ubiquitin,
“I’m sorry I still don’t get it. The Government is encouraging and paying for the vaccines (yes with tax payer money obviously) what are they gaining? Are they getting kickbacks from the pharmaceutical company. Is that the plan? So De Blasio is being paid by the pharmaceutical company to mandate their vaccine? “
Thanks for the benevolent condescension, and you’re welcome for the chuckles. Kickbacks imply secret, illegal backroom deals that I would have no real knowledge of so I would have to be speculating or making things up in order to piece together my supposed worldview. Unfortunately, there are a plethora of legal, fully out-in-the-open examples of the revolving door and gravy train between drug companies and government. Here are a few.
The largest drug companies contributed to the vast majority of the sitting congressional members’ campaigns in the last election, totaling over $11 million in contributions. In the last 20 years, drug companies spent hundreds of millions on state-level campaigns, hundreds of millions on Federal level campaigns, and billions on lobbying.
In 2015, Congress provided just $331.6 million of the $1.1 billion budget for the FDA prescription drug oversight, while the drug companies they’re supposed to regulate contributed $796,1 million. Fine, they’re just user fees, but every 5 years the FDA is legally required to negotiate the oversight and approval policies with the industry in order to keep collecting these user fees that are now the majority of the oversight budget. That’s quite the stick industry can bring to that table. Drug companies are really good at getting people addicted to things.
For individual government employees, the pharmaceutical companies they help regulate can provide cushy landing spots when they decide to leave government, such as former CDC director Julie Gerberding landing the role of president of Merck’s vaccine division.
Drug companies frequently run their own clinical trials for new drugs. That includes the major Covid 19 vaccines. With billions of dollars and their job security on the line (Pfizer has already made billions on their vaccine), how motivated are the researchers employed by the drug companies to actually find problems? It’s really easy to find no signal in a complex and messy dataset.
Why on earth would they even need kickbacks?