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https://www.statnews.com/2020/06/29/gilead-announces-remdesivir-price-covid-19/

So Gilead has developed a drug which can reduce the time in hospital for Covid 19 patients.

It took public funds for researching, and expects to charge 3,000 or so to USA patients.

They think research will cost them a billion by the end of the year. And they'll sell 6.7 billion worth of the stuff by next year.

And their shareholders are mad at this. You would think even doubling their money would be sufficient in a pandemic, but no, 5x profit is necessary.

Right.

Slight change of topic. In the U.K., we’re starting to see the easing of Lockdown (no, whether it’s too soon or not doesn’t matter for this post).

That means shops are starting to re-open, and I for one am very much looking forward to visiting the pub on Saturday.

And as much as I urge everyone to exercise caution (PPE, wear a mask. Hygiene? Wash your hands. Staff? Don’t be difficult with them.) I also urge you to Shop Local.

It may be a bit more expensive, but it’ll have a stronger benefit to your local economy than giving your money to a larger, national or international business.

By this I mean....kids want an ice cream? Swing by your corner shop or local cafe. Fancy a take away for dinner? Go for a local company, not a big name. Need some new clothes? Use local shops where practicable.

Don’t go breaking your budget though. If you need big retailer value, let none judge you for that.

But if your budget allows, go as small and local as you can.

I'm a bit worried folk will be a bit mental come Saturday

But have already started to shop local admittedly it was comics and nerd supplies but every little helps *( *other evil food barns are also available, offer excludes Waitrose cos Shire)

I’ll be playing Trip To Pub by ear.

I’ve got my face masks, and a decent grasp of hygiene. I’ll likely be on my Jack Jones, but may also arrange belated birthday drinkies (basically I’ll do a lot for free beer!)

If on my own, I’ll be re-Reading the collected Nikolai Dante volumes of the 2000AD mega-collection, so between beers I can sit quite happily with my mask on. Heck, even between sips/slugs of beer.

However, if it’s getting too rammed, I’ll just up and go home. Wouldn’t mind getting tiddled and possibly even porched, but not at the expense of my health.

well youre getting on and at your age you cant be too careful (belated huppy big burpday)

sadly the only local pub with any reasonable amount of outside for me to feel okay with is an old manor house that looks like a castle so run the risk of myopic holiday folk over-running it

I’ll have you know I’m in rude health, can out drink most people, and still don’t get hangovers as such!

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’ll have you know I’m in rude health, can out drink most people, and still don’t get hangovers as such!

As long as you aren't drinking Corona you should be fine!

Not Online!!! wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I’ll have you know I’m in rude health, can out drink most people, and still don’t get hangovers as such!

Spoiler:

Look more like Hagrid, thank you

Leicester will be the first localised lockdown in the UK, with the changes scheduled to come into effect on the 4th postponed and non essential shops to.close one more.

 Azreal13 wrote:
Leicester will be the first localised lockdown in the UK, with the changes scheduled to come into effect on the 4th postponed and non essential shops to.close one more.

First but unlikely to be the last.

As far as retail vs local small retail discussions in coronavirus goes, I can point out two things that are CRITICAL items economically at this juncture.

Many small businesses have been operating at a low income state for a long time now, and are struggling to get by. (Exacerbated severely in the USA where many such places got burned to the ground, of course, or are in riot zones not really conducive to social hanging out.) That's point one, and shopping locally for a bit is perhaps going to save a few such places that would otherwise die on the vine because...

The subsidy extra unemployment checks of an additional 600 a week on top of uninsurance (in virginia, this means an average retail employed person who got let go about 3 months ago has been comfortably banking nearly twice their normal salary just by staying unemployed) ... that's run out of time on a lot of people, and even if they still have unemployment to draw (I believe its 3 months from first check) the subsidy money (2/3 of it) is going away at the end of july.

So in 4 weeks, all the people who right now are ordering pizza and tipping 10 bucks cause, meh, its free money for sitting at home all day, they won't be ordering pizza no more, and they may not be shopping locally any more, either. When you go down to 330 a week from 930, you start to make real choices, and all those people will NOT be able to suddenly and magically be employed again. Many businesses are still contracted in their income so much they can't keep a full staff on. Restaurants and small similar enterprises like bakeries tend to have the owners working extra shifts in them now, and still be half staffed, because they can't afford to bring other people on.

(note that the stupidly high unemployment insurance is WHY people in retail have stayed out of work this long, no matter the requests from those businesses that seek to hire them, because oyu would have to pay basically utterly unskilled labor something like 23 bucks an hour for them to earn as much money as they have been earning staying home. That's not gonna happen to a dishwasher (which is a 7.5 dollar an hour position, or even to a front of house restaurant person or lower manager in a retail store or such. So yeah, the upshot is, in the next few weeks, the serious economic consequences of the coronavirus will finally hit the USA -- something that we have papered over in bad debts and loose spending up to now, and avoided noticing.

So yeah. I don't know if its wiser to advise people to totally shop big box and buy bulk items for rice, beans, and corn dishes 6 days a week, or if its best to advise them to what the hell, its only bankruptcy, shop on the small shop economy and pay 5 bucks for green peppers that are 1.56 at walmart.

I just know its coming up on chickens to roost time, and a lot of places that have been hanging on by slim margins may not have a margin to hang on much longer. Political divisiveness has been noted in the US's federal system of government, meaning another bailout is less likely than one would like, given the severe nature of this downturn and crisis.

It sort of doesn't matter any more how much paper money we print, we past that rubicon and zeroxed a few trillion dollar bills already this year, the money WILL devalue in the near term and perhaps by as much as (real terms) about 25 percent. Add that onto the rising cost of raw food materials and the supplies going into them, and you could end up with an 8 dollar beet at the local organic health food schmallshop, and a 3 or 4 dollar green pepper in walmart (not even organic, the barbarians!)

So yeah, I dont know where this is headed, but I know that this economy, its serious time now.

Hah, extra 600 for unemployment? My application from fething March has not even been processed.

Flu virus with 'pandemic potential' found in China

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53218704

This is why we need a proper functioning track test and isolate system

Tipping $10?
Ordering pizza all the time?
Many such places got burned?

Wow....agenda much?

 Azreal13 wrote:
Leicester will be the first localised lockdown in the UK, with the changes scheduled to come into effect on the 4th postponed and non essential shops to.close one more.

This is after the schrodingeresque lockdown in Weston-super-Mare one assumes ?

Ideal tactic really : do not actually have a lockdown and then just simply claim you did.

Bound to go well.

.. getting a bit worried about the NYT coverage of the UK




... But who amongst us has not taken time to delve through the humidity of the Southcoast English bayou ..

Guessing/hoping they've misunderstood exactly what Hackney Marshes actually is, but in strange days like these....

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Flu virus with 'pandemic potential' found in China

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-53218704

This is why we need a proper functioning track test and isolate system

feth me here we go again.

How about we just agree to not let people in/out of china and to simply bathe all the products they send in disinfectant before shipping them out.

The first sounds somewhat extreme, but considering how many of these pandemics start in their population pool it might actually be prudent to have a blanket 2 week quarantine on all people leaving the country. At the very least it might help contain things in China.



Then again perhaps the media is already bored with corona and is looking for a new plague .

Has anyone heard anything on the reported chinese military getting a vaccine for covid approved for its soldiers? Apparently also involving a major test in Sao paolo, Brazil?

If there was a working vaccine I'd have thought it would be massive news. Saying that the military has it and no one else almost sounds like its rumour/conspiracy level thinking. That or its mixing things up such as how the military can be used as part of scientific studies so it could just be part of normal vaccine trials being run simply using the military as a pool of humans to work with.

A quick google says that they approved a vaccine candidate for testing by the military. That's not so noteworthy, candidates are going into human testibg worldwide.

if it indeed would work, then they'd have thrown it out allready just for the sake of money and ecnomic stabilisation.

Not Online!!! wrote:
if it indeed would work, then they'd have thrown it out allready just for the sake of money and ecnomic stabilisation.

Pretty much this.

I know there’s one vaccine currently undergoing human trials in the U.K.

What’s important to note of course is that this is accelerated testing. And to be honest, I hope that where any fail, the findings are passed on to other research groups, if for no other reason than to prevent multiple teams barking up the same wrong tree.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
if it indeed would work, then they'd have thrown it out allready just for the sake of money and ecnomic stabilisation.

Pretty much this.

I know there’s one vaccine currently undergoing human trials in the U.K.

What’s important to note of course is that this is accelerated testing. And to be honest, I hope that where any fail, the findings are passed on to other research groups, if for no other reason than to prevent multiple teams barking up the same wrong tree.

If it's any comfort, an awful lot of research for COVID and COVID-related subjects have been open access for quite some time.

Suffice it to say that of the major world players, Corona being active in the world doesn't benefit any of them. So having research open-access makes perfect sense. The sooner we've better medication and can tackle it the better things get. Even poorer nations want it gone; you can't support your tourist industry if the tourists from richer nations are not flying; heck if your workers do shift work in richer nations that whole network has also been under strain as well.


Basically a global pandemic benefits no nation unless you're totally isolated from the world anyway.

Of course nations still play sillies with the numbers for both national and international reasons.

https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/30/us-buys-up-world-stock-of-key-covid-19-drug

Is the US setting the parameters for future international relations here?

What happens if another nation comes up with a vaccine and takes the lead from the US now?

Basically its Trumps only "Trump card" to throw the US wealth/influence around. It's not surprising, other nations will do exactly the same and you can bet most "first world" nations got to supplies before poorer nations.

It won't earn the USA any respect internationally, but nationally its a big thing.

It's also nothing new, we've seen them intercept and otherwise try to bribe/force to get supplies of PPE and other elements.

Okay, so I work in the industry.

Clinical research comes in phases. There are MANY COVID-19 trials underway, and some vaccines have made it out of phase 1 and 2. If the Chinese are shooting up their soldiers, it may be one of those. That doesn't mean it's been approved or will be.

Basically they'd be giving their troops a vax that generates some immune response (it would have to do that to get out of the early phases, and it wouldn't make much sense to be doing phase 1/2 research with such a large group of subjects) without much knowledge about little things like ACTUAL efficacy or long-term safety. Immune response <> efficacy. It may very well have no benefit and/or have longer-term health risks, but you know, totalitarian states and all that. I can believe that the Chinese would do that on a non-voluntary basis, and I could also believe that the media would be incapable of putting this news in any kind of proper context.

There are things that they're doing to accelerate the overall process, but you can't actually accelerate the research. Time itself is key. In a phase 3 trial (last step before approval...or not), you can probably expect that the subjects will need to be followed for 6+ months to get to get relevant data.

Tbf , the soldiers as Target shows some confidence in it imo ,. especially when uygurs exist for such non -voluntary Option of test subjects...

Not Online!!! wrote:
Tbf , the soldiers as Target shows some confidence in it imo ,. especially when uygurs exist for such non -voluntary Option of test subjects...

I agree with this. The chinese government has a flawless record when it comes to being absolutely free of any trace of human decency or compassion, so I always knew they would not even think about hesitating to use human being they had no regard for as unwilling test subjects. Their soldiers are seen as a useful resource so i'm sure they went thru a lot of dissidents, malcontents and people that just didn't fully toe the party live before injecting their enforcement agents with anything.

Those used who survived will probably be kept in slave labor camps for the rest of their lives or quietly eliminated to avoid discomforting the chinese government by telling the world what was done to them.

Meanwhile in america we have senators saying we should ignore medical experts on the covid situation because "They might be wrong" even as covid cases in america now skyrocket after restrictions have been eased exactly as experts said it would. I've heard we could reach 400,000 cases a day now.