A S I A Economic Monitor - Important Report - July 2009
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7
After a Lag, U.S. Consumers Begin to Feel the Pinch of Tariffs
Maybe it can be called transitory inflation. Worked for biden. -
255
Crime Drunk Brit Attacks Bar Worker, Hurt by American Customer
God in heaven please no! We have more than enough part time legal bores around here! -
44
USA RFK Jr Scraps $500 Million mRNA Vaccine Program
Lots of governments around the world fund early stage research. There is a logic to that. Investors can be quite risk averse. If it hadn't been for WW2 and Operation Overlord, Penicillin would have remained in Fleming's lab, and we'd probably be still using sulfonamides, and dicing with death everytime we did a bit of gardening. The "win" for government for an effective treatment or prevention of disease is less people getting sick, people live longer, Which means people work more, tax receipts go up, and we are a happier society. When your country goes to war, who pays for the development of that equipment to defend your country? The government. US,UK defence funds programme research and development. Its a lie put out by the crypto-Stalinists to suggest that the Pharmaceutical companies are entirely funded by government. Its a lie put out, and lapped up by the gullible, intended to undermine our society and faith in our institutions, both public and private. Its designed to divide peoples who ordinarily have lots in common. Free market capitalism, as you put it, has rendered new antibiotic research virtually non-existant. Its a matter of time before whole classes of surgery become non-survivable; we survive the surgery, but don't live to recover, because there is nothing left in the antibiotic armoury. Now some people think that antibiotics are a terrible thing. There are some people who also believe blood transfusion is an evil act. They are both fruitcakes. There is a synergistic relationship between industry and government in the west. It doesn't matter what it is. For the car industry, there is a great deal where the government helps the car makers keep out the opposition ("safety standards", "emission standards"0. Occasionally the government helps out further with tax rebates. They do this because of the thinking that its really good that lots of people work in car factories, because people not working in a car factory is a bad thing. Free market capitalism would mean every car factory in Europe and the US would shut. Without a government-industry partnership, your military would be fighting with sticks. Or probably Chinese AKMs and knocks off RPG7s. Before WW2, there wasn't a Pharmaceutical industry. Medicines were made by the chemical companies, and disease was basically treated using varying amounts of poison and crossed fingers. Pfizer became the Pfizer what we know of because of WW2. Pfizer and Merck were both chemical companies before WW1. Pfizer made its money making citric acid. Citric acid is geritol. Its used in soldering flux, facial creams, textile dying, heroin processing, stainless steel manufacturer, household cleaner, photograph developing agent etc. Pfizer used to make it from calcium citrate. Italy pretty much had the monopoly on calcium citrate. The WW1 happened. Pfizer scientists figured out fungal fermentation to make citric acid instead; very important. Its the first step in a company manufacturing an industrial product at scale using biotechnology (beer making is not the same, its not nearly as controlled and its not making an industrial product). Typically, these companies know how to make a lot of stuff repetitively, at scale, not small batches. Come WW2, the Australian-British scientists travel to the US, seeking someone who knew how to make a lot of the penicillin stuff, repetitively , at scale. As early as 1940, they knew that one day, someone's husband, brother, son, will be striding across a French beach into a hail of bullets, and they would need a lot of this penicillin stuff to help those wounded young men. Then, as now, the biggest killer in combat is not bombs or bullets, but infection (sepsis had a terrible impact in Afghanistan). By 1940, they had managed to treat a few people with penicillin, but it was an expensive treatment, and huge batch to batch variation. Pfizer had the soluton. Pencillin is produced by a fungus closely related to the one they used for citric acid manufacture. they knew how to make a lot of that. Less that 4 years later, the allies had massive stockpiles available, in time for the liberation of Europe, and the extermination of the Nazi menace. We know how WW2 would have worked out if left to free market capitalism. You only have to look at two companies to know. Ford and Coca Cola. Ford, not Opel, was the biggest supplier of trucks to the German Army. At the same time, they were the second biggest manufacturer of Jeeps for the Allies. Coca Cola; after sanctions blocked delivery of the secret syrup, Coca Cola made sure its German arm kept winning those lucrative government contracts, so they invented Fanta, an Apple soda, with deliveries to the German Army continuing right into 1945. In other words, industry would have done a deal, because it would have been good for business, if war had been left to them. For some Isolationists and Crypto-Stalinists, that would have been a good thing. For the rest of Humanity with a soul, thats not. FDR was well known as a survivor of polio. That fact bothered him, and he tried to hide his disability. That experience lead him to initiate the Million Dime March. Polio was terrible; the US had been suffering a 40 year epidemic (it was really a pandemic, but most acutely felt in the US). 40 years of crippled and dead kids, schools regularly closing, lockdowns at public facilties. Uniquely, it was a disease of the middle classes (working classes, stuck with unsanitary conditions, developed innate immunity). Roosevelt was one of those middle class victims. The Million Dime March was effectively crowdfunding a vaccine for Polio. When it was started, viruses were barely understood, and the Polio virus had only just been discovered. FDR reasoned, correctly, that if lead to industry, there would never be a vaccine; there is no money to be made in vaccination of kids. That funding effort helped fund Jonas Salk, who by about 1950, had developed the first polio vaccine, reducing the former soldier turned president, Eisenhower to tears. It was the American pharmaceutical industry they then turned to to make 600,000 doses of untested vaccine. The rest is history. There are various origin stories for RNA vaccines. Numpties who don't understand vaccines don't understand how difficult it is to develop whats called a sterilising vaccine. Most vaccines are non-sterilising, which means they don't control the spread of infection, but they help the body enough to stop development of a disease. Usually, it takes about 10 generations of a vaccine, or about 40-50 years work, to get something like a sterilising vaccine, if you follw the conventional approach, which is a variant of inactivated or weakened biological agent. Weakened biological agents carry risk because of nature (reversion, which we see in some battches of attenuated polio vaccine, but the risk of that is still outweighed by the risk of polio if you don't vaccinate). Inactivated agent; someone can screw up with the inactivation step. Happened in the mid-2000, DoD sent out thousands of batches of "killed" anthrax worldwide for testing, only it was live (someone changed a pasteurisation protocol). I had my letter warning of exposure. But essentially, these vaccines mean we don't have that much control in what is being presented to the body to stimulate an immune reaction. Mutations occur spontaneously or through environmental pressure. Mostly the former, because the process to make new cells can make mistakes. We mutate daily. Most of the time, its fine, we are still us. But occasionally the mutation is really bad, and we develop cancer. The same with viruses. But viruses can also mutate to an extant that they quit being a threat to us. With Sars-Cov-2, its all in that Spike protein that used by the virus to infect our cells. Without that, its not virulant. That Spike protein does a complete number on the ACE2 receptor. ACE2 is part of the Angiotensin system, which, among other things, affects your blood pressure. The receptors are everywhere. I feel we don't fully understand their function. In an ideal vaccine, you want the bit that used to mimic the virus, or the bacteria, to be the bit that the virus cannot mutate, because to mutate, its no longer the nasty virus. The old way is a Russian roulette, albeit cracking edge molecular biology means it might be a revolver with 2 loaded chambers not 1. Synthetic biology, the heart of the RNA vaccines, means we can be extremely precise. Hence the interest in the cure for cancer. Its that big. RNA vaccines have the potential to be as transformative to medicine as penicillin was. Penicillin wasn't just about treating cuts and wounds. It created the possiblity of open heart surgery, organ transplant, joint replacements. Without antibiotics, we wouldn't survive any of that. Many countries are involved, but I would say the key breakthrough research was carried out in the UK, because we are blessed with the Biotech triangle (London-Oxford-Cambridge). Thanks to a Conservative government 40 years ago, Pharma and academia are in lock step for the common good. We should thank people like Keith Joseph and indeed Maggie Thatcher for the events that lead the world to be even able to respond to COVID. Going on another tangent; very early in my career, I was a postdoctoral fellow in Alabama, conducting research in the Gulf of Mexico/America, on one of the well meaning University labs along the Gulf coast. It struck me even then, how uninvolved local industry was in that marine research. Shell gave a grant to the lab, but had zero input or interest in what we did. It was a PR exercise. At the same time, in the UK, the oil companies are very involved in that marine research with the universities. Years later you had that BP rig failure in the Gulf, leading to untold environmental damage (ruining the red snapper fishing) and leading to hookers getting government compo. Everyone looked to these labs to find out what was going on. Thanks to the lack on involvement by the oil companies, no one had a clue about the impact of their operations pre-disaster, so there was no baseline. That's all changed now, necessity being the mother of invention. But it shouldn't have been that way. The mRNA technology was largely put together by academics, who are well meaning and ambitious about wanting to improve the lives of all people. Yeah, there is the prize of curing cancer, but that always sees a long way off, and is risky research. The big short term goal was a vaccine for malaria. Like polio vaccines, no one is going to make money vaccinating millions of brown kids. The funding comes from government, through overseas aid, and through the philanphropists. The COVID vaccines ought to have been like antibiotics for D-Day; that killer application that you do, because its a good thing to do, and not because you are seeking to make money. And $30bn really is not that much these days. It should have kickstarted research, and it will, but it seems America is excusing itself. The money and scientists won't necessarily be going to Europe. EU medical regulations in recent years have been tightened up, more in line with the US, supposedly because it will mean safer medicines (in reality, it will add 7 years to develpment). In the past, manufacturers liked Europe, because you could get something on the market 7 years ahead of the US, because it was more liberal. Investors likeed European pharma. Now, they are liking Chinese and Korean pharma. As soon as this 'roided buffoon does the inevitable flounce (and he will), I expect the research to be quietely green flagged again. Just like AI, the US cannot afford to be outside this research. -
12
Thai - Cambodia Conflict Thailand Threatens Legal Action Against Cambodia Over Conflict
Isn´t that a matter of attacking or defending? Do you blame innocence on numbers? -
23
Crime Singapore Tourist Arrested for Flying Drone on Walking Street
Ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law.... and flying drones required paperwork tourists would not normally have prior to the recent Cambodian war edict! Do we have to tell the tourists how to use a bathroom too? -
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