This holiday season, the best gift is an end to 2020. But if you’re scrambling to find gifts among tree shortages, delayed shipping, and disrupted supply chains, we’re pleased to share with you our Pharma Holiday Gift-Buying Guide. Thank you for another year of collaboration, and happy holidays from your friends at High Lantern Group.

1. To: Your Favorite Pharmaceutical Executive
What: A Chance to Start Over

It’s a trite exercise to bellyache about pharma’s bad press. Last year, according to Gallup’s annual polling, pharma had the worst reputation of all industries, behind lawyers, airlines, the oil industry, and the federal government. But what now, given the breathtaking COVID vaccine timeline? The European Pharmaceutical Review reports on new research that suggests pharma might be wise to focus its charm offensive on the young:

The data suggest that as people get older, the less favourably they perceive pharma companies. This implies that there is a paradox in the industry; the more reliant people become on healthcare and medicine in general, the poorer their opinion of the industries that many suggest they should be increasingly thankful for…Also, the drop in reputation with age may be due to those who require more medications having rising expectations, and with these anticipations there is a greater risk of disappointment.

2. To: Your Second-Favorite Pharmaceutical Executive
What: Another Chance to Start Over

Every year, BCG publishes its “most innovative companies” ranking. To no surprise, the list is dominated by the firms that bring you such life-saving wonders as wireless earbuds and two-day shipping. In 2020, pharma barely cracked the top 50, surpassed by “innovators” like Walmart and Adidas. Read and weep:

#13. Walmart
#22. Target
#28. Adidas
#32. Volkswagen
#38. Bayer
#47. Novartis

3.  To: The Anti-Vaxxer Next Door
What: Not logic, reason, data, or science – but cold, hard cash

A new research paper asks the most 2020 question ever: now that we have the vaccine, how do we encourage the motley horde of skeptics, blowhards, and conspiracy theorists to get pricked? One idea is a monetary incentive. But even payment has serious limitations:

People are likely to infer from payment that the vaccine could be risky. In our research with Kevin Volpp and Alex London, we found that people naturally assume that payments signal risk. In a series of experiments, we described clinical trials that offered different payment amounts for participating in a study that involved an unfamiliar testing procedure. We found that people believed that a study’s riskiness was greater when the payment was higher, even though the descriptions of the study procedures were otherwise identical. Paying people to be vaccinated might, similarly, lead them to infer that it is riskier than they would otherwise assume.

4. To: The Pro-Vaxxers Down the Road
What: An Indoor Party!

Who needs to celebrate birthdays or anniversaries when we can celebrate one of the greatest scientific and medical achievements in the history of humankind! Less than a year ago, the term “social distancing” wasn’t in our vocabularies, much less our policies. Now, we have multiple vaccines. Dr. Larry Brilliant, Professor of Epidemiology, puts this timeline into perspective:

The previous world speed record in getting a vaccine was the mumps vaccine—four years. We had the smallpox vaccine for 200 plus years before we had vaccine programs on a global scale. We had the polio vaccine for 70 years before we had vaccine campaigns as we do now. We're going to have a vaccine campaign in two months. We're going to go from the appearance of this novel virus to a global vaccine campaign in 14 months.

And what about the speed of monoclonal antibodies? We're barely into a world that can understand what a monoclonal antibody is and we will have two, at least, and many more following, treatments that appear to work, if given in the right way at the right time.

5. To: Your Uncle Who Still Talks About Woodstock
What: A Prescription for Magic Mushrooms

With all eyes on COVID in 2020, a quiet revolution gained momentum: using psilocybin to treat everything from alcoholism to depression to eating disorders. Here’s a summary of researchreported in JAMA on psilocybin and MDD:

"The magnitude of the effect we saw was about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants on the market," said Alan Davis, an adjunct assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in a news statement. "Because most other depression treatments take weeks or months to work and may have undesirable effects, this could be a game changer if these findings hold up in future 'gold-standard' placebo-controlled clinical trials."