Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. Yeah, but We’re Innovative… and Sustainable

Bartleby’s latest column in The Economist looks askance at the “wooly” words of business, arguing that “overused words…are anodyne to the point of being useless.” The most grievous offenders: innovation, collaboration, sustainability, and purpose:

These words are ubiquitous in part because they are so hard to argue against. Who really wants to be the person making the case for silos? Which executive secretly thirsts to be chief stagnation officer? Is it even possible to have purposelessness as a goal? Just as Karl Popper, a philosopher, made falsifiability a test of whether a theory could be described as scientific, antonymy is a good way to work out whether an idea has any value. Unless its opposite could possibly have something to recommend it, a word is too woolly to be truly helpful.

Pharma take note. HLG reviewed the “About” pages of the top-ten global pharma companies, and we found that all 10 said they’re “innovative” and nine in 10 claimed to be “sustainable.” Impactful!

2. Shareholder Capitalism Forever

Vivek Ramaswamy pours gasoline on the debate of shareholder vs.stakeholder capitalism. Ramaswamy, founder of Roivant Sciences, has launched Strive, an asset management company that calls bosh on “mixing business with politics.” Despite what Larry Fink of BlackRock says about a broader understanding of capitalism, Strive prefers the old way:

We want iconic American brands like Disney, Coca-Cola and Exxon, and U.S. tech giants like Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and Google to deliver high-quality products that improve our lives, not controversial political ideologies that divide us. The Big 3 asset managers [BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street] have fueled this polarizing new trend in corporate America, and that’s why we’re going to compete with them head-on to refocus American companies on the shared pursuit of excellence over politics.

If Strive gains traction, heads of healthcare companies may need to respond. Are you with Vivek or Larry?

3. Fortnite for Doctors

It’s not just teens. The concept and technology that has made Fortnite a global sensation is coming for medicine. Fast Companymakes a persuasive case for why this is a good thing:

Imagine: Just like Fortnite allows a hundred players to play competitively in a shared environment, this technology can enable up to hundreds of physicians to competitively (and collaboratively) diagnose and treat virtual patients at in-person and online medical conferences, across specialties like dermatology, rheumatology, and immunology.

4. China’s COVID Billionaires

Images of iron-fist COVID lockdowns across China stand in dramatic relief to the party-going cruise ships sailing western waters. But not all Chinese are losing out. The “zero-covid policy” is minting Chinese billionaires:

Prospects for the zero-covid industrial complex indeed look bright. Covid testing is moving from makeshift tents on street corners into a network of semi-permanent kiosks where residents will be tested regularly for the foreseeable future; Shanghai alone will build 9,000 of them. In big cities tens of millions of people may have their throats or nasal passages swabbed every 48 hours. An analyst at Soochow Securities, a local broker, says that testing at this pace will cost China about 1.7trn yuan ($254bn) this year, or around 1.5% of GDP.This seems unfair to people navigating disease. The burden instead should fall on pharma and advocacy to provide better support, curation, and guidance.

5. No Fear

Turns out that scaring people into getting vaccinated for COVID may not be the best strategy. A better way forward, according to a new study in the Journal of Experimental Political Science, is to create policies that lead to desired outcomes:

To successfully address large-scale public health threats such as the novel coronavirus outbreak, policymakers need to limit feelings of fear that threaten social order and political stability…fear is affected strongly by the final policy outcome, mildly by the severity of the initial outbreak, and minimally by policy response type and rapidity…Remarkably, despite accumulating evidence of intense partisan conflict over pandemic-related attitudes and behaviors, we show that effective government policy reduces fear among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike.