Gilead Sciences -- you've heard of them, they're the ones making a killing, so to speak, by charging over $70,000 for their Hep C drug -- has also tried to corner the market on a potential coronavirus treatment, by exploiting a loophole in the law that allows big pharma corporations to enjoy more monopoly rights on drugs that treat "rare" diseases. You're thinking coronavirus ain't rare, since it's all we're talking about, but the law defines "rare" as afflicting fewer than 200,000 people at the time the corporation applies for special treatment, and thus coronavirus is still "rare" at this writing, though maybe not in a few hours. Gilead faced some PR backlash for its naked attempt to monopolize that drug, and has thus decided not to exploit that loophole -- but they still haven't committed to making the drug affordable, which, given their history with their Hep C drug, they might not. Unless and until we bring the Big Stick of Bad PR! Public Citizen helps you tell Gilead Sciences to ensure that everyone can get its coronavirus drug, not just the well-off.
Meanwhile, it ain't just Fox News that's misinforming us during this pandemic crisis -- it's the usually more-estimable Associated Press! The AP's standard "What You Need to Know About the Virus Outbreak" passage it usually inserts into its articles might lull you into a false sense of security, what with "most people" getting "mild to moderate symptoms" "that clear up in two to three weeks," and saying "the vast majority of people recover" is, well, TBD, frankly. And, perhaps more to the point, will be of exactly zero comfort to you if you're one of the ones who die horribly. The Centers for Disease Control puts this matter somewhat differently: "Covid-19 can result in severe disease, including hospitalization, admission to an intensive care unit and death, especially among older adults. Everyone can take actions, such as social distancing, to help slow the spread of Covid-19 and protect older adults from severe illness." So for the AP, "what you need to know" somehow excluded "what you need to do"! FAIR helps you tell AP to get their act together in re informing good Americans about the pandemic.
Finally, our Administration's EPA has just announced its proposal to restrict the science that it can use to make decisions on how to protect our clean air and clean water. The EPA started this process back in 2018, but received some 600,000 comments (including yours, perhaps!) opposing their attempt to a) let it use corporate-backed science to make decisions and b) only use "publicly-available" studies to make decisions, when they know damn well that the reason most good scientific studies aren't "publicly-available" is that they contain good Americans' private health into and medical records. So, confronted with so many Americans telling them they were full of soup, what did they do? They decided to delay their proposal until they thought no one was listening -- you know, like, in the middle of a pandemic. But we are listening! Our Glorious Elites (including Mitch McConnell!) pretend you can only ever do or think or say one thing at a time, we know that's utter bunkum. Hence the Union of Concerned Scientists helps you tell our EPA to use real science in deciding how to stop pollution.
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