Connect with us

International

Saving $3.5 Trillion on Prescription Drugs to Pay for Bernie Sanders’s Big Agenda

Arguably, the full cost of the $3.5 trillion (1.2 percent of GDP) package could be covered by savings on prescription drugs alone.
The post Saving $3.5 Trillion on Prescription Drugs to Pay for Bernie Sanders’s Big Agenda appeared first on Center for…

Published

2 years ago

on

According to a draft document being circulated, the Democrats are looking to save $600 billion over a decade by negotiating lower prescription drug prices. The basic story here is that the United States pays more than twice as much, on average, for prescription drugs than Germany, France, Canada, and other wealthy countries. If we paid something closer to what these countries pay for drugs, there would be very large potential savings.

The Democrats are hoping to use these savings to pay for expanding Medicare (possibly also lowering the age of eligibility; 64 would be a good start), free community college, extending the child tax credit, and all sorts of other good things. While there is some skepticism as to whether the government can actually save $600 billion over a decade on prescription drugs, this is actually a very low target. Arguably, the full cost of the $3.5 trillion (1.2 percent of GDP) package could be covered by savings on prescription drugs alone.

Projected Spending on Prescription Drugs

There is very little awareness of how much money the country spends on prescription drugs. This is partly due to the fact that most spending is by third parties, either the government or private insurers, rather than directly out of the pocket of patients. There also is little realization of how high drug prices are relative to the cost of manufacturing and distribution.

The figure below shows projected spending on prescription drugs over the next decade. Spending for 2021 is projected to be just over $500 billion, or 2.2 percent of GDP. The growth rates projected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) imply that spending will rise to $894 billion by 2031, or 2.6 percent of GDP.[1] The base for this spending is taken from the National Income and Product Accounts, Table 2.4.5U, Line 121. It is considerably higher than the spending data from CMS because it includes spending on drugs in hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions. The CMS data only measures spending on drugs by patients directly.

 

Source: CMS, BEA, and author’s calculations.

As a target for potential spending, the figure assumes that without patent and related protections, we would be spending 20 percent as much as is currently projected. This is a plausible, and possibly even conservative target.

According to data from the Association for Accessible Medicines (AAM), the trade group for the generic industry, brand drugs accounted for 74 percent of spending even though they were only 11 percent of the prescriptions sold. By contrast, generic drugs accounted for just 26 percent of spending even though they were 89 percent of prescriptions. This implies that the average generic prescription cost just 3.6 percent of the price of the average brand prescription, or $29.70 per prescription. This figure would mean that we could save 96.4 percent of the money spent on brand drugs if we immediately got rid of protections and allowed them to be sold as generics.[2] (As a practical matter, we would not see generic competition push down prices right away, since it would take several years for a substantial number of competitors to enter the market.)

But even this figure understates the true potential savings from eliminating patents and related protections. The AAM’s data is based on averages, but these numbers are skewed by the fact that many generics sell for high prices in the period immediately after they are introduced. This is due to the fact that they have limited competition, in part by design.

The first generic to enter a market is granted six months of exclusivity, a period in which they enjoy an effective duopoly with the brand drug. For example, a recent analysis found that price declines averaged just over 50 percent in the first year after a generic is introduced. This means that the average cost of generic drugs in the AAM analysis is inflated by the generic drugs that are sold at high prices in the first years after they come onto the market. Also, the price of generics is inflated due to the fact that the generic industry must incur legal costs to contest patent battles with the brand industry. In addition, generic drugs may also be paying royalties on secondary patents that are still in force even after the key patent for a drug expired.

In a world with no patents or related protections, it is likely that generics would cost close to half as much as we now spend since the market would be more fully competitive and the industry would face far lower legal expenses. The table assumes an 80 percent reduction in spending, which is likely a conservative figure. If the average price of a generic drug in a patent-free world was 50 percent of the current price and all drugs were sold as generics, the savings would be more than 85 percent of current spending.

The 80 percent reduction in projected spending would imply savings of $5.6 trillion over the next decade. Of course, the government does not pay for all prescription drugs in the country, so only around half of these savings, or $2.8 trillion, would accrue to the government. Although, since most spending on health insurance is tax deductible, the government should recoup some of the private sector savings in the form of higher tax revenue. Also, from the standpoint of reducing demand in the economy and limiting the risk of inflation (the purpose of taxation at the federal level), the reduction in private sector spending on drugs is likely to have almost as much impact as the savings to the government.

Research and Development Costs

This picture leaves out the research and development costs incurred by the industry. In 2020, the industry spent $105.7 billion on research and development.[3] If we assume that spending on research increases at the same pace as spending on drugs, then the industry would be spending $1.5 trillion on research and development over the course of the decade, on its current path. (This is in addition to the $45 billion a year that it currently spends through NIH and other agencies.)  If the government had to replace this spending, and we assume that a dollar of government spending has the same value as a dollar of private spending, then we would need to subtract $1.5 trillion from our savings on drug prices to cover these research costs. That would still leave $4.1 trillion in savings.

Whether or not a dollar of government spending has the same value as a dollar of private spending under the patent monopoly system is a debatable point. It could be argued that private companies, with their own dollars on the line, will be more efficient, but there are reasons the story could go the other way. (Moderna, which developed its coronavirus vaccine almost entirely on the public dime, is a great example of public funding being very effective.)

First, there are better and worse ways of doing public funding. In my view, the best route would be to pay out money for research to drug companies on long-term contracts, similar to the way the Defense Department contracts out for major weapons systems. (I describe this more fully in chapter 5 of Rigged [it’s free].) The contractors would have a strong incentive to ensure their money was well spent, since presumably they will want their contracts renewed when they expire.

A big advantage this system would have over military contracting is that everything would be fully open. While there are good reasons for secrecy in designing weapons systems, there is no reason to want to keep research findings on a cancer drug or treatment for heart disease secret. In fact, putting all results on the web in a timely manner should be a condition of getting public funding. This rule would apply not only to contractors, but also to all subcontractors. (It is likely that any major drug company winning a contract would contract out for much of the research, just as they do now. Innovative startups are likely to be more efficient with research dollars than large well-established companies.)

If all research is quickly made available to the entire scientific community, we are likely to make progress more quickly than in a world where drug companies are looking to lock up their work behind patent monopolies. Researchers can quickly learn from each other’s research, building on successes and avoiding failures.

In addition, research that is primarily rent-seeking in nature would be largely avoided. In many cases drug companies look to develop drugs that are not expected to produce major medical benefits over existing drugs, but rather will simply give them a portion of the patent rents earned by a major breakthrough drug. The Food and Drug Administration puts more than 90 percent of its drug approvals in the “standard” category, meaning that they are not a qualitative improvement over existing drugs.

To be clear, duplicative drugs are not of zero value. People may react poorly to a certain drug, whereas they may be fine with another drug in the same class. Also, some drugs do not mix well with other drugs. However, as a general rule, we would probably like to see research dollars spent finding drugs for conditions where effective drugs do not currently exist, rather than developing the seventh, eighth, or ninth drug for a condition.

There also will be some amount of research spending that will be needed to ensure that production standards are safe and efficient. This spending would be necessary even if everything was sold as a generic, since it will be needed for any manufacturer. The government would not need to replace this spending, which is likely in the neighborhood of 10 percent of the total.

The Opioid Scandal and Patent Monopoly Financings

There is one other very important reason for believing that publicly funded research could be more effective on a per dollar basis than patent monopoly financing. Patent monopolies give drug companies an incentive to lie about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs.

While it is common for drug companies to be less than completely honest about the safety and effectiveness of their drugs, we saw a very dramatic example of this dishonesty with the opioid crisis. Purdue Pharma and other major opioid manufacturers paid out tens of billions of dollars in settlements in response to lawsuits alleging that they deliberately concealed evidence of the addictiveness of their drugs in their efforts to promote them to doctors.

To be clear, the allegation was not that these companies made a mistake. The claim was that they knew their drugs were highly addictive, but claimed the opposite when they tried to convince doctors to prescribe them to patients.

There will always be mistakes in research, some with very large consequences. But the issue here was deliberate deception. Had it not been for the opportunity to sell their opioids at patent monopoly prices, the drug companies would have had far less incentive to misrepresent their addictiveness.

If we eliminated patent monopolies for prescription drugs, we also eliminate this perverse incentive. This is likely to lead to considerably better care for patients, since doctors will have honest research guiding their decisions in prescribing drugs.  

Drug Savings and Covering the Cost of the Reconciliation Package

If we think clearly about how much we are spending on drugs, compared to the cost of manufacturing and distributing them, it should be clear that the $600 billion savings figure being tossed around by Democrats is very doable. It is plausible to envision savings many times larger, if we are prepared to jettison the patent monopoly system of financing drug research and replace it with something more modern.

Of course, we should be looking to other routes for offsetting the spending in the reconciliation package, most obviously by increasing taxes on the rich and corporations. My favorite in the latter category involves switching the basis for the corporate income tax from profits to returns to shareholders. The latter are simply dividends and capital gains. This can be done on a simple spreadsheet. (That would be a single spreadsheet for all publicly traded companies.) We could put the tax shelter industry out of business since there is no way to hide what is being doled out as dividends or the rise in share price. (To be clear, this is a corporate income tax, not an individual tax – the corporations will be taxed based on the money they made for shareholders.)    

The Democrats in Congress are in a position to make changes that will have a huge impact on the lives of tens of millions of people. Covering the cost should not be a problem. We can get much or all of the way there from savings on prescription drugs alone, but we have many other good options to add to the mix.

[1] The projections in the chart use calendar year 2019 spending on prescription drugs as a base, since the 2020 numbers were distorted by the pandemic. This is taken from the National Income and Product Accounts, Table 2.4.5U, Line 121. The numbers for later years use the projected growth rates from Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, National Health Expenditure Projections, 2019-2028, Table 2. The spending growth rate for 2027 to 2028 (6.0 percent), is assumed to continue for the next three years.

[2] In the case of some very high-priced drugs, high quality generic versions are available in other countries for less than 1.0 percent of the price charged in the United States.

[3] National Income and Product Accounts, Table 5.6.5, Line 9.

The post Saving $3.5 Trillion on Prescription Drugs to Pay for Bernie Sanders’s Big Agenda appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Read More

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

International

Chronic stress and inflammation linked to societal and environmental impacts in new study

From anxiety about the state of the world to ongoing waves of Covid-19, the stresses we face can seem relentless and even overwhelming. Worse, these stressors…

Published

2 hours ago

on

March 12, 2024

By

From anxiety about the state of the world to ongoing waves of Covid-19, the stresses we face can seem relentless and even overwhelming. Worse, these stressors can cause chronic inflammation in our bodies. Chronic inflammation is linked to serious conditions such as cardiovascular disease and cancer – and may also affect our thinking and behavior.   

Credit: Image: Vodovotz et al/Frontiers

From anxiety about the state of the world to ongoing waves of Covid-19, the stresses we face can seem relentless and even overwhelming. Worse, these stressors can cause chronic inflammation in our bodies. Chronic inflammation is linked to serious conditions such as cardiovascular disease and cancer – and may also affect our thinking and behavior.   

A new hypothesis published in Frontiers in Science suggests the negative impacts may extend far further.   

“We propose that stress, inflammation, and consequently impaired cognition in individuals can scale up to communities and populations,” explained lead author Prof Yoram Vodovotz of the University of Pittsburgh, USA.

“This could affect the decision-making and behavior of entire societies, impair our cognitive ability to address complex issues like climate change, social unrest, and infectious disease – and ultimately lead to a self-sustaining cycle of societal dysfunction and environmental degradation,” he added.

Bodily inflammation ‘mapped’ in the brain  

One central premise to the hypothesis is an association between chronic inflammation and cognitive dysfunction.  

“The cause of this well-known phenomenon is not currently known,” said Vodovotz. “We propose a mechanism, which we call the ‘central inflammation map’.”    

The authors’ novel idea is that the brain creates its own copy of bodily inflammation. Normally, this inflammation map allows the brain to manage the inflammatory response and promote healing.   

When inflammation is high or chronic, however, the response goes awry and can damage healthy tissues and organs. The authors suggest the inflammation map could similarly harm the brain and impair cognition, emotion, and behavior.   

Accelerated spread of stress and inflammation online   

A second premise is the spread of chronic inflammation from individuals to populations.  

“While inflammation is not contagious per se, it could still spread via the transmission of stress among people,” explained Vodovotz.   

The authors further suggest that stress is being transmitted faster than ever before, through social media and other digital communications.  

“People are constantly bombarded with high levels of distressing information, be it the news, negative online comments, or a feeling of inadequacy when viewing social media feeds,” said Vodovotz. “We hypothesize that this new dimension of human experience, from which it is difficult to escape, is driving stress, chronic inflammation, and cognitive impairment across global societies.”   

Inflammation as a driver of social and planetary disruption  

These ideas shift our view of inflammation as a biological process restricted to an individual. Instead, the authors see it as a multiscale process linking molecular, cellular, and physiological interactions in each of us to altered decision-making and behavior in populations – and ultimately to large-scale societal and environmental impacts.  

“Stress-impaired judgment could explain the chaotic and counter-intuitive responses of large parts of the global population to stressful events such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic,” explained Vodovotz.  

“An inability to address these and other stressors may propagate a self-fulfilling sense of pervasive danger, causing further stress, inflammation, and impaired cognition in a runaway, positive feedback loop,” he added.  

The fact that current levels of global stress have not led to widespread societal disorder could indicate an equally strong stabilizing effect from “controllers” such as trust in laws, science, and multinational organizations like the United Nations.   

“However, societal norms and institutions are increasingly being questioned, at times rightly so as relics of a foregone era,” said Prof Paul Verschure of Radboud University, the Netherlands, and a co-author of the article. “The challenge today is how we can ward off a new adversarial era of instability due to global stress caused by a multi-scale combination of geopolitical fragmentation, conflicts, and ecological collapse amplified by existential angst, cognitive overload, and runaway disinformation.”    

Reducing social media exposure as part of the solution  

The authors developed a mathematical model to test their ideas and explore ways to reduce stress and build resilience.  

“Preliminary results highlight the need for interventions at multiple levels and scales,” commented co-author Prof Julia Arciero of Indiana University, USA.  

“While anti-inflammatory drugs are sometimes used to treat medical conditions associated with inflammation, we do not believe these are the whole answer for individuals,” said Dr David Katz, co-author and a specialist in preventive and lifestyle medicine based in the US. “Lifestyle changes such as healthy nutrition, exercise, and reducing exposure to stressful online content could also be important.”  

“The dawning new era of precision and personalized therapeutics could also offer enormous potential,” he added.  

At the societal level, the authors suggest creating calm public spaces and providing education on the norms and institutions that keep our societies stable and functioning.  

“While our ‘inflammation map’ hypothesis and corresponding mathematical model are a start, a coordinated and interdisciplinary research effort is needed to define interventions that would improve the lives of individuals and the resilience of communities to stress. We hope our article stimulates scientists around the world to take up this challenge,” Vodovotz concluded.  

The article is part of the Frontiers in Science multimedia article hub ‘A multiscale map of inflammatory stress’. The hub features a video, an explainer, a version of the article written for kids, and an editorial, viewpoints, and policy outlook from other eminent experts: Prof David Almeida (Penn State University, USA), Prof Pietro Ghezzi (University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy), and Dr Ioannis P Androulakis (Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA). 

Journal

Frontiers in Science

DOI

10.3389/1239462

Method of Research

Computational simulation/modeling

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

A multiscale inflammatory map: linking individual stress to societal dysfunction

Article Publication Date

12-Mar-2024

COI Statement

YV is a cofounder of, and stakeholder in, Immunetrics, Inc. and a consultant to Anuna AI. PFMJV is the founder of, and stakeholder in, Eodyne Systems s.l. and Sapiens5 Holding BV. DLK was employed by Tangelo – Intend, Inc. Neither these companies nor the funders mentioned above were involved in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation of data, the writing of this article, or the decision to submit it for publication. The companies mentioned above also did not provide funding for the study. The remaining author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The authors YV and PV declared that they are editorial board members of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Read More

Continue Reading

International

Acadia’s Nuplazid fails PhIII study due to higher-than-expected placebo effect

After years of trying to expand the market territory for Nuplazid, Acadia Pharmaceuticals might have hit a dead end, with a Phase III fail in schizophrenia…

Published

3 hours ago

on

March 12, 2024

By

After years of trying to expand the market territory for Nuplazid, Acadia Pharmaceuticals might have hit a dead end, with a Phase III fail in schizophrenia due to the placebo arm performing better than expected.

Steve Davis

“We will continue to analyze these data with our scientific advisors, but we do not intend to conduct any further clinical trials with pimavanserin,” CEO Steve Davis said in a Monday press release. Acadia’s stock $ACAD dropped by 17.41% before the market opened Tuesday.

Pimavanserin, a serotonin inverse agonist and also a 5-HT2A receptor antagonist, is already in the market with the brand name Nuplazid for Parkinson’s disease psychosis. Efforts to expand into other indications such as Alzheimer’s-related psychosis and major depression have been unsuccessful, and previous trials in schizophrenia have yielded mixed data at best. Its February presentation does not list other pimavanserin studies in progress.

The Phase III ADVANCE-2 trial investigated 34 mg pimavanserin versus placebo in 454 patients who have negative symptoms of schizophrenia. The study used the negative symptom assessment-16 (NSA-16) total score as a primary endpoint and followed participants up to week 26. Study participants have control of positive symptoms due to antipsychotic therapies.

The company said that the change from baseline in this measure for the treatment arm was similar between the Phase II ADVANCE-1 study and ADVANCE-2 at -11.6 and -11.8, respectively. However, the placebo was higher in ADVANCE-2 at -11.1, when this was -8.5 in ADVANCE-1. The p-value in ADVANCE-2 was 0.4825.

In July last year, another Phase III schizophrenia trial — by Sumitomo and Otsuka — also reported negative results due to what the company noted as Covid-19 induced placebo effect.

According to Mizuho Securities analysts, ADVANCE-2 data were disappointing considering the company applied what it learned from ADVANCE-1, such as recruiting patients outside the US to alleviate a high placebo effect. The Phase III recruited participants in Argentina and Europe.

Analysts at Cowen added that the placebo effect has been a “notorious headwind” in US-based trials, which appears to “now extend” to ex-US studies. But they also noted ADVANCE-1 reported a “modest effect” from the drug anyway.

Nonetheless, pimavanserin’s safety profile in the late-stage study “was consistent with previous clinical trials,” with the drug having an adverse event rate of 30.4% versus 40.3% with placebo, the company said. Back in 2018, even with the FDA approval for Parkinson’s psychosis, there was an intense spotlight on Nuplazid’s safety profile.

Acadia previously aimed to get Nuplazid approved for Alzheimer’s-related psychosis but had many hurdles. The drug faced an adcomm in June 2022 that voted 9-3 noting that the drug is unlikely to be effective in this setting, culminating in a CRL a few months later.

As for the company’s next R&D milestones, Mizuho analysts said it won’t be anytime soon: There is the Phase III study for ACP-101 in Prader-Willi syndrome with data expected late next year and a Phase II trial for ACP-204 in Alzheimer’s disease psychosis with results anticipated in 2026.

Acadia collected $549.2 million in full-year 2023 revenues for Nuplazid, with $143.9 million in the fourth quarter.

Read More

Continue Reading

Government

Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched

Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

"Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare…

Published

8 hours ago

on

March 12, 2024

By

Four Years Ago This Week, Freedom Was Torched

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Brownstone Institute,

"Beware the Ides of March,” Shakespeare quotes the soothsayer’s warning Julius Caesar about what turned out to be an impending assassination on March 15. The death of American liberty happened around the same time four years ago, when the orders went out from all levels of government to close all indoor and outdoor venues where people gather. 

It was not quite a law and it was never voted on by anyone. Seemingly out of nowhere, people who the public had largely ignored, the public health bureaucrats, all united to tell the executives in charge – mayors, governors, and the president – that the only way to deal with a respiratory virus was to scrap freedom and the Bill of Rights. 

And they did, not only in the US but all over the world. 

The forced closures in the US began on March 6 when the mayor of Austin, Texas, announced the shutdown of the technology and arts festival South by Southwest. Hundreds of thousands of contracts, of attendees and vendors, were instantly scrapped. The mayor said he was acting on the advice of his health experts and they in turn pointed to the CDC, which in turn pointed to the World Health Organization, which in turn pointed to member states and so on. 

There was no record of Covid in Austin, Texas, that day but they were sure they were doing their part to stop the spread. It was the first deployment of the “Zero Covid” strategy that became, for a time, official US policy, just as in China. 

It was never clear precisely who to blame or who would take responsibility, legal or otherwise. 

This Friday evening press conference in Austin was just the beginning. By the next Thursday evening, the lockdown mania reached a full crescendo. Donald Trump went on nationwide television to announce that everything was under control but that he was stopping all travel in and out of US borders, from Europe, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. American citizens would need to return by Monday or be stuck. 

Americans abroad panicked while spending on tickets home and crowded into international airports with waits up to 8 hours standing shoulder to shoulder. It was the first clear sign: there would be no consistency in the deployment of these edicts. 

There is no historical record of any American president ever issuing global travel restrictions like this without a declaration of war. Until then, and since the age of travel began, every American had taken it for granted that he could buy a ticket and board a plane. That was no longer possible. Very quickly it became even difficult to travel state to state, as most states eventually implemented a two-week quarantine rule. 

The next day, Friday March 13, Broadway closed and New York City began to empty out as any residents who could went to summer homes or out of state. 

On that day, the Trump administration declared the national emergency by invoking the Stafford Act which triggers new powers and resources to the Federal Emergency Management Administration. 

In addition, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a classified document, only to be released to the public months later. The document initiated the lockdowns. It still does not exist on any government website.

The White House Coronavirus Response Task Force, led by the Vice President, will coordinate a whole-of-government approach, including governors, state and local officials, and members of Congress, to develop the best options for the safety, well-being, and health of the American people. HHS is the LFA [Lead Federal Agency] for coordinating the federal response to COVID-19.

Closures were guaranteed:

Recommend significantly limiting public gatherings and cancellation of almost all sporting events, performances, and public and private meetings that cannot be convened by phone. Consider school closures. Issue widespread ‘stay at home’ directives for public and private organizations, with nearly 100% telework for some, although critical public services and infrastructure may need to retain skeleton crews. Law enforcement could shift to focus more on crime prevention, as routine monitoring of storefronts could be important.

In this vision of turnkey totalitarian control of society, the vaccine was pre-approved: “Partner with pharmaceutical industry to produce anti-virals and vaccine.”

The National Security Council was put in charge of policy making. The CDC was just the marketing operation. That’s why it felt like martial law. Without using those words, that’s what was being declared. It even urged information management, with censorship strongly implied.

The timing here is fascinating. This document came out on a Friday. But according to every autobiographical account – from Mike Pence and Scott Gottlieb to Deborah Birx and Jared Kushner – the gathered team did not meet with Trump himself until the weekend of the 14th and 15th, Saturday and Sunday. 

According to their account, this was his first real encounter with the urge that he lock down the whole country. He reluctantly agreed to 15 days to flatten the curve. He announced this on Monday the 16th with the famous line: “All public and private venues where people gather should be closed.”

This makes no sense. The decision had already been made and all enabling documents were already in circulation. 

There are only two possibilities. 

One: the Department of Homeland Security issued this March 13 HHS document without Trump’s knowledge or authority. That seems unlikely. 

Two: Kushner, Birx, Pence, and Gottlieb are lying. They decided on a story and they are sticking to it. 

Trump himself has never explained the timeline or precisely when he decided to greenlight the lockdowns. To this day, he avoids the issue beyond his constant claim that he doesn’t get enough credit for his handling of the pandemic.

With Nixon, the famous question was always what did he know and when did he know it? When it comes to Trump and insofar as concerns Covid lockdowns – unlike the fake allegations of collusion with Russia – we have no investigations. To this day, no one in the corporate media seems even slightly interested in why, how, or when human rights got abolished by bureaucratic edict. 

As part of the lockdowns, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was and is part of the Department of Homeland Security, as set up in 2018, broke the entire American labor force into essential and nonessential.

They also set up and enforced censorship protocols, which is why it seemed like so few objected. In addition, CISA was tasked with overseeing mail-in ballots. 

Only 8 days into the 15, Trump announced that he wanted to open the country by Easter, which was on April 12. His announcement on March 24 was treated as outrageous and irresponsible by the national press but keep in mind: Easter would already take us beyond the initial two-week lockdown. What seemed to be an opening was an extension of closing. 

This announcement by Trump encouraged Birx and Fauci to ask for an additional 30 days of lockdown, which Trump granted. Even on April 23, Trump told Georgia and Florida, which had made noises about reopening, that “It’s too soon.” He publicly fought with the governor of Georgia, who was first to open his state. 

Before the 15 days was over, Congress passed and the president signed the 880-page CARES Act, which authorized the distribution of $2 trillion to states, businesses, and individuals, thus guaranteeing that lockdowns would continue for the duration. 

There was never a stated exit plan beyond Birx’s public statements that she wanted zero cases of Covid in the country. That was never going to happen. It is very likely that the virus had already been circulating in the US and Canada from October 2019. A famous seroprevalence study by Jay Bhattacharya came out in May 2020 discerning that infections and immunity were already widespread in the California county they examined. 

What that implied was two crucial points: there was zero hope for the Zero Covid mission and this pandemic would end as they all did, through endemicity via exposure, not from a vaccine as such. That was certainly not the message that was being broadcast from Washington. The growing sense at the time was that we all had to sit tight and just wait for the inoculation on which pharmaceutical companies were working. 

By summer 2020, you recall what happened. A restless generation of kids fed up with this stay-at-home nonsense seized on the opportunity to protest racial injustice in the killing of George Floyd. Public health officials approved of these gatherings – unlike protests against lockdowns – on grounds that racism was a virus even more serious than Covid. Some of these protests got out of hand and became violent and destructive. 

Meanwhile, substance abuse rage – the liquor and weed stores never closed – and immune systems were being degraded by lack of normal exposure, exactly as the Bakersfield doctors had predicted. Millions of small businesses had closed. The learning losses from school closures were mounting, as it turned out that Zoom school was near worthless. 

It was about this time that Trump seemed to figure out – thanks to the wise council of Dr. Scott Atlas – that he had been played and started urging states to reopen. But it was strange: he seemed to be less in the position of being a president in charge and more of a public pundit, Tweeting out his wishes until his account was banned. He was unable to put the worms back in the can that he had approved opening. 

By that time, and by all accounts, Trump was convinced that the whole effort was a mistake, that he had been trolled into wrecking the country he promised to make great. It was too late. Mail-in ballots had been widely approved, the country was in shambles, the media and public health bureaucrats were ruling the airwaves, and his final months of the campaign failed even to come to grips with the reality on the ground. 

At the time, many people had predicted that once Biden took office and the vaccine was released, Covid would be declared to have been beaten. But that didn’t happen and mainly for one reason: resistance to the vaccine was more intense than anyone had predicted. The Biden administration attempted to impose mandates on the entire US workforce. Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, that effort was thwarted but not before HR departments around the country had already implemented them. 

As the months rolled on – and four major cities closed all public accommodations to the unvaccinated, who were being demonized for prolonging the pandemic – it became clear that the vaccine could not and would not stop infection or transmission, which means that this shot could not be classified as a public health benefit. Even as a private benefit, the evidence was mixed. Any protection it provided was short-lived and reports of vaccine injury began to mount. Even now, we cannot gain full clarity on the scale of the problem because essential data and documentation remains classified. 

After four years, we find ourselves in a strange position. We still do not know precisely what unfolded in mid-March 2020: who made what decisions, when, and why. There has been no serious attempt at any high level to provide a clear accounting much less assign blame. 

Not even Tucker Carlson, who reportedly played a crucial role in getting Trump to panic over the virus, will tell us the source of his own information or what his source told him. There have been a series of valuable hearings in the House and Senate but they have received little to no press attention, and none have focus on the lockdown orders themselves. 

The prevailing attitude in public life is just to forget the whole thing. And yet we live now in a country very different from the one we inhabited five years ago. Our media is captured. Social media is widely censored in violation of the First Amendment, a problem being taken up by the Supreme Court this month with no certainty of the outcome. The administrative state that seized control has not given up power. Crime has been normalized. Art and music institutions are on the rocks. Public trust in all official institutions is at rock bottom. We don’t even know if we can trust the elections anymore. 

In the early days of lockdown, Henry Kissinger warned that if the mitigation plan does not go well, the world will find itself set “on fire.” He died in 2023. Meanwhile, the world is indeed on fire. The essential struggle in every country on earth today concerns the battle between the authority and power of permanent administration apparatus of the state – the very one that took total control in lockdowns – and the enlightenment ideal of a government that is responsible to the will of the people and the moral demand for freedom and rights. 

How this struggle turns out is the essential story of our times. 

CODA: I’m embedding a copy of PanCAP Adapted, as annotated by Debbie Lerman. You might need to download the whole thing to see the annotations. If you can help with research, please do.

*  *  *

Jeffrey Tucker is the author of the excellent new book 'Life After Lock-Down'

Tyler Durden Mon, 03/11/2024 - 23:40

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending