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. Vax On, Vax Off

As Trump needles pharma for a pre-election COVID miracle, The Walrus enumerates post-election COVID hurdles:

An effective vaccine is not the pandemic finish line—it’s more like a pandemic off-ramp. Epidemiological, logistical, and ethical roads still lie ahead: to determine how long and how well that vaccine’s protection can last, to manufacture enough of it to jab into billions of arms, to allocate the first batches of supply between countries and within their populations, and to persuade vaccine skeptics to roll up a sleeve.

Might there be guidance for overcoming these hurdles in old notes from Art History 101?

To counter the opposition [to the smallpox vaccine in India,] the British started an advertising campaign featuring Indian royalty. [One painting] shows three Indian queens of Mysore with the queen on the right prominently portraying her arm where she has been inoculated with cowpox while the older queen on the left shows the discoloration around the mouth associated with smallpox.

2. Meanwhile in China…

…thousands of people have already received a COVID-19 vaccine under an emergency use authorization, even as Phase III trials continue:

For people in the United States and Europe, the idea of so many Chinese being vaccinated prior to full approval is shocking. “But in China it’s viewed very positively,” said Yiwu He, the chief innovation officer at the University of Hong Kong. After a series of vaccine-related scandals in the twenty-tens, China tightened regulations, and the standards for a Phase III trial are similar to those in the United States.

3. “A Biologically Informed Legal System”

A science journalist shares how a traumatic brain injury (TBI) devastated his brother’s life – changing his personality, triggering violent behavior, and leading to a criminal conviction. But can – or should – the legal system account for TBI or other biological factors?

A “biologically informed” legal system was the one I had wanted for my brother. It had seemed to me that the law was, at best, slow to adapt to new scientific advances, and, at worst, hopelessly obtuse — and in its ignorance responsible for my brother’s fate. But is it a good idea to reduce all criminal behavior to misfiring neurons? It’s one thing to claim a brain abnormality — such as my brother’s TBI — contributed to criminal behavior. It’s another thing to say that if someone commits a crime, then it must have been the result of a brain abnormality — which is exactly what scientists are saying when they reimagine crime as a form of neurological disease.

To further complicate the question, consider the data on TBI and incarceration: “anywhere from 25 percent to 87 percent of incarcerated people report having suffered a TBI at some point in their lives, as compared to 8.5 percent of the general population.”

4. How to Treat Dad’s Politics

“How would you feel about a new therapy for your chronic pain, which—although far more effective than any available alternative—might also change your religious beliefs?” So begins Scientific American’s examination of psilocybin – the stuff in magic mushrooms – and how it might have medical, religious, and political effects: 

If psilocybin does change political values, the significance of this effect goes deeper than which politicians or media outlets will seek to support or impede psilocybin-assisted therapy. A well-established consensus on the secular democratic state is that it should remain neutral and agnostic on a number of matters, allowing a diversity of values, political attitudes and religious beliefs among its citizens. Where such states have universal health care systems, is it permissible to not only endorse, but fund through taxpayer contributions, a treatment which shifts values in one direction?

This is no stoner musing. The FDA has granted breakthrough therapy status for a psilocybin-based treatment, and there are 30+ active trials investigating psilocybin on ClinicalTrials.gov.

5. Doctors’ Orders

The American College of Physicians (ACP), with its 154,000 members, is one of the largest and most influential professional societies in healthcare. In Annals of Internal Medicine, the ACP offers a position paper stating four policy recommendations to promote competition in the development and marketing of prescription drugs. They are not to be ignored:

1. ACP supports legislative reforms to the Orphan Drug Act (ODA) that realign incentives offered through the law to support increased innovation in rare disease drug development.
 

2. ACP supports reducing the period of data and market exclusivity for biologic drugs from 12 years to 7 years. ACP also supports removing additional barriers to biosimilar market entry, such as modifications to the current patent system that would reduce excessive patenting on brand-name and biologic drugs.
 

3. ACP opposes anticompetitive pay-for-delay arrangements that curtail access to lower-cost alternative drugs. ACP believes applicable federal agencies should be empowered through guidance, congressional action, or additional resource support to address anticompetitive behaviors and gaming.
 

4. ACP supports elimination of tax deductions for direct-to-consumer product claim advertisements.