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Trump attacks the Merck CEO. Totally not because he opposed racism

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Oersted

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Edit: I was late. Let the thread disappear


Merck & Co Inc Chief Executive Kenneth Frazier resigned from U.S. President Donald Trump's American Manufacturing Council on Monday, saying he was taking a stand against intolerance and extremism.

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Trumpy's response

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https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/897079051277537280

In case you wondered, yes, back in 2017 parroted industry numbers which are used to justify the "RIPOFF DRUG PRICES"

President Trump’s meeting Tuesday with pharmaceutical executives was a theatrical display of chumminess in which all the parties seemed to share deep regret over high and soaring drug prices.

It also was a one-stop shop of misconceptions and misinformation about the causes of high drug prices, and therefore a mishmash of solutions, most of which are a lot more complicated than Trump thinks, some of which won’t work, and some of which are disguised handouts to the drug industry.

Trump addressed the cost of bringing a new drug to market thusly:

“I read where it costs sometimes $2.5 billion — on average, actually — to come up with a new product.… Fifteen years, $2.5 billion to come up with a product where there’s not even a safety problem. So it’s crazy.”

Leaving aside the fact that a major part of R&D is aimed at determining whether there’s a safety problem, Trump didn’t say where he got that figure. But we know: He got it from the pharmaceutical industry, via the Tufts University Center for the Study of Drug Development, which is heavily funded by the industry itself.

But there are several issues with these studies that have been raised by critics of the industry. One is that the raw data are confidential. The latest study is based on the R&D costs of 106 drugs made by 10 multinational companies but, in common with the previous studies, neither the drugs whose costs are analyzed nor the companies in the sample are revealed. The paper says only that five were among the top 10 in global sales, seven are in the top 25 and three are outside the top 25.

Obviously, this makes any assessment of the accuracy of the Tufts estimate impossible. A study that doesn't reveal what it measured or provide a way for outsiders to reproduce its findings is hopelessly flawed, and must be judged useless as the basis for any policymaking.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-trump-pharma-20170131-story.html
 
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