Congress Incentivizes Rare Disease Research. Big Pharma Exploits It.
Mother Jones; Unsplash Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.After three years on prednisone, a steroid not recommended for long-term use, Amy G. saw a new specialist. She had been diagnosed with EGPA, a particularly rare type of the autoimmune disorder vasculitis, which causes blood vessels…
Hospitals Are Full of Kids Sick With RSV—And Anti-Vaxxers Think It’s a Hoax
Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.Across the country, children’s hospitals are reporting record numbers of admissions—not just from Covid, but also from a host of other seasonal respiratory viruses. Particularly worrisome among these is respiratory syncytial virus, more commonly known as RSV. The illness,…
Remarkable Photos Show What Harm Reduction Actually Looks Like
Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.The numbers are now frighteningly familiar: Last year more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses, bringing the total death toll to more than 1 million since the invention of OxyContin in 1996. By 2030 another million people are…
An Explosive New Report Could Upend More than a Decade of Alzheimer’s Research. How Did This Happen?
Mother Jones illustration; Unsplash Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.More than 15 years ago, researchers at the University of Minnesota announced they had made a breakthrough: When they purified a protein from the brains of genetically modified mice and injected it into rats, it…
Big Pharma Pricing Is a Racket. These Startups Aim to Disrupt It.
Mark CubanDamairs Carter/MediaPunch /IPX/AP This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2015, Martin Shkreli became the smirking face of drug company greed when, as founder and then-chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, he bought rights to the anti-parasitic medication Daraprim and then jacked up the price from $17.60 to…
If You’re Wondering Who’s Paying for All That Ivermectin—You Are
Fight disinformation. Get a daily recap of the facts that matter. Sign up for the free Mother Jones newsletter.Doctors have known for more than a year now that the antiparasitic drug ivermectin isn’t effective against Covid. The FDA has explicitly warned against prescribing it to Covid patients, but many physicians still do—and public and private insurance companies…