Hell Frozen

Well, it really happened. Congress passed a law enabling the biggest purchaser of drugs in America, Medicare, to negotiate the prices it pays. It’s probably bewildering to most people why Medicare is not currently allowed to negotiate prices. That was enacted as part of the 2003 Medicare prescription drug benefit law passed during the Bush administration. Pretty much every presidential/congressional administration since then has attempted to change this and failed. And there’s a simple answer for these failures: pharmaceutical lobbyists.

How Congress was finally able to ignore such a heavyweight lobbying corps is a good question – this was passed on party lines by Democrats and the biggest drug companies operating in America are all located in democratic strongholds such as NJ, NY, MA, CA & IL. Gotta give them some credit for standing up to that lobbying Godzilla.

At first the law will enable Medicare to negotiate the price of only 10 drugs, each of which must be at least 9 years old & have no generic equivalent. And this can't happen until 2026. So not immediately earth-shattering, but this is transparently a foothold designed to be expanded over time. Once Medicare can negotiate 10, hard to argue why they shouldn’t be able to negotiate more, or even all prices.

Pharma shareholders are crapping their pants, which means this will probably lower prices. PhRMA, the main lobbying organization for drug companies in the US has termed this bill a “tragic loss for patients”. Will such gloomy insider predictions for future R&D outlays come true? Doubtful. This should not directly affect private health insurance, which is still ripping off Americans day in and day out with their opaque billing processes. (Just yesterday BioPharmGuy tried to pick up a prescription and the price with insurance was higher than the price without.)

It will take time to understand all the knock-on effects, but even a small step towards more rational drug pricing is welcome. In the meantime, bluebird bio had a gene therapy product approved yesterday and it has a $2.8 million price tag.

Two Beds, Please

The blanket octopus exhibits one of the biggest sexual size-dimorphisms in the animal kingdom. The female can be up to 2 meters long while the males clock in at about 2.4 centimeters. The ladies weigh about 10,000x as much as the boys and sometimes as much as 40,000x.

Already an awkward power dynamic going on here, but then the female is also known to rip the male mating “arm” off for her own purposes, leaving the male to die. Before all that goes down, those little guys do have some fight in them. They are immune to Portuguese man o' war jellyfish stings and rip off the tentacles to use as weapons.

Moral: Don't mess with blanket octopuses

Social Scientific American

We can all agree that lead leaching into our water supply is very bad, mostly because it has been proven for decades in the real world. When utilities attempt to remove these lead pipes and replace some with plastic, you can bet there will be whiners acting like plastic pipes might be just as bad. Newsflash: They aren’t.

So instead of publishing this scare-mongering article, it would have made a lot more sense for Scientific American to embrace the removal of the known health risk. Unfortunately, they have gone way, way down the controversy rabbit hole ever since their 2020 endorsement of a presidential candidate for the first time in their 175-year history (you can guess who they endorsed).

That endorsement itself was not totally unwarranted given the scientific chasm between the two major candidates, however, Scientific American has followed up by becoming more and more focused on culture, social justice & various left-wing causes by the month. They even did a cover story on civil rights last year. A laudable subject, but is that what readers had in mind when they paid for their subscription to a science magazine?

For such a timeless scientific publication, this seems to be a very short-sighted pivot to politics and fear-mongering.

So Many Toilets, So Little Plumbing

Authorities in Shanghai attempted to barricade people inside an IKEA after a customer who was shopping there was found to have been a close contact of a Covid case. Anyone who has been imprisoned in IKEA by a significant other will understand the horror these souls felt. Thankfully, the customers made their escape. Even the wrath of the Communist party was no match for their fear of an IKEA lockdown.

This whole episode was based on a single asymptomatic person. 400 close contacts had been traced. So basically China is at about the May 2020 stage in their Covid response. By 2040 they might even be back to normal.

Jackalopes

Let's talk jackalopes. You probably think they're not real. But what if we told you there was a virus that infects rabbits, leading to horned-looking appendages growing out of their head. Would you start to believe? Maybe next we will find a virus that makes humans grow hair all over their bodies...