charlie hebdoA conflict of interest is a conflict of interest. The magnitude is irrelevant. Those naysayers don't know ethics and are simply Trump apologists.
Well, I guess you'd better write your Congressman and demand new impeachment articles be drawn.
And go ahead. Lump me into the group of people who don't know ethics. That's a first for me.
York1 John
A conflict of interest is a conflict of interest. The magnitude is irrelevant. Those naysayers don't know ethics and are simply Trump apologists.
Unintended consequences department. Has anyone noticed how clear the nights are when there are no clouds around during the past few weeks ?
BaltACD Excusing corruption?
Excusing corruption?
If Sanofi was making a good fraction of its of money selling the medication in the US and Trump had a lot more money directly invested in Sanofi, then corruption would be a concern. With the circumstances in this case, the corruption charge is a joke. You would be much better off looking at campaign donations.
I think a better explanation for Trump's actions is that if it works, then he will have something to campaign on.
charlie hebdoCoal's demise was a result of market forces. Natural gas for cogeneration becomes a much cheaper replacement for coal in a fairly short time.
Erik_Mag charlie hebdo It's still a conflict in interest which would be indictable in most states if he were a governor, a State University President or other official. In most corporations, he would be terminated if he were CEO and we're pushing some company's (in which he had shares) product. But ethics don't apply to him. Most intelligent corporate conflict of interest policies do take proportionality into account. The Sanofi allegation is also laughable as Sanofi does not sell the medication in question in the US and the patent expired decades ago. The usual drug testing regime doesn't make sense for COVID-19 as we will be well past the peak by the time the testing is finished - think war time protocols. The drug is available now in large quantities, and side effects are well. known. Since survival rate of people going on ventilators is about 30 - 35% at best, anything that reduces the number of people needing ventilator support will be helpful.
charlie hebdo It's still a conflict in interest which would be indictable in most states if he were a governor, a State University President or other official. In most corporations, he would be terminated if he were CEO and we're pushing some company's (in which he had shares) product. But ethics don't apply to him.
It's still a conflict in interest which would be indictable in most states if he were a governor, a State University President or other official. In most corporations, he would be terminated if he were CEO and we're pushing some company's (in which he had shares) product. But ethics don't apply to him.
Most intelligent corporate conflict of interest policies do take proportionality into account. The Sanofi allegation is also laughable as Sanofi does not sell the medication in question in the US and the patent expired decades ago.
The usual drug testing regime doesn't make sense for COVID-19 as we will be well past the peak by the time the testing is finished - think war time protocols. The drug is available now in large quantities, and side effects are well. known. Since survival rate of people going on ventilators is about 30 - 35% at best, anything that reduces the number of people needing ventilator support will be helpful.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
After this virus issue goes away, the U.S. is left with questions.
1. New York has suffered several major terrorist attacks. Since the first terror attack in 1993, the idea of a major biological attack has been floated, and terrorists would most likely pick NYC or Washington, DC, for the target.
Why, then, do we find ourselves so flat-footed? NYC's lack of hospital rooms, supplies, etc., seem to indicate our preparedness has a long ways to go.
2. Critical medicines and supplies are dependent on other countries, especially China. The U.S. emergency planning seems to have overlooked the fact that a possible enemy may be in control of the exact medical supplies and equipment we would need in an attack.
Hopefully, one of the outcomes of this whole situation will be to make us prepare ourselves better.
charlie hebdoThe size is totally irrelevant as to ethics.
The size is totally relevant to plausibility.
Since I suspect I was critically exposed to SARS-CoV-2 this morning I will not be able to ask her except remotely what her sources of 'video of concern' were. She may have kept a playlist.
I would be delighted to find that Biden's problems are rust, or even poor attitude, rather than something nominally or factually geriatrically related. Even if the only thing he did for passenger railroading was to push Gateway into finances-contract stage it would be enough. No one else... for all-too-explicable New York reasons... is likely to do that before well into the 2020s.
Interestingly enough, there are ways to make many of Bernie's state's priorities actually workable. Just not the way he calls for them to be funded (or vaguely dodges the issue if someone mentions the numbers). And no, it doesn't involve the moral equivalent of either John Law or Horace Greeley Schacht's MeFo bonds to produce. So we shouldn't dismiss him for not knowing the right methodologies any more than we should blame Reagan for a slow start in addressing stagflation.
The size is totally irrelevant as to ethics.
charlie hebdoThe size of the profit is irrelevant when it comes to an ethical violation like a conflict of interest. It's unethical whether $10.00 or $10 million to act as a carnival barker for a product made by a concern in which you have a financial interest (even if minor) from a position of influence such as POTUS. Period.
The size of the profit is relevant to our discussion. You're the one who stated the following:
charlie hebdoTurns out Trump is pushing hydroxychlroquine because he has stock in Sanofi, the company that manufactures it.
So in order to make his multi-billion dollar portfolio gain $10, he is willing to unethically push a company and product, knowing that CNN, PMSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, The NYT, and The Washington Post are waiting to pounce?
Someone is living in someone's head.
I stand corrected as to your views on Trump. Bernie Bros. tend to repeat this meme about Biden. Initially I did wonder too about his performance in the early "debates" but based on later appearances, his missteps seemed to have been rust (not really a major campaigner since 2008, and then only briefly) and his history of a speech impediment. What specifically concerned you or your daughter
Although I have been called a socialist on here, I felt Sanders was ill-equipped for the job due to his historic inability to work with others along with very fuzzy math about how to pay for some of his planned policies.
Your notion about Obama, coal and Soros seems like a major stretch. Coal's demise was a result of market forces. Natural gas for cogeneration becomes a much cheaper replacement for coal in a fairly short time.
I am about the last person here who is a Trump supporter, as I knew him reasonably closely in the '80s and have little attraction for most of his so-called policy approaches, 'crazy-like-a-fox though some of them doubtless are.
I didn't like Biden at all when he (and I) were much younger, but we certainly became reconciled over the railroad issues since then. Both my daughter and I have become concerned over what appear to be a great many strange things visible in what are surely high-enough-profile appearances that confusion or lack of adequate preparation wouldn't apply. If that tendency carries over into even one debate during the actual campaign things will not go well.
Since an almost self-evident purpose of the impeachment follies was to tar Biden by innuendo and implication into being impossible as a candidate, I think I am not the only one concerned about what produces some of the strange behavior. I do think it is almost poetic justice that the scheme - I use the word consciously - has failed to influence the primaries, where the actual voters expressed their preference...
Had it been up to me, it would have been Sanders, and I would have voted for him even though I disagree with many of his expressed policies and priorities. It is well past time we actually tried a form of socialism here instead of the whackjob California-style giveaway style that masquerades with all the drawbacks and few of the advantages. And if it fails, there's either 2022 or response to abuse of power to correct it in any event.
I happen to agree with you strongly about abuses of power and authority, and am glad you agree with me that Hillary should be promptly tried and jailed for hers. I am waiting to see exactly what the actual scope and details of this Sanofi business turn out to be, and if in fact it turns out to be a naked greed grab I'll be among the first to call it so. Personally I think Trump happily embraced hydroxychloroquine as something to save him from perceptions of earlier incompetence and diBlasio/Johnson style Pooh-pooling; if he had the Sanofi in a blind trust earlier, how much could he make before the trust were unwound; if he bought it after hydroxychloroquine became the new penicillin it's far more disturbing for him to be able to do it in the first place than for it to involve a peripheral player supplying a commodity generic drug.
While we are on this subject, of course, the issue of certain strategic demonization of the coal industry by Obama, resulting in the direct ability by Soros to acquire an enormous position in Peabody after the stock was artificially depressed to about $1, is a far more telling abuse of Presidential authority than investing in a supposedly-effective treatment. Now, it's possible that the whole hydroxychloroquine bubble is a fake thing, and "further research" will reveal it does little or nothing -- and we will be told Trump divested himself of the Sanofi at the peak of its little transient spike as a Supplier Of The Cure in the eyes of witless twenty something analysts. He won't win there, either.
OM: The true GOP/Trumpist colors of our self-proclaimed resident polymath reveal themselves. And now you are parroting the party line about Biden's allegedly failing cognitive state. Sorry, pal, you lack the background and training for making that diagnosis. But like many Drumpfeters, you are projecting what Trump does as an hourly tactic onto any and all who see him as the most corrupt (feel free to add dishonest and incompetent here) POTUS in our history.
The size of the profit is irrelevant when it comes to an ethical violation like a conflict of interest. It's unethical whether $10.00 or $10 million to act as a carnival barker for a product made by a concern in which you have a financial interest (even if minor) from a position of influence such as POTUS. Period.
York1So since Trump's investments in Sanofi total less than $1,500, and if demand for this material was to cause the stock to double in price, billionaire Trump's investments would gain $1,500. This is the next big scandal?
For the Democrats who ginned up the House impeachment spectacle: of course it is. And to judge by charlie hebdo's enthusiasm to bring it up as a smoking gun of rampant profiteering and conflict-of-interest, it is both well-engineered and will have gained substantial traction among the credulous.
I'm concerned: now that Biden appears to be the only one left standing as an actual candidate, and as he seems to be drifting more and more into something resembling, if not actual dementia, the effect of pronounced and increasingly-frequent TIAs, there will be a more and more frantic attempt to send Trump down the railroad track that Ford, Quayle, and the Carter family were made to travel. Probably using, as here, buzzwords and trigger concepts carefully chosen to inflame the maximum number of people. The problem comes in that people were already wise to much of this cookery by the end of the impeachment struggle, and it will become more and more recognizable as desperation as election time approaches. Lord help the Democrats if there's some kind of effective treatment for COVID-19 and associated ARDS by the end of October...
BaltACDThat wouldn't be self enhancing corruption would it? [/sarcasm]
So since Trump's investments in Sanofi total less than $1,500, and if demand for this material was to cause the stock to double in price, billionaire Trump's investments would gain $1,500. This is the next big scandal?
You mentioned that last year you tried to get the shingles vaccine, but they didn't have it.
My clinic had the same issue. As soon as they got more, it was used.
My doctor finally told me to go to Walgreen's and get on their waiting list. My wife and I waited about three months, but we finally got it. Then we were first in line for the second vaccine which is given two or three months later. I was determined to get it after watching my father suffer from a case. Hope the medicine is helping yours.
EuclidIt may be poor science, but if the drug saves lives, which is needed now, do we really have to wait for perfect science?
The issue here is not whether we 'wait' -- pretty obviously plans to administer it are going ahead. More of an issue is whether the drug actually saves lives -- either 'by itself' or in conjunction with very different agents from what the original research used, or assumed to be effective -- but again, with the use of it going forward without particular restraint we'll be finding out, with adequate statistics and likely much better clinical management, how well it turns out to work. (Keep in mind that there is probably a window in which this is important: early infection will show little effect, while I suspect little if any practical effect in developed ARDS would be seen -- adjust any reports you read accordingly for this possibility.)
It is not so much that the research is "difficult" as that the results will be prejudged and, very likely, no one's mind will be particularly changed whatever the 'facts' turn out to be.
What is not difficult to do is to refute the utterly ridiculous implication that Sanofi has some kind of production monopoly or intellectual-property protection on a long-out-of-patent chemical. Even the top hit in a 0.46s Google search demonstrates that many companies are ramping up production dramatically. Which to me is, admittedly prejudicially, that this is really little more than "impeachment hearing farce 2.01" being pursued by other desperate means, very likely by the successors-in-interest of the same party that has so effectively used this strategy in the past...
That wouldn't be self enhancing corruption would it? [/sarcasm]
Another coronavirus facility is expected to open in Acre's student hostel
Happy holidays, Dave
OvermodEUCLID: It was my impression, from many years ago when I last explicitly looked at the situation, that very wealthy men going into public life put their investment portfolio in a 'blind trust' for the duration of their service. Whether or not this practically meant the 'policy-maker' actually didn't have investments is, of course, not something usually discussed; whether or not there was a requirement for the blind trust to divest any 'known' assets whenever a subject for policymaking involved conflict-of-interest (either tacit or explicit) is yet another. Now, I do remember that there was some discussion of this when Trump was originally running for office, including some concerning just this concern over conflict of interest. I also recall some discussion that certain folks administering Trump's investments during his term of office were, shall we say, a little too 'close' to him by ties other than pecuniary/fiscal responsibility. It would not be 'all that difficult' to do a little research into precisely how the Sanofi ownership is held, and perhaps even whether Trump 'knew' what the bump to his portfolio would be. Whether he, or Kushner, or anyone else is actually scheming to benefit substantially from having a scarce-resource 'magic bullet' treatment for COVID-19 is another, and perhaps fundamentally unanswerable at present, question -- but prejudging it appears to me, at least, to be very poor science.
It may be poor science, but if the drug saves lives, which is needed now, do we really have to wait for perfect science?
As for Trump's alleged Sanofi investment, I cannot imagine the research needed to answer the question as not being "all that difficult." If the researched answer were not difficult, why would a person making the charge not include that answer to bolster their case?
charlie hebdoYou really don't understand how the Illinois State pension plans work, but it's typical convoluted nonsense. An individual has zero control over how one's employer contribution is invested. In his case it was as a member of the State Senate.
Yeah, that's right -- I'm too ignorant to know how a pension plan like the Illinois plan works.
OM: In regards to any medication, there is no substitute for properly-designed clinical efficacy studies.
York1 charlie hebdo Turns out Trump is pushing hydroxychlroquine because he has stock in Sanofi, the company that manufactures it. Yeah, sure Charlie. Keep pushing that. Reuters reports that the stake is lower than $1,500, and may be much lower. It is part of a large portfolio. Kind of like President Obama's money in the Illinois state pension plan. The pension plan owned stock in several gun and ammunition producers. Therefore, according to Charlie's reasoning, President Obama pushed certain policies that made the gun makers increase profits during his term (which they did) because his pension benefited.
charlie hebdo Turns out Trump is pushing hydroxychlroquine because he has stock in Sanofi, the company that manufactures it.
Yeah, sure Charlie. Keep pushing that.
Reuters reports that the stake is lower than $1,500, and may be much lower. It is part of a large portfolio.
Kind of like President Obama's money in the Illinois state pension plan. The pension plan owned stock in several gun and ammunition producers.
Therefore, according to Charlie's reasoning, President Obama pushed certain policies that made the gun makers increase profits during his term (which they did) because his pension benefited.
You really don't understand how the Illinois State pension plans work, but it's typical convoluted nonsense. An individual has zero control over how one's employer contribution is invested. In his case it was as a member of the State Senate.
In my opinion most 'studies' that do not include a mechanism of action for the purported effect are little better than anecdotal to begin with; when they are small-sample, suffer from fairly dramatic heteroscedasticity effects in that sample, and then conduct extensive assumption and data sanitizing, they become nearly impossible except as guides to establish methodology to attempt to reproduce the results. As I recall, the original papers on the effect of hydroxychloroquine (and anti-inflammatory) in reducing viral binding -- which considerably antedate the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 -- did not suffer from most of these issues, and the paper I cited earlier (which actually considered the role of hydroxychloroquine in its effect on COVID-19, which is in the binding of the virus to the ACE2 enzyme protein on cell membranes) is from a molecular-biology, not a "clinical", point of reference.
In any case, attempting to argue that Trump touts hydroxychloroquine -- a chemical he could barely pronounce a week ago, and perhaps still has trouble with -- because he or his son-in-law has some secret ownership interest in specific Big Pharma does not particularly 'work' as an intellectual argument. (It is much closer to the type of argument that led to the original 'hoax' remarks back at the beginning of the year, a facile excuse for 'policy by other means' to make Trump look worse than he already does, not that he seems to need much assistance in that department...)
I am highly grateful to charlie hebdo for putting me onto the idea of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine in the first place, as before he did I considered this essentially an antiplasmodial agent with no particular special effect on viral anything. It is beginning to appear that the effect of the 'drug' is as circumstantial as the effectiveness of 'red dye' in reducing detonation in gasoline motors was in the 1920s -- it has some effect, but not for the reasons posited in the first place. (And it is essentially a 'co-drug' -- it works to enhance the effect of other material, not provide a certain or even reasonably assured 'cure' by itself.
I am also nervous about its claimed effect on the complexed enzyme/spike protein complex, especially as I still see most published 'experts' utterly ignorant of whether ACE2 has some intracellular receptor-signaling mechanism in addition to its enzymatic surface function. The enhanced 'infectiousness' of novel SARS-CoV-2 only begins with the selective binding to the ACE2 'pocket'; there is a conformance over time that results in the actual viral penetration, and it is this (not the initial binding) that hydroxychloroquine appears to 'degrade'.
As a hypothetical: if ACE2 were to actually prove to have signalling capability when selectively bound or deformed, and hydroxychloroquine-produced acid enhancement degrades the ACE2 structure in ways that induce that signalling, a suitably-advanced state of latent infection might well produce overactivation, perhaps even chronic activation, of ... whatever pathways the signalling induces. Some of which, like a leukotriene cascade, may be self-amplifying once started, now in the absence of any corresponding evolved mediation mechanism (as, for example, in the RAAS system as we currently understand it).
Something else has begun to alarm me in the past couple of weeks. I have never been a big 'satellite radio' proponent, but we recently added a used car to the company fleet which was built with it, and when testing I discovered that 'medical' channel 121 has been made 'free' for the predictable extent of the COVID-19 crisis. Programming here is notable for the parade of really top-class 'names' brought in for commentary and discussion, and I encourage anyone who has access to a satellite tuner to listen in (as most of the 'expert witnessing' is miles and miles above anything you can get from most mass-market media).
But what I notice, increasingly, is that people who are top authorities in one field may be utterly ignorant even of basic theory in other fields. Virologists, for example, may demonstrate they know little if anything about immunology. In part this is an artifact of necessary specialization, I suppose ... and it has been notably observed in other fields, notoriously (and perhaps more than a little trollingly) in recent graduates of Dave Klepper's beloved MIT. The problem is that much of the 'hurry-up' research to "find the cure" is being done in a where-you-stand-is-where-you-sit kind of fashion, and there really isn't time for the usual give-and-take of organized science to decide how the whole complex model of infection and disease production 'ought' to be considered while people keep dying -- a great many of them needlessly in a time when effective and human-safe inhibitors of specific SARS-CoV-2 RNA assembly AND selective section are known to exist (and in the case of the former, at least, capable of industrial production by multiple megadoses).
EUCLID: It was my impression, from many years ago when I last explicitly looked at the situation, that very wealthy men going into public life put their investment portfolio in a 'blind trust' for the duration of their service. Whether or not this practically meant the 'policy-maker' actually didn't have investments is, of course, not something usually discussed; whether or not there was a requirement for the blind trust to divest any 'known' assets whenever a subject for policymaking involved conflict-of-interest (either tacit or explicit) is yet another.
Now, I do remember that there was some discussion of this when Trump was originally running for office, including some concerning just this concern over conflict of interest. I also recall some discussion that certain folks administering Trump's investments during his term of office were, shall we say, a little too 'close' to him by ties other than pecuniary/fiscal responsibility. It would not be 'all that difficult' to do a little research into precisely how the Sanofi ownership is held, and perhaps even whether Trump 'knew' what the bump to his portfolio would be. Whether he, or Kushner, or anyone else is actually scheming to benefit substantially from having a scarce-resource 'magic bullet' treatment for COVID-19 is another, and perhaps fundamentally unanswerable at present, question -- but prejudging it appears to me, at least, to be very poor science.
Turns out Trump is pushing hydroxychlroquine because he has stock in Sanofi, the company that manufactures it.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/trumps-personal-stake-in-the-malaria-drug-maker-sanofi-could-be-as-small-as-99-2020-04-07
I would conclude that he has a far greater stake in the chance that the drug will effectively reduce the threat of the virus, and thus reduce the damage to his economy.
The Gatestone Institute is notorious for spewing unsupported hate stories.
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/23/gatestone-institute-john-bolton-chairs-an-actual-fake-news-publisher-infamous-for-spreading-anti-muslim-hate/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/gatestone-institute/
And you are spreading them on here. You should remove them and stop attacking respected institutions like Georgetown University.
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