Connect with us

International

The Unbearable Cost of Drug Development: Deloitte Report Shows 15% Jump in R&D to $2.3 Billion

In one report, business services consultancy Deloitte details the growing research-and-development (R&D) expenses that biopharmas often blame for the…

Published

on

A pair of recently-released studies shed new light on the staggering cost of developing new drugs—an expense that now exceeds $2 billion per therapy on average.

In one report, business services consultancy Deloitte details the growing research-and-development (R&D) expenses that biopharmas often blame for the sky-high list prices they charge for new treatments. Deloitte found that the average cost of developing a new drug among the top 20 global biopharmas it studied rose 15% ($298 million) last year, to approximately $2.3 billion.

That figure includes the average cost of developing a candidate from discovery through clinical trials to the market. Deloitte counted 278 late-stage assets last year, slightly above 273 in 2021 and the lowest year-over-year increase since 2018—with companies ranging for four to 35 late-stage assets—defined as both approved and terminated assets in Phase II with breakthrough therapy designation, in Phase III, or filed as of April 30 of each year.

R&D expense per asset remains slightly below the nearly $2.5 billion peak reported by Deloitte in 2019, before the onset of COVID-19. The pandemic led to lower R&D per-asset costs as developers brought their vaccines and drugs against the virus to market in just months. Total R&D spending by the top 20 biopharmas stayed relatively flat, dipping 1% from $141 billion to $139.2 billion—but still 63% above the $85.47 billion calculated in 2013.

Worse for drug developers, the return on investment reaped by biopharmas for new drugs and vaccines plunged last year by 82%, to 1.2%—the lowest percentage recorded in the 13 years Deloitte launched its annual reports on biopharma R&D—from 6.8% in 2021 and 10.1% in 2010, the first year studied by Deloitte.

Drug developers have long blamed rising R&D expenses for the escalating prices of new drugs. However, a study by British researchers published recently in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) takes issue with that premise, arguing that drug prices cannot be justified as the product of rising R&D spending.

Citing data collected from the world’s 15 largest biopharma giants from public filings between 1999 and 2018, the researchers found that the companies spent 57% more—$2.2 trillion—on selling, general and administrative (SG&A) expenses, compared with $1.4 trillion on R&D.

Both the Deloitte and British studies agree, however, that R&D expenses are growing and show no signs of slowing down soon.

Kevin Dondarski, Partner, Life Sciences Strategy with Deloitte Consulting, told GEN Edge the rise in R&D costs reflects increasing expenses aggravated by inflation, as well as diminishing returns as candidates advance from trials to market.

Peak sales forecast decline

Kevin Dondarski, Partner, Life Sciences Strategy with Deloitte Consulting

According to Deloitte, the amount of money a pipeline drug is expected to generate annually, or average forecast peak sales per pipeline asset, fell 22% last year, to $389 million from $500 million in 2021.

Deloitte said the sales forecast declines reflected several new costly or “high-value” drugs advancing from pipeline to market over the past year. The firm did not name any examples, one of which was the controversial Biogen/Eisai co-developed Alzheimer’s disease drug Aduhelm® (aducanumab), approved in 2021. Aduhelm generated only $4.8 million last year; its sales were hobbled after the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) limited coverage of that and other amyloid-beta targeting Alzheimer’s disease therapies receiving accelerated approval to those in FDA- of NIH-approved clinical trials.

Growing competition among drugs in relatively few therapeutic areas means lower sales per treatment and helps explain the drop, Dondarski said.

“There’s certainly more of a larger emphasis on therapeutic areas like oncology and orphan and rare diseases,” Dondarski said. He added that another trend in oncology but also more broadly, is “we continue to see a lot of assets where there’s multiple indications.”

Another factor, according to Dondarski, is the growing number of challenges faced by drug developers in expanding access to newer drugs by pursuing reimbursements—where they clash with insurers loathe to pay for costly treatments whose benefit to patients they deem marginal at best.

When COVID-19 drugs and vaccines granted emergency use approval (EUA) were excluded, the average peak sales forecasts fell 16% in 2022 to $284 million from $340 million a year earlier. While COVID-19 vaccines and drugs sped to market, those products took resources away from other candidates outside of those aimed at preventing or treating SARS-CoV-2.

“If we had to take away a positive from how R&D was impacted during COVID, it’s that it did force the adoption of some new capabilities and approaches that had been discussed in and explored throughout the industry for years—everything from remote trials to new ways of engaging patients and investigators, and so forth. That was a real positive,” Dondarski said.

“The big challenge for the industry now is to ensure that those types of things become, to use a cliche, the new normal and not really an exception,” he added. “Companies haven’t forgotten about those things. But the speed at which they’re scaling those across their holistic portfolios could probably be accelerated.”

Deloitte’s study—titled “Seize the digital momentum: Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation 2022“—is the latest in a series of annual reports focused on “Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation,” produced by the firm’s Deloitte Centre for Health Solutions.

11% Below all-time high

The $2.284 billion in average per-asset R&D cost reported by Deloitte is 11% below the all-time reported high for drug R&D costs.

A 2014 study by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development (CSDD) found the cost of developing and winning marketing approvals for a new drug had more than doubled in a decade, rocketing to a record-high $2.558 billion in 2013 ($3.323 billion in today’s dollars). That cost had skyrocketed 145% since 2003, when a Tufts study pegged the cost at $802 million ($1.321 billion in 2023 dollars)—a figure memorialized by Modern Healthcare editor emeritus Merrill Goozner in his 2005 book The $800 Million Pill (University of California Press).

In a follow-up 2015 study, drug developers told Tufts CSDD they would cut development costs by improving R&D management and operations. By then, pharma giants had begun reducing R&D spending; a GEN report calculated the combined R&D spending by the top 20 biopharmas as growing just 4% year-over-year, from $88.643 billion in 2013 to $92.264 billion in 2014.

“It’s no longer reasonable for large pharma companies to try to maintain the capabilities to bring compounds from the laboratory bench all the way to the marketplace. It’s too expensive. It’s too difficult to justify the upfront cost, and it’s just not a formula for success,” Kenneth I Kaitin, PhD, who retired in December 2020 as director of Tufts CSDD, told GEN in 2015.

From blockbusters to “Nichebusters”

In the British report, Aris Angelis, PhD, assistant professor in health economics with the department of health services research and policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), and colleagues shared one cause of rising drug prices—an industry shift away from blockbuster drugs targeting chronic diseases and sold in high volumes globally, to “nichebuster” drugs targeting rare diseases or narrow indications for which higher prices can be charged.

Aris Angelis, PhD, assistant professor in health economics with the department of health services research and policy at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)

In their study, “High drug prices are not justified by industry’s spending on research and development,” the researchers cited a June 2022 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association or JAMA, which showed the net price of newly launched prescription drugs rocketing from a median price of about $1,400 a year in 2008 to more than $150,000 a year in 2021.

However, in January, Reuters found an even higher median annual price of $193,900 for 17 novel drugs the FDA has approved since July 2022, paced by the $3.5 million list price of CSL’s Hemgenix®, the first and only FDA-approved gene therapy for hemophilia B and the most expensive drug ever sold (to date).

But Reuters acknowledged the median had fallen from $257,000 in the first half of 2022, thanks to five drugs marketed with five-figure list prices, the lowest being Spectrum Pharmaceuticals’ Rolvedon, an infection-fighting drug in adults with non-myeloid malignancies, whose price the news agency pegged at $27,000 based on wholesaler information.

Drug pricing also drew public attention earlier this year when Vertex Pharmaceuticals slashed its annual copay assistance for its cystic fibrosis treatments—which in the case of Orkambi® (lumacaftor/ivacaftor) was lowered 80%, from approximately $100,000 a year to $20,000. Orkambi is list priced at $286,000. Vertex is at odds with health insurers and pharmacy benefits managers, which are limiting the amount of copay assistance patients can apply through “accumulator” tools. Vertex has attacked the accumulators as predatory, while a national insurer group America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP) has denounced copay programs as “just one more Big Pharma scheme to price gouge patients.”

As bad as the pricing of new drugs, the researchers concluded, most new drugs entering the market have provided little or no added clinical value—a conclusion they based on analyses of drug evaluation reports by health technology assessment bodies in France and Germany in the 2010s.

Pursuing policy changes

To address these issues, according to Angelis and colleagues, governments need to press biopharmas into redeploying existing resources to generate more new and innovative treatments.

“There should be no need to pass research and development costs on to patients and
healthcare systems through ever higher and increasingly unaffordable prices,” the researchers asserted, before adding: “This is unlikely to happen, however, without government intervention or regulation along the lifecycle of new medicines.”

At least one industry group also sees government intervention as an answer to rising drug prices, but in a different way. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) last year restated its long-standing call for policymakers to instead lower patient costs by curbing the pricing power of insurers and pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs).

Through their industry group Pharmaceutical Care Management Association (PCMA), the PBMs in turn have long blamed drug developers for rising prices of therapies. Earlier this year, PCMA endorsed the Affordable Prescriptions for Patients Act of 2023 (S. 150), introduced January 30 by U.S. Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX). The measure would ban biopharmas from blocking generic and biosimilar versions of prescription drugs through patent law, by limiting the number of patents a manufacturer can contest to prevent “patent thickets,” and ending the right of drug developers from shifting or “hopping” patents from older to newer versions of products.

Angelis and colleagues also shared findings of a study last year by the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Reform which found that 14 of the largest biopharmas spent 11% more on stock buybacks and dividends ($577 billion) than R&D ($521 billion) from 2016-2020.

The stock buybacks were not counted within SG&A, which includes rent and utilities, marketing and advertising, sales and accounting, management and administrative salaries.  Between 1999-2018, SG&A expenses for the top 15 biopharmas as a share of revenue dropped from 35% to 27%, while R&D spending rose from 16% to 21%.

“Given the amount spent on non-research and development activities and that most new drugs add little or no therapeutic value, in theory the biopharmaceutical industry could generate more medically valuable innovation with its existing resources,” Angelis and colleagues concluded. “We need to foster the development of therapeutically superior drugs that can enhance patient outcomes. This may require a shift of more resources from selling, general, and administrative activities to R&D activities and companies to prioritize disease areas with clinical unmet needs.”

“Governments, policy makers, drug regulators, health technology assessment bodies, and payers need to re-think the incentives for valuable biopharmaceutical innovation, creating policy and regulatory environments that will meet public health objectives,” Angelis and colleagues added. “The world needs a truly value based health-industrial ecosystem focused on incentivizing and rewarding improvements in health outcomes and population health throughout the lifecycle of new medicines.”

The post The Unbearable Cost of Drug Development: Deloitte Report Shows 15% Jump in R&D to $2.3 Billion appeared first on GEN - Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News.

Read More

Continue Reading

International

Red Candle In The Wind

Red Candle In The Wind

By Benjamin PIcton of Rabobank

February non-farm payrolls superficially exceeded market expectations on Friday by…

Published

on

Red Candle In The Wind

By Benjamin PIcton of Rabobank

February non-farm payrolls superficially exceeded market expectations on Friday by printing at 275,000 against a consensus call of 200,000. We say superficially, because the downward revisions to prior months totalled 167,000 for December and January, taking the total change in employed persons well below the implied forecast, and helping the unemployment rate to pop two-ticks to 3.9%. The U6 underemployment rate also rose from 7.2% to 7.3%, while average hourly earnings growth fell to 0.2% m-o-m and average weekly hours worked languished at 34.3, equalling pre-pandemic lows.

Undeterred by the devil in the detail, the algos sprang into action once exchanges opened. Market darling NVIDIA hit a new intraday high of $974 before (presumably) the humans took over and sold the stock down more than 10% to close at $875.28. If our suspicions are correct that it was the AIs buying before the humans started selling (no doubt triggering trailing stops on the way down), the irony is not lost on us.

The 1-day chart for NVIDIA now makes for interesting viewing, because the red candle posted on Friday presents quite a strong bearish engulfing signal. Volume traded on the day was almost double the 15-day simple moving average, and similar price action is observable on the 1-day charts for both Intel and AMD. Regular readers will be aware that we have expressed incredulity in the past about the durability the AI thematic melt-up, so it will be interesting to see whether Friday’s sell off is just a profit-taking blip, or a genuine trend reversal.

AI equities aside, this week ought to be important for markets because the BTFP program expires today. That means that the Fed will no longer be loaning cash to the banking system in exchange for collateral pledged at-par. The KBW Regional Banking index has so far taken this in its stride and is trading 30% above the lows established during the mini banking crisis of this time last year, but the Fed’s liquidity facility was effectively an exercise in can-kicking that makes regional banks a sector of the market worth paying attention to in the weeks ahead. Even here in Sydney, regulators are warning of external risks posed to the banking sector from scheduled refinancing of commercial real estate loans following sharp falls in valuations.

Markets are sending signals in other sectors, too. Gold closed at a new record-high of $2178/oz on Friday after trading above $2200/oz briefly. Gold has been going ballistic since the Friday before last, posting gains even on days where 2-year Treasury yields have risen. Gold bugs are buying as real yields fall from the October highs and inflation breakevens creep higher. This is particularly interesting as gold ETFs have been recording net outflows; suggesting that price gains aren’t being driven by a retail pile-in. Are gold buyers now betting on a stagflationary outcome where the Fed cuts without inflation being anchored at the 2% target? The price action around the US CPI release tomorrow ought to be illuminating.

Leaving the day-to-day movements to one side, we are also seeing further signs of structural change at the macro level. The UK budget last week included a provision for the creation of a British ISA. That is, an Individual Savings Account that provides tax breaks to savers who invest their money in the stock of British companies. This follows moves last year to encourage pension funds to head up the risk curve by allocating 5% of their capital to unlisted investments.

As a Hail Mary option for a government cruising toward an electoral drubbing it’s a curious choice, but it’s worth highlighting as cash-strapped governments increasingly see private savings pools as a funding solution for their spending priorities.

Of course, the UK is not alone in making creeping moves towards financial repression. In contrast to announcements today of increased trade liberalisation, Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers has in the recent past flagged his interest in tapping private pension savings to fund state spending priorities, including defence, public housing and renewable energy projects. Both the UK and Australia appear intent on finding ways to open up the lungs of their economies, but government wants more say in directing private capital flows for state goals.

So, how far is the blurring of the lines between free markets and state planning likely to go? Given the immense and varied budgetary (and security) pressures that governments are facing, could we see a re-up of WWII-era Victory bonds, where private investors are encouraged to do their patriotic duty by directly financing government at negative real rates?

That would really light a fire under the gold market.

Tyler Durden Mon, 03/11/2024 - 19:00

Read More

Continue Reading

Government

Trump “Clearly Hasn’t Learned From His COVID-Era Mistakes”, RFK Jr. Says

Trump "Clearly Hasn’t Learned From His COVID-Era Mistakes", RFK Jr. Says

Authored by Jeff Louderback via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President…

Published

on

Trump "Clearly Hasn't Learned From His COVID-Era Mistakes", RFK Jr. Says

Authored by Jeff Louderback via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

President Joe Biden claimed that COVID vaccines are now helping cancer patients during his State of the Union address on March 7, but it was a response on Truth Social from former President Donald Trump that drew the ire of independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. holds a voter rally in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Feb. 10, 2024. (Mitch Ranger for The Epoch Times)

During the address, President Biden said: “The pandemic no longer controls our lives. The vaccines that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat cancer, turning setback into comeback. That’s what America does.”

President Trump wrote: “The Pandemic no longer controls our lives. The VACCINES that saved us from COVID are now being used to help beat cancer—turning setback into comeback. YOU’RE WELCOME JOE. NINE-MONTH APPROVAL TIME VS. 12 YEARS THAT IT WOULD HAVE TAKEN YOU.”

An outspoken critic of President Trump’s COVID response, and the Operation Warp Speed program that escalated the availability of COVID vaccines, Mr. Kennedy said on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “Donald Trump clearly hasn’t learned from his COVID-era mistakes.”

“He fails to recognize how ineffective his warp speed vaccine is as the ninth shot is being recommended to seniors. Even more troubling is the documented harm being caused by the shot to so many innocent children and adults who are suffering myocarditis, pericarditis, and brain inflammation,” Mr. Kennedy remarked.

“This has been confirmed by a CDC-funded study of 99 million people. Instead of bragging about its speedy approval, we should be honestly and transparently debating the abundant evidence that this vaccine may have caused more harm than good.

“I look forward to debating both Trump and Biden on Sept. 16 in San Marcos, Texas.”

Mr. Kennedy announced in April 2023 that he would challenge President Biden for the 2024 Democratic Party presidential nomination before declaring his run as an independent last October, claiming that the Democrat National Committee was “rigging the primary.”

Since the early stages of his campaign, Mr. Kennedy has generated more support than pundits expected from conservatives, moderates, and independents resulting in speculation that he could take votes away from President Trump.

Many Republicans continue to seek a reckoning over the government-imposed pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates.

President Trump’s defense of Operation Warp Speed, the program he rolled out in May 2020 to spur the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines amid the pandemic, remains a sticking point for some of his supporters.

Vice President Mike Pence (L) and President Donald Trump deliver an update on Operation Warp Speed in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on Nov. 13, 2020. (Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)

Operation Warp Speed featured a partnership between the government, the military, and the private sector, with the government paying for millions of vaccine doses to be produced.

President Trump released a statement in March 2021 saying: “I hope everyone remembers when they’re getting the COVID-19 Vaccine, that if I wasn’t President, you wouldn’t be getting that beautiful ‘shot’ for 5 years, at best, and probably wouldn’t be getting it at all. I hope everyone remembers!”

President Trump said about the COVID-19 vaccine in an interview on Fox News in March 2021: “It works incredibly well. Ninety-five percent, maybe even more than that. I would recommend it, and I would recommend it to a lot of people that don’t want to get it and a lot of those people voted for me, frankly.

“But again, we have our freedoms and we have to live by that and I agree with that also. But it’s a great vaccine, it’s a safe vaccine, and it’s something that works.”

On many occasions, President Trump has said that he is not in favor of vaccine mandates.

An environmental attorney, Mr. Kennedy founded Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit that aims to end childhood health epidemics by promoting vaccine safeguards, among other initiatives.

Last year, Mr. Kennedy told podcaster Joe Rogan that ivermectin was suppressed by the FDA so that the COVID-19 vaccines could be granted emergency use authorization.

He has criticized Big Pharma, vaccine safety, and government mandates for years.

Since launching his presidential campaign, Mr. Kennedy has made his stances on the COVID-19 vaccines, and vaccines in general, a frequent talking point.

“I would argue that the science is very clear right now that they [vaccines] caused a lot more problems than they averted,” Mr. Kennedy said on Piers Morgan Uncensored last April.

“And if you look at the countries that did not vaccinate, they had the lowest death rates, they had the lowest COVID and infection rates.”

Additional data show a “direct correlation” between excess deaths and high vaccination rates in developed countries, he said.

President Trump and Mr. Kennedy have similar views on topics like protecting the U.S.-Mexico border and ending the Russia-Ukraine war.

COVID-19 is the topic where Mr. Kennedy and President Trump seem to differ the most.

Former President Donald Trump intended to “drain the swamp” when he took office in 2017, but he was “intimidated by bureaucrats” at federal agencies and did not accomplish that objective, Mr. Kennedy said on Feb. 5.

Speaking at a voter rally in Tucson, where he collected signatures to get on the Arizona ballot, the independent presidential candidate said President Trump was “earnest” when he vowed to “drain the swamp,” but it was “business as usual” during his term.

John Bolton, who President Trump appointed as a national security adviser, is “the template for a swamp creature,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Scott Gottlieb, who President Trump named to run the FDA, “was Pfizer’s business partner” and eventually returned to Pfizer, Mr. Kennedy said.

Mr. Kennedy said that President Trump had more lobbyists running federal agencies than any president in U.S. history.

“You can’t reform them when you’ve got the swamp creatures running them, and I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do something different,” Mr. Kennedy said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, President Trump “did not ask the questions that he should have,” he believes.

President Trump “knew that lockdowns were wrong” and then “agreed to lockdowns,” Mr. Kennedy said.

He also “knew that hydroxychloroquine worked, he said it,” Mr. Kennedy explained, adding that he was eventually “rolled over” by Dr. Anthony Fauci and his advisers.

President Donald Trump greets the crowd before he leaves at the Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit in Washington on Dec. 8, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

MaryJo Perry, a longtime advocate for vaccine choice and a Trump supporter, thinks votes will be at a premium come Election Day, particularly because the independent and third-party field is becoming more competitive.

Ms. Perry, president of Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights, believes advocates for medical freedom could determine who is ultimately president.

She believes that Mr. Kennedy is “pulling votes from Trump” because of the former president’s stance on the vaccines.

“People care about medical freedom. It’s an important issue here in Mississippi, and across the country,” Ms. Perry told The Epoch Times.

“Trump should admit he was wrong about Operation Warp Speed and that COVID vaccines have been dangerous. That would make a difference among people he has offended.”

President Trump won’t lose enough votes to Mr. Kennedy about Operation Warp Speed and COVID vaccines to have a significant impact on the election, Ohio Republican strategist Wes Farno told The Epoch Times.

President Trump won in Ohio by eight percentage points in both 2016 and 2020. The Ohio Republican Party endorsed President Trump for the nomination in 2024.

“The positives of a Trump presidency far outweigh the negatives,” Mr. Farno said. “People are more concerned about their wallet and the economy.

“They are asking themselves if they were better off during President Trump’s term compared to since President Biden took office. The answer to that question is obvious because many Americans are struggling to afford groceries, gas, mortgages, and rent payments.

“America needs President Trump.”

Multiple national polls back Mr. Farno’s view.

As of March 6, the RealClearPolitics average of polls indicates that President Trump has 41.8 percent support in a five-way race that includes President Biden (38.4 percent), Mr. Kennedy (12.7 percent), independent Cornel West (2.6 percent), and Green Party nominee Jill Stein (1.7 percent).

A Pew Research Center study conducted among 10,133 U.S. adults from Feb. 7 to Feb. 11 showed that Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents (42 percent) are more likely than Republicans and GOP-leaning independents (15 percent) to say they have received an updated COVID vaccine.

The poll also reported that just 28 percent of adults say they have received the updated COVID inoculation.

The peer-reviewed multinational study of more than 99 million vaccinated people that Mr. Kennedy referenced in his X post on March 7 was published in the Vaccine journal on Feb. 12.

It aimed to evaluate the risk of 13 adverse events of special interest (AESI) following COVID-19 vaccination. The AESIs spanned three categories—neurological, hematologic (blood), and cardiovascular.

The study reviewed data collected from more than 99 million vaccinated people from eight nations—Argentina, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, New Zealand, and Scotland—looking at risks up to 42 days after getting the shots.

Three vaccines—Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA vaccines as well as AstraZeneca’s viral vector jab—were examined in the study.

Researchers found higher-than-expected cases that they deemed met the threshold to be potential safety signals for multiple AESIs, including for Guillain-Barre syndrome (GBS), cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), myocarditis, and pericarditis.

A safety signal refers to information that could suggest a potential risk or harm that may be associated with a medical product.

The study identified higher incidences of neurological, cardiovascular, and blood disorder complications than what the researchers expected.

President Trump’s role in Operation Warp Speed, and his continued praise of the COVID vaccine, remains a concern for some voters, including those who still support him.

Krista Cobb is a 40-year-old mother in western Ohio. She voted for President Trump in 2020 and said she would cast her vote for him this November, but she was stunned when she saw his response to President Biden about the COVID-19 vaccine during the State of the Union address.

I love President Trump and support his policies, but at this point, he has to know they [advisers and health officials] lied about the shot,” Ms. Cobb told The Epoch Times.

“If he continues to promote it, especially after all of the hearings they’ve had about it in Congress, the side effects, and cover-ups on Capitol Hill, at what point does he become the same as the people who have lied?” Ms. Cobb added.

“I think he should distance himself from talk about Operation Warp Speed and even admit that he was wrong—that the vaccines have not had the impact he was told they would have. If he did that, people would respect him even more.”

Tyler Durden Mon, 03/11/2024 - 17:00

Read More

Continue Reading

International

There will soon be one million seats on this popular Amtrak route

“More people are taking the train than ever before,” says Amtrak’s Executive Vice President.

Published

on

While the size of the United States makes it hard for it to compete with the inter-city train access available in places like Japan and many European countries, Amtrak trains are a very popular transportation option in certain pockets of the country — so much so that the country’s national railway company is expanding its Northeast Corridor by more than one million seats.

Related: This is what it's like to take a 19-hour train from New York to Chicago

Running from Boston all the way south to Washington, D.C., the route is one of the most popular as it passes through the most densely populated part of the country and serves as a commuter train for those who need to go between East Coast cities such as New York and Philadelphia for business.

Veronika Bondarenko captured this photo of New York’s Moynihan Train Hall. 

Veronika Bondarenko

Amtrak launches new routes, promises travelers ‘additional travel options’

Earlier this month, Amtrak announced that it was adding four additional Northeastern routes to its schedule — two more routes between New York’s Penn Station and Union Station in Washington, D.C. on the weekend, a new early-morning weekday route between New York and Philadelphia’s William H. Gray III 30th Street Station and a weekend route between Philadelphia and Boston’s South Station.

More Travel:

According to Amtrak, these additions will increase Northeast Corridor’s service by 20% on the weekdays and 10% on the weekends for a total of one million additional seats when counted by how many will ride the corridor over the year.

“More people are taking the train than ever before and we’re proud to offer our customers additional travel options when they ride with us on the Northeast Regional,” Amtrak Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Eliot Hamlisch said in a statement on the new routes. “The Northeast Regional gets you where you want to go comfortably, conveniently and sustainably as you breeze past traffic on I-95 for a more enjoyable travel experience.”

Here are some of the other Amtrak changes you can expect to see

Amtrak also said that, in the 2023 financial year, the Northeast Corridor had nearly 9.2 million riders — 8% more than it had pre-pandemic and a 29% increase from 2022. The higher demand, particularly during both off-peak hours and the time when many business travelers use to get to work, is pushing Amtrak to invest into this corridor in particular.

To reach more customers, Amtrak has also made several changes to both its routes and pricing system. In the fall of 2023, it introduced a type of new “Night Owl Fare” — if traveling during very late or very early hours, one can go between cities like New York and Philadelphia or Philadelphia and Washington. D.C. for $5 to $15.

As travel on the same routes during peak hours can reach as much as $300, this was a deliberate move to reach those who have the flexibility of time and might have otherwise preferred more affordable methods of transportation such as the bus. After seeing strong uptake, Amtrak added this type of fare to more Boston routes.

The largest distances, such as the ones between Boston and New York or New York and Washington, are available at the lowest rate for $20.

Read More

Continue Reading

Trending