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The Endpoints R&D 15: How many blockbusters does $124B buy the biggest spenders in drug research? (Not enough)

Some big themes become apparent as you get into the details on the world’s top 15 R&D players, ranked by overall spending in 2021.
Bottom line, this…

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Some big themes become apparent as you get into the details on the world’s top 15 R&D players, ranked by overall spending in 2021.

Bottom line, this new look includes a $124 billion total for the Endpoints R&D 15, up $22 billion from the 2018 numbers. That’s a 22% jump in just three years, including a fast and furious assault on Covid-19, with distinctly mixed results. While many tried, only one of these big players — Pfizer — turned a historic opportunity into a major money earner with long-term potential. Merck, GSK with Vir, Eli Lilly, J&J and AstraZeneca, all made smaller — sometimes temporary — advances in vaccines or therapeutics. But the long-term potential for the second-tier players seems stunted compared to what Pfizer achieved.

Many had a few shots on goal but achieved nothing. And now it appears that the global campaign to vaccinate the world will end far short of that goal, even though the virus is still very much with us.

The pandemic triggered some amazing overnight changes in R&D, inspiring a shift to Zoom that enhanced instant cooperation and allowed for a new and faster way to develop vaccines and therapeutics. But beneath the surface optics of an industry enjoying a brief turn in the sun of positive public opinion, some underlying trends were remorselessly driving costs up. We’ve moved toward a new generation of combination approaches that has only made clinical trials more expensive for many. The competition for talent has never been so intense as now. And the supply chain disarray that afflicted everyone clearly left its mark on Big Pharma as well, where developers hunting the next best-in-class, first-in-class drugs experienced the same kind of broken logistics and rising costs that swell budgets.

Those costs remain high, while public opinion is already fast turning against the industry again, as drug pricing remains the perennial unsolved challenge for the US.

Pharma, though, enjoys big margins in the US, and that makes it possible — while necessary — to foot some very large bills like you’ll see below. But if you do the math on drug development, you’ll find that even at this lofty height, Big Pharma’s inability to accurately pick Phase III winners will make it essential to snap up drugs from biotechs to fill pipelines. That goes double for the big outfits spinning out less profitable operations in order to focus more directly on innovation.

For the last few years, the big boom that made it possible for biotech to take their drugs all the way to the regulatory finish line ended with a market implosion earlier this year. Now, biotech will once become the R&D pantry for this slate of players who continue to perform well and desperately need more candidates they can line up for approvals in the 2025 to 2030 time frame.

But don’t look for overall costs to go anywhere but up as the race to develop new blockbusters continues to heat up.

The Endpoints R&D 15
  • Roche
  • Pfizer
  • Merck
  • J&J
  • Bristol Myers Squibb
  • AstraZeneca
  • Novartis
  • AbbVie
  • Eli Lilly
  • GlaxoSmithKline
  • Sanofi
  • Gilead
  • Amgen
  • Takeda
  • Boehringer Ingelheim

Severin Schwan

  • Change: +14%
  • Sales revenue: 65.9 billion
  • R&earlyD chief – gRED: Aviv Regev
  • R&earlyD chief – pRED: Hans Clevers
  • Compensation: N/A
  • Ticker: $RHHBY
  • Employees: 101,000

1. Roche:

R&D spending 2021: $15.7 billion (14.8B Swiss francs)
R&D spending 2020:
$13.8 billion (13B Swiss francs)
R&D as a percentage of sales: 23%

The scoop: Roche’s annual R&D investment has swelled 74% over the past decade, making their gRED and pRED operations large enough to both fit into the top 10 big spenders list, if the budget was split evenly between the two.

Aviv Regev

Back in 2009, when Roche bought out all of Genentech and shuttered its old campus in Nutley, NJ, the big question was whether it was making a wise choice, or would just smother it to death with Swiss German regimentation. No one seriously discusses that anymore, as Genentech continues to deliver — even as having Genentech on the resume makes their R&D staff among the most sought after in the industry.

James Sabry

Genentech/Roche — along with Novartis — have virtually trained a generation of industry leaders that have fanned out around the globe.

More recently, the Genentech side of that research equation has been undergoing a sea change with Aviv Regev running the early development show. The Broad Institute scientist came in with some completely new thinking about AI and machine learning that has the pharma giant’s chief dealmaker, James Sabry, scouring the globe for a whole new set of partners on the early end of the discovery/development journey.

Hans Clevers

Over at pRED, meanwhile, William Pao recently departed to a bustling Pfizer as development chief, with Hans Clevers jumping from the board to replace him. Clevers has had a prominent position at Utrecht University, which will earn him some quick respect in an organization traditionally based in Europe with the rump of the old New York organization beefing up its ranks.

Roche got shut out of the NDA list for original drugs in 2021, but the year before it counted three approvals: Evrysdi, a potential blockbuster, along with Enspryng and Gavreto. And early this year they added an Eylea rival, Vabysmo, to the portfolio. In this league, counting 4 OKs in 28 months qualifies as a success story. And they can boast of an industry-leading position in the  CD20xCD3 space with mosunetuzumab and glofitamab.

William Pao

Roche has a big focus on diagnostics, which played to its advantage during the pandemic, but that’s a solid bit of business that does little to thrill the investor class. On that end, there’s a hyper-focus on gantenerumab for Alzheimer’s, an old anti-amyloid drug that failed decisively 8 years ago but was brought back from the dead with a new Phase III development plan. We’re now nearing a new pivotal readout that will spell the fate of this drug once and for all, along with the whole amyloid hypothesis. Investors have been dizzied by dreams of massive, windfall profits, which led Biogen to the precipice — and over the edge.

Analysts continue to give this one a solid shot at blockbuster status, but who among us would actually be surprised if the drug didn’t actually move the dial on efficacy?

Then there’s the whole I/O 2.0 field, where Roche hopes to make history with its TIGIT tiragolumab, with 4 landmark readouts due out this year. The first round of data proved a sore disappointment, with a failure in small cell lung cancer. But the jury is still out on TIGIT and Roche — for now. The Phase III NSCLC readout in combination with Tecentriq looms this quarter, with analysts eager to see if Roche has stolen the lead on the path to I/O 2.0, or will disappoint once again after other attempts failed badly.

It’s to Roche’s credit, however, that win or lose they will make drug development history yet again. The R&D group doesn’t lack ambition — or budget.

Inevitably, that ambition leads to failure, which is what we saw as etrolizumab went down for the final count this year. When you aim for the bleachers as often as Roche has, it’s only natural to fan-out from time to time. It’s avoiding the big swings that land you in serious trouble.

Albert Bourla

  • Change: +47%
  • Sales revenue: $81.3 billion
  • R&D chief: Mikael Dolsten
  • Compensation: $10.9 million
  • Ticker: $PFE
  • Employees: 79,000

2. Pfizer: A global player helps orchestrate a blockbuster R&D revolution. What’s next?

R&D spending 2021: $13.8 billion
R&D spending 2020: $9.4 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 17%

The scoop: For Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, winning the war on R&D started out as a math lesson.

If you run the numbers on average success rates, Bourla has noted, you can pretty much expect that average performance will generate a certain number of new products that can be used to generate added sales. With sheer financial muscle on the order Pfizer commands, that will buy you growth as you stuff more clinical stage products into the pipeline, along the lines of etrasimod, the late stage S1P picked up in the $6.7 billion Arena buyout.

Mikael Dolsten

But it doesn’t actually work that way in Big Pharma, and Bourla’s been giving a master class on the real world of major league R&D success. Right now, all the numbers look great for Pfizer. And therein lies the promise and peril for what lies ahead.

For Pfizer, the most important development on the R&D side comes down to one vaccine: Comirnaty, the Covid-19 jab that has saved lives globally and opened a door to huge commercial success. It also carved a similarly speedy path for Paxlovid, its antiviral pill which has continued to ring up endorsements from the WHO and others as so many rival treatments have been iced by the variants.

Its alliance with BioNTech set the stage for the dream event in R&D: A monumental and important program completed in record time, allowing Pfizer to leverage its manufacturing power to seize the leading role in mRNA and enjoy its time in the spotlight.

Windfalls, of course, are dicey. Just ask the crew that once ran Gilead during the hep C heyday. For Pfizer, it sets up a bit of a dilemma. How do you keep your numbers climbing after you’ve blown the doors off the old budget?

Pfizer also has to reckon with its poor historical record in drug development, with plenty of misses and thorny safety issues. Its JAK portfolio has been dicey and its big commitment to gene therapy is now hung up on a safety issue of its own.

It’s got a closely watched RSV vaccine that now enjoys back-to-back breakthrough designations as chief rivals wrestle with setbacks. But that still has a ways to go to play out. And then there’s the next big gamble in mRNA, with flu added to Covid. But they have a big challenge there as well.

When you’re sitting on cash like Pfizer has, the obvious answer to hedging bets is more bolt-ons. And you’d think that with biotech beaten down on Wall Street, the deals would be flying. Again, though, it’s not about numbers. No one wants to scoop up a bunch of struggling biotechs and then pay to see how the dice roll in clinical studies.

For Pfizer, the view from the top is beautiful. But add in the prospect of a couple of late-stage disasters and a fading pandemic, the big question will be how long before the law of averages Bourla consults starts to raise more doubts than expectations.

Today, the biopharma world is dominated by Pfizer. Tomorrow? We’ll see.

Rob Davis

  • Change: -8%
  • Sales revenue: $48.7 billion
  • R&D chief: Dean Li
  • Compensation: $5.5 million
  • Ticker: $MRK
  • Employees: 68,000

3. Merck: The new team on top angle for a bigger future, with Keytruda paying the freight

R&D spending 2021: $12.25 billion
R&D spending 2020: $13.4 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 25%

The scoop: Merck may have cut a bit off the top of its R&D budget in 2021, but it’s still a top player on the Endpoints list. In 2018, they spent less than $10 billion on drug development, but now the focus is fixed on Merck 2.0, and innovation doesn’t come cheap.

Dean Li

The bear case against Merck is that it’s been riding a lucky streak on Keytruda for years, putting off the reckoning that awaits in 2028 when the patent expires, if the cash cow doesn’t actually get taken down earlier by something that’s just as good and a whole lot less expensive.

But it’s hard to argue with the way Roger Perlmutter and Ken Frazier handled the dominant I/O franchise in oncology, quickly leaping in front of a Bristol Myers Squibb that suffered a self-inflicted wound with Opdivo. There were select deals along the way, but the New Merck crowd in charge has embraced the challenge — though they are a long way from making an effective case that they’re ready for the end of the Keytruda jackpot.

You could see that all front and center with the $11.5 billion Acceleron buyout, which delivered a new contender for blockbuster status in cardio, a field where Merck once dominated but long since faded. New R&D chief Dean Li recently set out to make a case that CV will deliver more than $10 billion in peak sales, but little room was left for failure — and failure is a constant in drug R&D, particularly in cardio.

If Merck’s been lucky, though, that streak has shown no sign of ending. Innovent/Eli Lilly, which threatened to take on Keytruda with a bargain-basement price on their PD-1, got taken down by none other than Richard Pazdur, who dealt the whole China sphere a blow with his adamant objections to China-only data.

That leaves EQRx, which would have quite a task taking on an established drug star-like Keytruda with nothing but its price to recommend it.

One thing is absolutely certain: Merck clearly needs to get busy with the checkbook, using those deep cash reserves in place to refit the pipeline. Six years is a considerable amount of time to ring up OKs for new blockbusters. But they can’t trust on time for long.

Joaquin Duato

  • Change: 24%
  • Sales revenue: $93.7 billion
  • R&D chief: Mathai Mammen
  • CSO: Paul Stoffels (recently departed)
  • Compensation:  $15 million
  • Ticker: $JNJ
  • Employees: 141,700

4. J&J: Betting big on innovation, with a fortune on the line

R&D spending 2021: $11.9 billion (pharma); $14.7 billion, total
R&D spending 2020: $9.6 billion (pharma); $12.1 billion, total
R&D as a percentage of sales: 16% (of total)

Mathai Mammen

The scoop: J&J is the one true conglomerate on this list, which is why I break out their pharma R&D budget line out of the R&D total. And pretty soon, J&J will do some breaking up of its own, spinning out consumer health into a separate operation and doubling down on innovation as the key to the future.

To get there, J&J R&D chief Mathai Mammen has been willing to take some pretty bold bets. One standout: A gamble to partner with China’s Legend on a first-in-class BCMA CAR-T, approved a few weeks ago. Legend brought the CAR-T to the party, J&J’s powerhouse oncology group made a major play in bringing it to the regulatory finish line in quick time — without any of the data messiness that blighted Eli Lilly’s shot with its PD-1 from Innovent.

Paul Stoffels

The same ambition was applied to Covid-19, which registered an early win as the third vaccine available in the US. But their jab never gained the kind of traction as the market-leading mRNA shots from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna. Why? Regulators balked at the evidence of blood clots, sidelining their vaccine. And it never fully recovered from the bad publicity, even though the risk/benefit was obvious to all experts. Last week, J&J dropped its annual guidance on the vaccine, as its prospects dwindled while Omicron burned out.

So what’s next?

Mammen is doubling down on his promise of major new entries. Literally. Instead of 4 significant new OKs every 3 years, well ahead of the typical success goal of one per year, J&J is promising 8 major new approvals every 3 years through 2025.

Carvykti and the other new approval — Rybrevant — top the list of big new drugs, with nipocalimab, an immunology candidate acquired in a $6.5 billion buyout of Momenta that will also likely face a crowded market, and milvexian, a Bristol Myers Squibb-partnered Factor XIa inhibitor, slated for $5 billion each in annual sales.

Promising big payoffs are one thing, delivering is another. And new CEO Joaquin Duato is hedging his bets, with promises of new buyouts ahead that fall into the small, medium and large categories.

In this environment, with a multitude of targets to pick from in a languishing marketplace, it’s a pretty sure bet that this is one goal that J&J can certainly hit.

Giovanni Caforio

  • Change: +2%
  • Sales revenue: $45 billion
  • EVP research and early development: Rupert Vessey
  • Compensation: $7.8 million
  • Ticker: $BMY
  • Employees: 32,200

5. Bristol Myers Squibb: Big wins, big setbacks set the stage for a new round of deals

R&D spending 2021: $11.35 billion
R&D spending 2020: $11.14 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 25%

The scoop: Welcome to the bigger R&D group at Bristol Myers. The $74 billion Celgene buyout almost doubled their R&D expense line, and that’s continued right through last year and into the future.

Rupert Vessey

CEO Giovanni Caforio has been a high roller at Bristol Myers, and unlike every other chief executive in the wake of a big buyout, he didn’t look to hatchet down research expenses or engage in a wholesale pullback from the deals they acquired. On the contrary, the global player proved just how willing it is to go in with the big money when Bristol Myers paid $650 million in cash to pick up the rights to Eisai’s MORAb-202, an ADC which combines the in-house folate receptor antibody and the chemotherapy eribulin (Halaven) last June.

It’s been a bit quiet on the BD front, but chief dealmaker Elizabeth Mily has been frank about waiting out the frothy biotech market that brewed up during the pandemic. So now is their time, with a host of biotechs flattened by a bear market and a large swathe of small and midcap players in bad need of a deal.

Elizabeth Mily

They’ll need to get busy on signing some deals. Two of their blockbusters — Pomalyst and Revlimid — are going up against knockoffs in the next few years, leaving the executive team touting the prospects of CELMoDs iberdomide and CC-92480 for multiple myeloma. Their 2.0 approach, now in mid-stage development, has a tremendous amount of money riding on their success, so you can bet that they’ll want to improve their odds with some more shots on goal.

Looking back, Bristol Myers has wagered big sums on some bad bets. Most notable: The $3.6 billion IL-2/Opdivo alliance with Nektar, a deal that has now been swept away.

Bristol Myers remains a big winner in PD-1 with their longtime blockbuster Opdivo, but for one brief, shining moment, they held the lead over Keytruda — and then they blew it with the wrong development strategy. Now revenue has flattened out as Keytruda keeps surging ahead with its megablockbuster, which has carried their pipeline now for years.

Pascal Soriot

  • Change: +62%
  • Sales revenue: $36.5 billion
  • EVP research and early development: Mene Pangalos and Susan Galbraith (oncology)
  • Compensation: N/A
  • Ticker: $AZN
  • Employees: 83,100

6. AstraZeneca: Oncology momentum and a big buyout tops a big turnaround

R&D spending 2021: $9.73 billion
R&D spending 2020: $6 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 26%

The scoop: It wasn’t that many years ago that Pascal Soriot was in the same shoes worn by every new CEO of a pharma giant in bad need of a turnaround. The R&D group took a lot of chances, and they kept getting shot down. Treme seemingly could never break through. And the mortality rate of drugs in development was gruesome.

Mene Pangalos

Until it wasn’t.

The early Lynparza approval positioned AstraZeneca to dominate PARP. Tagrisso came through with flying colors. And the brief appearance of Jose Baselga set up the Enhertu deal, positioning the pharma giant for a major new cancer franchise as it continued to perform admirably in the China market, with high growth rates.

Susan Galbraith

As a result, analysts have been quite willing to overlook the latest disasters, like the roxa CRL, that have come their way. There was some grumbling about the Alexion buyout — buying revenue like that isn’t innovation. But the numbers work — at least until we see whether rival drugs and near-term biosimilars sour the brew — and set up Soriot to deliver on a huge revenue promise he had made to investors as he twisted out of Pfizer’s arms.

What Soriot has now is a reliable money machine, deepening proven franchises and allowing Susan Galbraith and Mene Pangalos a clear shot at advancing some next-gen plays along. And it’s still doing deals like the $200 million upfront that landed eplontersen (IONIS-TTR-LRX) — a late-stage ATTR amyloidosis drug added to the Alexion pipeline.

You can’t argue with success. It would take a hell of a mishap to derail this train anytime soon.

Vas Narasimhan

  • Change: +6%
  • Sales revenue: $51.6 billion
  • NIBR chief: Jay Bradner
  • Compensation: $6 million
  • Development chief: Shreeram Aradhye
  • Ex-development chief: John Tsai
  • Compensation: $4.25 million
  • Ticker: $NVS
  • Employees: 108,000

7. Novartis: Scoring on innovation, but falling far too short in the all-important US market

R&D spending 2021: $9.54 billion
R&D spending 2020: $9 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 18%

The scoop: Novartis under Vas Narasimhan has made much of its intention to reimagine medicine. But it’s a line that runs a little thin after a short time, more company line than deep-seated belief.

John Tsai

Big and somewhat unwieldy, Novartis execs have a habit of referring to the sheer size of the pipeline — 20 potential blockbusters in the pipeline — as proof of its innovative culture. But the recent shakeup, with Narasimhan’s successor as development chief John Tsai pushed out and a move to unify strategy and BD under one roof evidence to Tim Anderson at Wolfe that “a coherent innovation vision was lacking at Novartis.”

There’s nothing unusual about a reorganization at Novartis, with thousands of layoffs expected in its huge global workforce. Winkling out costs and driving efficiency is a regular campaign event at the pharma giant. The question this time is whether Novartis can really deliver major new drugs.

Shreeram Aradhye

Novartis is a case study in critical R&D weakness — Big Pharma style. While it scores plenty of successes in terms of FDA OKs, the drugs typically aren’t $5 billion category killers. And it’s relatively low standing in the US market highlights its success at pioneering new meds that don’t bring in a ton of money. That’s something that will occupy Shreeram Aradhye, who’s going back to Novartis to take the development chief post.

There are a couple of Novartis drugs on the market, Cosentyx and Leqvio, that could go on to star status, but that hasn’t been enough to satisfy the doubters among the analysts following Novartis. What they want is a narrower focus on core research fields, with fewer low-margin plays and clear evidence that the company can do important things in drug development — the kind of important things that earn big paydays.

Richard Gonzalez

  • Change: +8%
  • Sales revenue: $56.2 billion
  • President: Michael Severino (recently left for Flagship)
  • Compensation: $11 million
  • Ticker: $ABBV
  • Employees: 50,000

8. AbbVie: A blockbuster future takes shape as Humira knockoffs loom

R&D spending 2021: $7.08 billion
R&D spending 2020: $6.56 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 12.5%

The scoop: From the moment that AbbVie was born in a major spin-off 9 years ago, the strategy was clear: Hang on to Humira and fend off knockoffs as long as possible while jacking up the price and developing new drugs that could take the bestseller’s place.

Michael Severino

Those generics are now poised to take over next year, and AbbVie has largely succeeded at its mission, hurrying along Skyrizi and Rinvoq — which has had more than its share of safety issues dragging it back — to blockbuster sales with added indications while tacking on aesthetics and Botox through the Allergan acquisition and beefing up its pipeline to keep new drugs pumping.

Through it all, they’ve been subjected to repeated exposure to scorn in Washington DC for maintaining a patent wall around Humira — something Wall Street would consider a small price to pay for a franchise that is still growing, largely through price hikes.

The marketing team also has 2 CGRP drugs in play: Ubrelvy for acute migraine and Qulipta for episodic migraine. Restasis, meanwhile, is getting ripped by knockoffs with Imbruvica, Vraylar, and Orilissa under pressure.

Analysts, though, have been ready to roll with the changes, as the executive team delivered on its big promises.

So that’s the back story on what’s worked. What are they betting the future on?

Telisotuzumab vedotin, or Teliso-V, is one of the most closely watched drugs in the pipeline. The ADC targets c-MET, a next-gen play that some analysts believe could get into blockbuster range, beginning with a potential approval next year. This one was stamped with the FDA’s “breakthrough” tag, so success here would be provided plenty of open doors.

Just a little under 2 years ago AbbVie paid Genmab $750 million in cash with billions in milestones on the table, lining up a new alliance that spotlighted the CD20xCD3 bispecific epcoritamab. Just a few days ago, they offered a 63.1% overall response rate in large B cell lymphoma, making them a contender in a field with some heavyweight rivals, comparing favorably to the data we’ve seen so far from Roche’s glofitamab.

That also encouraged notions of a near-term application and another blockbuster earner.

Then there’s the CF triplet, which few analysts are enthusiastic about backing. Vertex is the 800-pound gorilla in cystic fibrosis, with landmark successes in the field. Beating that team won’t be easy.

Dave Ricks

  • Change: +16%
  • Sales revenue: $28.3 billion
  • R&D chief: Dan Skovronsky
  • Compensation: $7.5 million
  • Ticker: $LLY
  • Employees: 35,000

9. Eli Lilly: Not afraid to gamble on huge markets, never underestimate this giant’s ambitions

R&D spending 2021: $7.03 billion
R&D spending 2020: $6.08 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 21%

The scoop: Eli Lilly has been a top biopharma player in terms of market performance. Investors have been happy to see Trulicity dominate its field. And they’ve played hard at drug development, ushering up a slate of late-stage therapies that are being positioned for major markets.

It’s not without major risk, though.

Daniel Skovronsky

The top drug headed to the FDA is donanemab, billed as the better aducanumab when it comes to clearing amyloid beta from the brains of Alzheimer’s patients. We just don’t know yet, though, whether the drug can actually improve people’s lives to any substantial level. And with Medicare flagging a refusal to cover unproven drugs for the general population on a biomarker, Eli Lilly has a tough path to blaze in an extraordinarily controversial field — and that’s if it gets an approval at a bruised and battered FDA.

The other key drug analysts are watching is tirzepatide, billed as the successor to their diabetes drug Trulicity and the keeper of the keys to the fortune associated with that franchise. And then there’s lebrikizumab, which just showed it could perform well against Dupixent — the awesome drug that Sanofi just tapped as a $14.5 billion superstar.

Generally, any drug as well established as Dupixent would find it easy to brush off new competition. But Eli Lilly has proven time and again that it has the marketing muscle to compete at every level, and they shouldn’t be discounted at this stage of the game.

Not everything has come up roses for the Lilly R&D team, though. An attempt by its oncology group at winning an approval for their PD-1 sintilimab, partnered with Innovent, on China-only data was snubbed by the FDA’s Richard Pazdur — eliminating an early shot at fielding a heavily discounted player against Keytruda and Opdivo and the rest of the high-priced PD-1s. While Lilly also enjoyed brief success in fighting Covid-19, it’s also seen bamlanivimab/etesevimab and bamlanivimab defeated by variants, as Congress debates funding for more.

Lilly, though, doesn’t quit. While its early antibodies were beaten by variants, its followup bebtelovimab is now the only FDA authorized antibody against Omicron BA.2.

When you are constantly focused on a new drug approval schedule, you can suffer some high-profile setbacks along the way. And Lilly has been a proven performer in staying focused.

Emma Walmsley

  • Change: +2%
  • Sales revenue: $44.7 billion (34.1 billion pounds)
  • R&D chief: Hal Barron
  • Compensation: $12.5 million
  • Ticker: $GSK
  • Employees: 90,000+

10. GlaxoSmithKline: An avoidance of late-stage risk has sapped R&D enthusiasm

R&D spending 2021: $6.9 billion (5.28 billion pounds)
R&D spending 2020: $6.7 billion (5.1 billion pounds)
R&D as a percentage of sales: 15%

The scoop: You don’t have to look beyond the R&D budget at GSK to see how cash-constrained they’ve been at the London-based pharma giant. The big bet under CEO Emma Walmsley came on an approved product — the PARP therapy Zejula — that cost $5 billion. And the revenue is divvied up, leaving GSK with only part of a story to tell.

Hal Barron

That’s not grounds for much excitement.

And it didn’t change all that much with the recent $1.9 billion acquisition of Sierra and its lead drug, momelotinib. They’re already lined up at the FDA’s 1-yard line with pivotal data, making this more of a commercial story now rather than something for R&D to direct.

True, there have been several major alliances inspired by departing GSK R&D chief Hal Barron, but many have chased rivals with a head start — and face some serious risks in the clinic. GSK aligned with CureVac on mRNA, choosing the biotech player that badly missed its first shot at a Covid vaccine. That’s not a kiss of death by any means, as we’ve seen some progress. But for a vaccine player that largely stayed on the sidelines during the global outbreak — contributing an adjuvant to Sanofi’s struggles doesn’t count for a lot — it’s not encouraging.

For a company that promised to do big new things in oncology, where’s their Enhertu?

True, the Vir alliance briefly delivered a major new Covid antibody, but as we’ve learned, antibodies are notoriously vulnerable to getting sidelined by variants. Sotrovimab just got cut from the Covid pharmacopeia, and new products won’t be easy to find.

Walmsley does have an ace up her sleeve, and now that the pandemic is waning globally it looks like it will get some added play. Shingrix, their big shingles vaccine, is waiting to be the cash cow many believe is only inevitable. And the spinoff of the consumer division later in the year will be helpful in freeing up the company.

Tony Wood

That underlying success story has helped revive the multinational’s flagging share price over the past year — now up 20% despite an attack on Walmsley from an activist investor. San Francisco-based Barron will soon be gone from the R&D post, replaced by Tony Wood in London. A few new moves in the UK market, closer to the research hub in Stevenage, will also help restore some hometown glory, which GSK needs.

Wood has a shot now at stirring some excitement. And Barron should be much happier focused on an early, cutting-edge tech like cell rejuvenation. Discovery was always one of his chief enthusiasms. He’s good at it, loves to explain what he’s working on, and has an infectious enthusiasm. The long haul story, though, doesn’t play well in Big Pharma.

In pharmaland it’s the late-stage pipeline that has to excite. And there’s still much to be done on that score.

Paul Hudson

  • Change: +3%
  • Sales revenue: 37.8 billion euros
  • R&D chief: John Reed
  • Compensation: N/A
  • Ticker: $SNY
  • Employees: 95,442

11. Sanofi: A perennial also-ran in R&D is taking a stab at glory. But it’s not going great

R&D spending 2021: $6.2 billion (5.7 billion euros)
R&D spending 2020: $6 billion (5.53 billion euros)
R&D as a percentage of sales: 15.1%

The scoop: Chris Viehbacher tried to revive Sanofi’s R&D group and got fired after moving to Boston.

Olivier Brandicourt took a stab at it, with no effect.

And now Paul Hudson has the Herculean challenge of rousing this sleepy giant’s R&D ops into a major league player, without a whole lot of time to lose. Which is quite the challenge.

John Reed

Hudson is taking risks, though. Doing nothing will get you nothing. And Hudson has proven to be an accomplished gambler in R&D, buying up new drugs for the pipeline while trying to stir excitement in what they can get through late-stage development.

The data, though, don’t always cooperate, as we saw with the critical late-stage failure of its oral SERD amcenestrant in March. The only way forward for Sanofi is to win approvals on new drugs that can successfully lay claim to first- or best-in-class status. A bunch of also-rans won’t fly when you’re out to prove you can innovate.

Then there was the earlier Phase III failure for rilzabrutinib, the number 2 BTK drug picked up in the $3.7 billion Principia buyout. Mocked by short-seller Sahm Adrangi, Sanofi bet big on its near-term success, but the pharma giant had to concede defeat in a trial for pemphigus. Sanofi vowed to make this into a pipeline in a product, though, and there’s much more work to be done.

But the bloom is off the rose.

Some other setbacks: The less than persuasive data for the RSV antibody nirsevimab, partnered with AstraZeneca, we saw a few weeks ago. They’re playing in an intensely competitive field here, and while Sanofi is out front, Pfizer may yet bull ahead in RSV.

Then there was the clinical hold on fitusiran, which raised some big questions about safety, which now dominate the conversation as late-stage data roll in. And last summer Sanofi raised doubts about its plans for rare diseases when it killed a program for venglustat after a trial failure — strike two for that drug.

Hudson, of course, inherited some of these setbacks, but it doesn’t help him change the company’s rep.

Throughout, though, Hudson’s trump card is never far away. Whoever concluded that partnering with Regeneron on this category killer saved Sanofi from a world of hurt. Even as the late-stage stumbles multiplied, Hudson could burnish ever-larger projections for Dupixent, though Eli Lilly has recently shown that it might just be able to compete.

It doesn’t take a lot of wins in Phase III to encourage investors, but Sanofi has some more dealmaking ahead if it wants to prove that Hudson can pick a winner.

Daniel O’Day

  • Change: +6%
  • Sales revenue: $27.3 billion
  • CMO: Merdad Parsey
  • Compensation: $6.5 million
  • Ticker: $GILD
  • Employees: 13,600

12. Gilead: Dan O’Day is working on the turnaround, but the data aren’t cooperating

R&D spending 2021: $5.35 billion
R&D spending 2020: $5.04 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 19%

The scoop: Gilead has had its ups and downs over the 3 years since Dan O’Day was brought in to position the big biotech for the future. But the stock price is almost exactly where he found it at the start — and that’s not the kind of track record he or investors were looking for.

That’s enough time to see how well Gilead has been able to do on the BD front, with a slate of deals that have either encountered some shocking implosions (Galapagos), setbacks (CD47) or disappointments (Trodelvy). But the Roche veteran isn’t budging from his established path, looking to advance a slate of approved oncology drugs while looking out 8 years to a promised land with some 20 new approvals in the mix.

Merdad Parsey

Gilead, though, has been long on promise and short on performance for years now, snagged repeatedly by clinical holds or outright failure. On the upside, they rolled out Biktarvy and Descovy to solidify their top position in HIV. But to achieve significant top-line growth, they need to score with Trodelvy on the TROPiCS-02 data as well as the upcoming reveal on the Arcus/domvanalimab TIGIT data if they want to gin up some excitement.

Supporters on the sell-side are doing what they can, but the unease is palpable. They’ve been burned before.

Christi Shaw

The old regime, which built the HIV foundation, scored a huge — though temporary — success with hep C. Turns out that actually offering patients a painless cure could effectively wipe out a drug market, after reaping a fortune.

Some of the money they harvested went to the Kite buyout, and Christi Shaw’s group has been successful in growing the franchise around Yescarta. The problem, similar to a slew of drug innovations, is that it’s not easy translating remarkable clinical success into marketing windfalls.

Over the last few months, we’ve seen a lineup of major league CEOs and R&D chiefs offering up a bright vision of the future for their companies. But you have to have a pretty good track record to win much support these days. And the track record at Gilead is largely downbeat now. They need to get better, or luckier if they want to break out of the holding pattern they are in.

Robert Bradway

  • Change: +14%
  • Sales revenue: $26 billion
  • R&D chief: David Reese
  • Compensation: $7.6 million
  • Ticker: $AMGN
  • Employees: 24,200

13. Amgen: The CEO is making some bold promises. But do the numbers add up?

R&D spending 2021: $4.8 billion
R&D spending 2020: $4.2 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 18%

The scoop: Every year, Amgen comes in near the bottom of the list of the top 15 big spenders in R&D. And every year you can credit Amgen with a couple of late-stage or newly approved drugs competing for blockbuster or breakthrough recognition among the multitude of competitors in that space.

David Reese Amgen

That’s where you’ll find Tezspire (tezepelumab), despite mixed data in asthma, where it was approved in late 2021. And it came through with a very wide label, not restricted by high eosinophils. Lumakras, its high-profile KRAS drug, also won a key approval early on, though later data tended to highlight limitations on its efficacy past non-small cell lung cancer.

CEO Bob Bradway opted to switch out the usual earnings call for 2021 with what was essentially a sales pitch for the next 8 years. After some stagnation this year, he’s promising investors mid-single-digit annual advances on compound annual growth rate.

The pipeline, topped by Tezspire and Lumakras, will lead that growth, with Bradway pushing some very ambitious growth numbers in revenue. Then he added some major promises on biosimilars, where they have been scoring positive late-stage data and project moderating discounts will swell revenue, with Repatha breaking away from the PCSK9 competition with billions in added annual sales. There’s more, but that’s the heart of the argument.

All their projected numbers are way, way ahead of consensus, and there’s some serious competition ahead on KRAS, biosimilars and PCSK9, leading me to think that Bradway is going to look to a few significant deals to actually deliver on these promises. He just doesn’t have the goods, and now’s the time to be a buyer, as biotech valuations languish.

Keep in mind, Bradway came up through the finance side of the business and he knows these numbers better than anyone. There’s no passionate pursuit of scientific theory, just a deadly seriousness about getting to first-in-class or best-in-class status ASAP. Not to be discounted: He’s just days away from his 10th anniversary of being selected as CEO, a serious stretch in the Big Pharma side of the business. He understands the math, and there’s a lot going on that subtracts value now.

Bradway’s track record points to single-drug deals, like the $1.9 billion acquisition of Five Prime, that gave Amgen the anti-FGFR2b antibody bemarituzumab. Bradway paid $400 million to get in on the anti-OX40 antibody KHK4083 for atopic dermatitis, which was another Phase III threshold drug.

Bradway also fully understands the demographics in play. As he’s making promises about CAGR, he knows that key drug markets will gray considerably between now and 2030, offering a steadily growing patient population in their core disease areas. Right now, the odds are against him. But don’t think for a second that he doesn’t understand the game.

Christophe Weber

  • Change: +15%
  • Sales revenue: $30.2 billion (forecast)
  • R&D chief: Andy Plump
  • Compensation: N/A
  • Ticker: $TAK
  • Employees: 49,578

14. Takeda: Following some big setbacks, R&D execs retool the late-stage pipeline

R&D spending 2021: $4.7 billion (forecast: Takeda’s fiscal year runs through March)
R&D spending 2020: $4.1 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 15%

The scoop: The big picture at Takeda has been dominated by Christophe Weber’s task of turning the 241-year-old Japanese company into a global player with a bright future in drug development. That’s why they bought Shire, and that’s why Andy Plump’s research group is based in Boston.

Andy Plump

To help achieve that goal, Plump has been positioning Takeda as a cell and gene therapy 2.0 player, laying out a web of investments and buyouts aimed at putting the global player at the forefront of one of the hottest fields in next-gen drug development — although one with plenty of challenges to overcome.

You could see that come together with the GammaDelta buyout last fall, following up on the network they’ve been building in cell therapy. Three months later they scooped up a GammaDelta spinout called Adaptate, deepening its work in I/O. And just a few weeks ago Takeda execs inked an alliance with Evozyne on a lineup of gene therapies for rare diseases — the latest in a series of deals on that front.

Moving up the food chain, Takeda has been working on getting the Novavax Covid-19 vaccine — TAK-019 — through in Japan. On the more traditional side of vaccine development, Takeda has been inching along for years with its dengue vaccine, TAK-003, looking for a regulatory green light in Europe this year. Takeda has an open road on this tropical vaccine niche after Sanofi’s candidate imploded in the Philippines several years ago. Peak sales, though, likely won’t be overly impressive — and with big generic competition looming for Vyvanse (next year) and Entyvio (2026), impressing Wall Street is a major consideration right now.

While Takeda has plenty of shots on goal lined up, the failure of its narcolepsy program for TAK-994 on top of the big pevonedistat setback as well as the Eohilia (budesonide oral suspension, from Shire) CRL, later axed, has raised some serious concerns on whether Takeda can deliver. The -994 setback also put its orexin agonists TAK-861, now being accelerated through proof of concept, and TAK-925 under a bit of a cloud, making any additional potential setbacks particularly serious for the pipeline.

Other top drug hopefuls include its RNAi drug TAK-999, partnered with Arrowhead Pharmaceuticals and provided with the FDA’s breakthrough therapy status, and TAK-007 for hematological malignancies, set for a hoped-for 2023 launch. Takeda investors have learned that wishes don’t always come true at Takeda, making some R&D successes critical right now.

Jean-Michel Boers

  • Change: +12.5%
  • Sales revenue: $22.4 billion (20.6 billion euros)
  • R&D chief: Michel Pairet
  • Compensation: N/A
  • Ticker: N/A
  • Employees: 52,000

15. Boehringer Ingelheim: A private German pharma bulls its way into the top 15

R&D spending 2021: $4.5 billion
R&D spending 2020: $4 billion
R&D as a percentage of sales: 20%

The scoop: Here’s a new one for the Endpoints R&D 15.

While all the numbers have been headed up for years, the company names generally stay the same. It takes a major M&A deal to move the dial enough on R&D spend to force a changeup. And yet, here we are, with a new player in the top 15, now following Takeda, which has been holding steady in the $4 billion-plus a year range in R&D expenses after acquiring Shire.

As a private company, Boehringer has free rein to report its numbers or not, a rare large player that doesn’t have to conform to the public company reporting rules. But they aren’t in the least bit shy about quoting their R&D budgets now — in fact, they’re quite proud of the big boost in spending over the past few years.

Michel Pairet

Now the German pharma player is talking up the prospect of 15 new product launches through 2025, with a slate of breakthrough therapy designations to boast about. Boehringer is still backing important new R&D on Jardiance, partnered with Eli Lilly.

At the top of that list you’ll find:

Spesolimab, an IL-36 specific monoclonal antibody for the treatment of generalized pustular psoriasis, a terrible ailment that can leave the entire body covered with sterile pustules. The FDA is hurrying it along, but peak sales may not be so impressive.

There’s also a PDE4B inhibitor for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, with data coming up later in the year for the ‘breakthrough’ therapy, and a Gly-T1 inhibitor, also deemed BTD worthy.

The German outfit may eventually deem its R&D spend as excessive. But right now the focus is on justifying the cost with some landmark advances. To play in this league, you have to be ready to swing the big bat.

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International

This is the biggest money mistake you’re making during travel

A retail expert talks of some common money mistakes travelers make on their trips.

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Travel is expensive. Despite the explosion of travel demand in the two years since the world opened up from the pandemic, survey after survey shows that financial reasons are the biggest factor keeping some from taking their desired trips.

Airfare, accommodation as well as food and entertainment during the trip have all outpaced inflation over the last four years.

Related: This is why we're still spending an insane amount of money on travel

But while there are multiple tricks and “travel hacks” for finding cheaper plane tickets and accommodation, the biggest financial mistake that leads to blown travel budgets is much smaller and more insidious.

A traveler watches a plane takeoff at an airport gate.

Jeshoots on Unsplash

This is what you should (and shouldn’t) spend your money on while abroad

“When it comes to traveling, it's hard to resist buying items so you can have a piece of that memory at home,” Kristen Gall, a retail expert who heads the financial planning section at points-back platform Rakuten, told Travel + Leisure in an interview. “However, it's important to remember that you don't need every souvenir that catches your eye.”

More Travel:

According to Gall, souvenirs not only have a tendency to add up in price but also weight which can in turn require one to pay for extra weight or even another suitcase at the airport — over the last two months, airlines like Delta  (DAL) , American Airlines  (AAL)  and JetBlue Airways  (JBLU)  have all followed each other in increasing baggage prices to in some cases as much as $60 for a first bag and $100 for a second one.

While such extras may not seem like a lot compared to the thousands one might have spent on the hotel and ticket, they all have what is sometimes known as a “coffee” or “takeout effect” in which small expenses can lead one to overspend by a large amount.

‘Save up for one special thing rather than a bunch of trinkets…’

“When traveling abroad, I recommend only purchasing items that you can't get back at home, or that are small enough to not impact your luggage weight,” Gall said. “If you’re set on bringing home a souvenir, save up for one special thing, rather than wasting your money on a bunch of trinkets you may not think twice about once you return home.”

Along with the immediate costs, there is also the risk of purchasing things that go to waste when returning home from an international vacation. Alcohol is subject to airlines’ liquid rules while certain types of foods, particularly meat and other animal products, can be confiscated by customs. 

While one incident of losing an expensive bottle of liquor or cheese brought back from a country like France will often make travelers forever careful, those who travel internationally less frequently will often be unaware of specific rules and be forced to part with something they spent money on at the airport.

“It's important to keep in mind that you're going to have to travel back with everything you purchased,” Gall continued. “[…] Be careful when buying food or wine, as it may not make it through customs. Foods like chocolate are typically fine, but items like meat and produce are likely prohibited to come back into the country.

Related: Veteran fund manager picks favorite stocks for 2024

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Spread & Containment

As the pandemic turns four, here’s what we need to do for a healthier future

On the fourth anniversary of the pandemic, a public health researcher offers four principles for a healthier future.

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John Gomez/Shutterstock

Anniversaries are usually festive occasions, marked by celebration and joy. But there’ll be no popping of corks for this one.

March 11 2024 marks four years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic.

Although no longer officially a public health emergency of international concern, the pandemic is still with us, and the virus is still causing serious harm.

Here are three priorities – three Cs – for a healthier future.

Clear guidance

Over the past four years, one of the biggest challenges people faced when trying to follow COVID rules was understanding them.

From a behavioural science perspective, one of the major themes of the last four years has been whether guidance was clear enough or whether people were receiving too many different and confusing messages – something colleagues and I called “alert fatigue”.

With colleagues, I conducted an evidence review of communication during COVID and found that the lack of clarity, as well as a lack of trust in those setting rules, were key barriers to adherence to measures like social distancing.

In future, whether it’s another COVID wave, or another virus or public health emergency, clear communication by trustworthy messengers is going to be key.

Combat complacency

As Maria van Kerkove, COVID technical lead for WHO, puts it there is no acceptable level of death from COVID. COVID complacency is setting in as we have moved out of the emergency phase of the pandemic. But is still much work to be done.

First, we still need to understand this virus better. Four years is not a long time to understand the longer-term effects of COVID. For example, evidence on how the virus affects the brain and cognitive functioning is in its infancy.

The extent, severity and possible treatment of long COVID is another priority that must not be forgotten – not least because it is still causing a lot of long-term sickness and absence.

Culture change

During the pandemic’s first few years, there was a question over how many of our new habits, from elbow bumping (remember that?) to remote working, were here to stay.

Turns out old habits die hard – and in most cases that’s not a bad thing – after all handshaking and hugging can be good for our health.

But there is some pandemic behaviour we could have kept, under certain conditions. I’m pretty sure most people don’t wear masks when they have respiratory symptoms, even though some health authorities, such as the NHS, recommend it.

Masks could still be thought of like umbrellas: we keep one handy for when we need it, for example, when visiting vulnerable people, especially during times when there’s a spike in COVID.

If masks hadn’t been so politicised as a symbol of conformity and oppression so early in the pandemic, then we might arguably have seen people in more countries adopting the behaviour in parts of east Asia, where people continue to wear masks or face coverings when they are sick to avoid spreading it to others.

Although the pandemic led to the growth of remote or hybrid working, presenteeism – going to work when sick – is still a major issue.

Encouraging parents to send children to school when they are unwell is unlikely to help public health, or attendance for that matter. For instance, although one child might recover quickly from a given virus, other children who might catch it from them might be ill for days.

Similarly, a culture of presenteeism that pressures workers to come in when ill is likely to backfire later on, helping infectious disease spread in workplaces.

At the most fundamental level, we need to do more to create a culture of equality. Some groups, especially the most economically deprived, fared much worse than others during the pandemic. Health inequalities have widened as a result. With ongoing pandemic impacts, for example, long COVID rates, also disproportionately affecting those from disadvantaged groups, health inequalities are likely to persist without significant action to address them.

Vaccine inequity is still a problem globally. At a national level, in some wealthier countries like the UK, those from more deprived backgrounds are going to be less able to afford private vaccines.

We may be out of the emergency phase of COVID, but the pandemic is not yet over. As we reflect on the past four years, working to provide clearer public health communication, avoiding COVID complacency and reducing health inequalities are all things that can help prepare for any future waves or, indeed, pandemics.

Simon Nicholas Williams has received funding from Senedd Cymru, Public Health Wales and the Wales Covid Evidence Centre for research on COVID-19, and has consulted for the World Health Organization. However, this article reflects the views of the author only, in his academic capacity at Swansea University, and no funding or organizational bodies were involved in the writing or content of this article.

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Government

The Grinch Who Stole Freedom

The Grinch Who Stole Freedom

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Before President Joe Biden’s State of the…

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The Grinch Who Stole Freedom

Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Before President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address, the pundit class was predicting that he would deliver a message of unity and calm, if only to attract undecided voters to his side.

President Joe Biden delivers the State of the Union address in the House Chamber of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on March 7, 2024. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)

He did the opposite. The speech revealed a loud, cranky, angry, bitter side of the man that people don’t usually see. It seemed like the real Joe Biden I remember from the old days, full of venom, sarcasm, disdain, threats, and extreme partisanship.

The base might have loved it except that he made reference to an “illegal” alien, which is apparently a trigger word for the left. He failed their purity test.

The speech was stunning in its bile and bitterness. It’s beyond belief that he began with a pitch for more funds for the Ukraine war, which has killed 10,000 civilians and some 200,000 troops on both sides. It’s a bloody mess that could have been resolved early on but for U.S. tax funding of the conflict.

Despite the push from the higher ends of conservative commentary, average Republicans have turned hard against this war. The United States is in a fiscal crisis and every manner of domestic crisis, and the U.S. president opens his speech with a pitch to protect the border in Ukraine? It was completely bizarre, and lent some weight to the darkest conspiracies about why the Biden administration cares so much about this issue.

From there, he pivoted to wildly overblown rhetoric about the most hysterically exaggerated event of our times: the legendary Jan. 6 protests on Capitol Hill. Arrests for daring to protest the government on that day are growing.

The media and the Biden administration continue to describe it as the worst crisis since the War of the Roses, or something. It’s all a wild stretch, but it set the tone of the whole speech, complete with unrelenting attacks on former President Donald Trump. He would use the speech not to unite or make a pitch that he is president of the entire country but rather intensify his fundamental attack on everything America is supposed to be.

Hard to isolate the most alarming part, but one aspect really stood out to me. He glared directly at the Supreme Court Justices sitting there and threatened them with political power. He said that they were awful for getting rid of nationwide abortion rights and returning the issue to the states where it belongs, very obviously. But President Biden whipped up his base to exact some kind of retribution against the court.

Looking this up, we have a few historical examples of presidents criticizing the court but none to their faces in a State of the Union address. This comes two weeks after President Biden directly bragged about defying the Supreme Court over the issue of student loan forgiveness. The court said he could not do this on his own, but President Biden did it anyway.

Here we have an issue of civic decorum that you cannot legislate or legally codify. Essentially, under the U.S. system, the president has to agree to defer to the highest court in its rulings even if he doesn’t like them. President Biden is now aggressively defying the court and adding direct threats on top of that. In other words, this president is plunging us straight into lawlessness and dictatorship.

In the background here, you must understand, is the most important free speech case in U.S. history. The Supreme Court on March 18 will hear arguments over an injunction against President Biden’s administrative agencies as issued by the Fifth Circuit. The injunction would forbid government agencies from imposing themselves on media and social media companies to curate content and censor contrary opinions, either directly or indirectly through so-called “switchboarding.”

A ruling for the plaintiffs in the case would force the dismantling of a growing and massive industry that has come to be called the censorship-industrial complex. It involves dozens or even more than 100 government agencies, including quasi-intelligence agencies such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which was set up only in 2018 but managed information flow, labor force designations, and absentee voting during the COVID-19 response.

A good ruling here will protect free speech or at least intend to. But, of course, the Biden administration could directly defy it. That seems to be where this administration is headed. It’s extremely dangerous.

A ruling for the defense and against the injunction would be a catastrophe. It would invite every government agency to exercise direct control over all media and social media in the country, effectively abolishing the First Amendment.

Close watchers of the court have no clear idea of how this will turn out. But watching President Biden glare at court members at the address, one does wonder. Did they sense the threats he was making against them? Will they stand up for the independence of the judicial branch?

Maybe his intimidation tactics will end up backfiring. After all, does the Supreme Court really think it is wise to license this administration with the power to control all information flows in the United States?

The deeper issue here is a pressing battle that is roiling American life today. It concerns the future and power of the administrative state versus the elected one. The Constitution contains no reference to a fourth branch of government, but that is what has been allowed to form and entrench itself, in complete violation of the Founders’ intentions. Only the Supreme Court can stop it, if they are brave enough to take it on.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, and surely you have, President Biden is nothing but a marionette of deep-state interests. He is there to pretend to be the people’s representative, but everything that he does is about entrenching the fourth branch of government, the permanent bureaucracy that goes on its merry way without any real civilian oversight.

We know this for a fact by virtue of one of his first acts as president, to repeal an executive order by President Trump that would have reclassified some (or many) federal employees as directly under the control of the elected president rather than have independent power. The elites in Washington absolutely panicked about President Trump’s executive order. They plotted to make sure that he didn’t get a second term, and quickly scratched that brilliant act by President Trump from the historical record.

This epic battle is the subtext behind nearly everything taking place in Washington today.

Aside from the vicious moment of directly attacking the Supreme Court, President Biden set himself up as some kind of economic central planner, promising to abolish hidden fees and bags of chips that weren’t full enough, as if he has the power to do this, which he does not. He was up there just muttering gibberish. If he is serious, he believes that the U.S. president has the power to dictate the prices of every candy bar and hotel room in the United States—an absolutely terrifying exercise of power that compares only to Stalin and Mao. And yet there he was promising to do just that.

Aside from demonizing the opposition, wildly exaggerating about Jan. 6, whipping up war frenzy, swearing to end climate change, which will make the “green energy” industry rich, threatening more taxes on business enterprise, promising to cure cancer (again!), and parading as the master of candy bar prices, what else did he do? Well, he took credit for the supposedly growing economy even as a vast number of Americans are deeply suffering from his awful policies.

It’s hard to imagine that this speech could be considered a success. The optics alone made him look like the Grinch who stole freedom, except the Grinch was far more articulate and clever. He’s a mean one, Mr. Biden.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Mon, 03/11/2024 - 12:00

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