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(cc photo: Jim Naureckas)
This week on CounterSpin: The coronavirus is highlighting existing faults and fissures in US society. Stark evidence of government priorities and their impact is coming fast and furious: $1.5 trillion is available instantly for loans to banks, but there’s no plan to protect incarcerated people, in jails, prisons or migrant detention centers. Congress can’t seem to act on assistance that reaches all the people who need it, and Jeff Bezos—the one with $111 billion—wants Whole Foods workers to share their sick leave. Immediate tests for celebrities without symptoms—yes; reconsideration of devastating sanctions on Iran and Venezuela—absolutely not. It’s a crime scene that’s setting up social economic justice work for the next many years, and calling for dogged, humanistic reporting that doesn’t “ask what questions this all raises,” but instead demands better answers.
But first we have to get through it. And as we now sit, eyes glued to every media, journalists carry a great responsibility: to translate evolving information, projections and recommendations into accessible news that reflects appropriate gravity without being unhelpfully alarmist. No one asks reporters themselves to have all the answers, but what about the clarity and intelligence with which they conduct the conversation?
We’ll talk about coronavirus coverage with FAIR editor Jim Naureckas.
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Transcript: ‘We Need to Not Just Slow Down the Disease, but Stop It’
Image: Next System Project
Also on the show: Among myriad issues Covid-19 has put a fine point on: Why does the United States value a private company’s ability to make millions off a drug so much more than the ability of sick people to get life saving medicine? Like many things, it doesn’t have to be that way. We talked about other ways to think about medicine last September with Dana Brown, who works on the intersection of health and economics as director of the Next System Project. We’ll hear that conversation today on the show.
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Transcript: ‘There’s Never Been More Attention on the Ills of Profit-Motivated Pharmaceutical Production’
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of the coronavirus and retail workers.
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An important prospective advantage to a public sector involvement in pharmaceutical provision seems to be too widely overlooked. The fact is that through the patent laws the for-profit sector has a perverse incentive to degrade the efficacy of drugs over time.
Whenever an effective drug becomes generic through the expiration of a patent, the drug companies are motivated to develop and aggressively advertise a new drug to replace it. The motivation for this is strictly profit and this means that whether the new drug is even as effective as the old one will be outweighed by whether it is more profitable. In some, perhaps most cases the new drug is less effective or perhaps more dangerous. And this process repeats itself every 17 years.
How many cases are there of a generic drug being largely abandoned now that are more effective or less problematic than the ones now being prescribed? Investigating this question would be a good project for a public-sector pharmaceutical industry. When they locate such a generic drug they need to follow industry example by producing it and aggressively promoting it to physicians. In fact, I long ago suggested this to the Surgeon General’s office, but I never saw a reply.
I can point to one specific drug that serves as an example. I have been taking probenecid which, without troublesome side effects, has completely controlled my gout symptoms for fifty years. Originally prescribed to me as the patent drug, Benemid, it soon became the generic drug, probenecid. It was quickly replaced in the minds of prescribing physicians by another patent drug that, unlike Benemid, required strict adherence to diet and reportedly had other troublesome side-effects. There have been perhaps two patent cycles since then.
Today, it is hard to find a physician who knows anything about probenecid and perhaps even other patented drugs that have succeeded it; probenecid is still sold, but has become more expensive because it no longer priced as a generic (because it no longer being widely used).
I have, in recent years, met several men who are suffering from uncontrolled gout; the drugs their doctors prescribed reportedly had side-effects that were worse than gout itself. At my suggestion, one of these men asked his doctor about probenecid but apparently the doctor knew nothing about the drug and would not prescribe it.