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Bill Gates Says He Has to ‘Have a Sense of Humor’ About Vaccine Conspiracy Theories
Speaking on “The Life Scientific” on BBC Radio 4, the Microsoft cofounder addressed a viral conspiracy theory that he was behind a plan to implant trackable microchips in people during the pandemic.
“You got to have a sense of humor,” Gates said about the conspiracy theories. “When people say that I want to track everyone — why do I want to track everyone?”
He said someone once confronted him in the street, yelling and making accusations: “I’m like ‘wow, I really don’t want to know your location.'”
Gates said on the BBC program that many people were still paying a price for how the world handled the pandemic.
“In terms of deaths and mental health and learning loss and loved ones who died, we’re still paying a price for not having handled that well at all,” he said.
Gates is the world’s fifth-richest person worth $158 billion, per Bloomberg, despite donating some of his wealth to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation set up in 2000.
Big Pharma Stocks: Who’s Leading the Race and Who’s Slipping?
Over the last decade, the pharma sector has undergone significant restructuring. On the upside, big data, machine learning, and predictive analytics have streamlined drug pipelines, enabling greater technology fragmentation into new drug product cycles.
According to McKinsey & Company, the mRNA vaccine tech alone expanded from 11% to 21% of the development pipeline beyond C19.
At the same time, GLP-1 drugs reshaped obesity treatment along with gene therapies for rare diseases.
Merck can count on the rapid rise of common cancers. For 2024 alone, the American Cancer Society projected 2 million new cancer cases and 611k cancer deaths.
Collaborative Study Brings Effective Gonorrhea Vaccine Step Closer
A study involving Kenyan sex workers illuminates the immune response to gonorrhea, paving the way for more effective vaccines.
The findings come amid recent reports showing gonorrhea—a sexually transmitted disease—is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics and could become untreatable in the future.
People infected with gonorrhea may experience pain or burning though, if untreated, they may go on to develop more serious problems including infertility, systemic infection and increased risk of HIV/AIDS.
Attempts to develop a vaccine against gonorrhea have been largely unsuccessful.
However, in 2017, a study showed that vaccination against a related bacterium Neisseria meningitidis (Nm) led to a reduction in the incidence of gonorrhea.
“This study has wide implications about revisiting vaccine design for other bacterial pathogens using these new methods, including those where antimicrobial resistance is a problem.”
The Back-to-School Hunt for Adderall Is On
For a third year, back-to-school preparations will include a scramble to find popular drugs used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Despite signs from the Food and Drug Administration that manufacturers were catching up to outsized demand, the stimulants remain hard to track down with pharmacies out of stock and the Drug Enforcement Administration taking a harder line policing them.
Parents can’t simply call around to other pharmacies and transfer the script since the drugs are controlled substances. That requires a call to a doctor — and for prescribers to track down and reroute the prescriptions themselves.
There was a 20% increase in demand for ADHD medications in the U.S. between 2020 and 2021 alone, per data analytics company Xevant.
But manufacturers’ efforts to respond were stymied by DEA crackdowns, on plants and prescribers, driven by concerns about unleashing another addiction epidemic.
Congo Reports More Than 1,000 New Mpox Cases in a Week. African Authorities Ask for Vaccines
Congo reported more than 1,000 new mpox cases in the last week up to Tuesday as African health authorities asked for desperately needed vaccines to help fight its “growing” threat on the continent.
While mpox has been reported in 12 of Africa’s 54 countries during these outbreaks, the vast central African nation of Congo has recorded by far the most cases this year.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa criticized the global response to the 2022 outbreak, calling it unfair as treatments and vaccines were made available to rich Western nations while Africa was given little support.
Africa CDC’s Kaseya said that his organization had received a pledge of 215,000 mpox vaccines from the European Union and the vaccine maker, Bavarian Nordic, which were due to arrive in the next few days.
Kaseya also asked for “solidarity” from the international community in dealing with mpox and specifically urged against any COVID-like travel bans being placed on African countries that would isolate them as the disease is not as easily transmissible.
Lilly to Test Zepbound in Psoriasis to Follow up on Weight-Loss Success
Eli Lilly & Co. is using its runaway success in obesity as a bridge into another lucrative area of medicine: immunology.
This fall, the company will begin recruiting for trials to test its popular weight-loss shot Zepbound with psoriasis drug Taltz to see if the combination boosts effectiveness, Chief Scientific Officer Daniel Skovronsky said.
Drugs like Zepbound, known as GLP-1 receptor agonists, have been shown to reduce inflammation in patients with diabetes and obesity.
Lilly already sells several treatments for inflammatory conditions like arthritis and psoriasis, including Taltz, which will lose key patent protections in the next few years.
Drug combinations may be the next frontier in autoimmune diseases, where there’s still unmet need for more effective treatments.
With a value already approaching $900 billion, Lilly still holds high investor hopes and wants to maintain the momentum.
