funding is different from blocking vaccines from reaching the market. The new season's covid vaccine is presumably an mrna vaccine. For cancer vaccines, it would be very strange to fund a vaccine just to block it from the market.
Should we hold these people accountable?
What do you mean? The court of public opinion seems to hold them accountable. Are you proposing legal punishments for Marc Andreessen? For what specifically?
Why though? Would they get paid by "crakpots" more than they could get paid by Big pharma !?
Apparently everyone knows Trump is only interested in him and friends making money. So how do you rationalize your claim?
Yes. A whole bunch of the prominent "MAHA" folks sell/promote supplements, peptides, miracle cures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children's_Health_Defense
https://www.cspi.org/press-release/peptides-fda-urged-overru...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/12/03/dr-oz-influ...
There's a shitload of money in alternative medicine, and you can get away with more.
...nor Trump himself: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-he-saved-100-million-liv...
How much did Moderna and Pfizer profit from the vaccines? I always go back to PG’s 2020 tweet: “Anyone else notice Fauci seems happier? I don’t think it’s just the vaccine.” https://x.com/paulg/status/1328075680492511232?s=46
To illustrate how much they've gone up, this 18% drop is just slightly less than their entire market cap in June (four months ago)
Like the FedEx logotype arrow, now I will never unsee it.
The trial result is excellent - anyone ‘not convinced’ was not living in the realm of typical results.
Please note this has about nothing whatsoever to do with COVID. It’s probably best not to comment on technical topics if you have no relevant experience.
https://www.biontech.com/int/en/home/pipeline-and-products/p...
The question now is what do you get with both treatments together?
> lost my dad to cancer because of cancer medication
Please don’t phrase it like this. Loss is hard. But desperate people have skipped treatment because they misread something online.
That isn’t to say there aren’t terrible tradeoffs that have to be faced in the course of cancer treatment, and much of medicine. Pharmaceuticals seem to beget pharmaceuticals.
that's great though that you got closure. also remember that hindsight is 20/20 and it's hard to really link some vague symptoms to a disaster until it's too late
I wish we were better at having the hard conversations beforehand,
(regarding metabolic health, immune health, what those even mean, why they apply).
I don't mind the above wording at all, because there's another thing that happens: people seem to have this impression that if you get cancer, follow the recommended treatment, and are in remission... that you're "done", and you "won". It isn't like that. First, the treatments have serious side effects, both short and long term. Second, cancer is never gone from your life, even if it never comes back. That doesn't mean you should not do the recommended and available treatments. Your odds of survival are almost always much much higher if you do, and imo is the right thing to do for the vast majority of people. But go into it with your eyes open. You're past the point where you get to have a conventional happy ending. You'll need to figure out how to be ok with the ending that you can still have. (Which may be a happy one! But not in the way that you imagined when you were younger.)
If you hold the key to saving a million people's lives, yet you decide to let those million people die so you can take the stage at a prestigious conference, are you a good person?
Curing disease is literally a race, with people dying every minute of every day. In any other situation, labs would be running night and weekend shifts and not a second would be lost.
It takes a profoundly naive person to think an organization full of people who have literally dedicated their careers to actually solving these problems are focused on the prestigious conferences.
These people signed up for decades and decades of work on a problem that would result in (statistically speaking) guaranteed failure.
In practice, data for new cancer treatments is usually published 6-12 months before approval. There are definitely exceptions, especially where the drug is already approved and the data is supporting a new use, but that is not the norm for new drugs.
There are other factors too e.g. it can take time to make commercial drug supply available. In this specific case how Merck/Moderna will scale the boutique manufacturing process for a much larger number of patients while maintaining the speed they need for the treatment to work is a major question.
Again, the company is extremely motivated to do all of this as fast as possible. In addition to the points raised elsewhere in this chain.