Lessons from Sovaldi: Fueling Innovation While Ensuring Access

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Watrous ◽  
Daniel S. Levine

The case of Gilead Science’s hepatitis C therapy Sovaldi is a notable precursor to the larger debate over drug pricing, providing some important lessons, at a time when a new generation of potentially curative therapies are coming to market. In recent years, the pharmaceutical industry has pointed the finger at misaligned incentives, problems with payer benefit designs, a distorted rebate model, and hospital mark-ups as the cause of pricing and access issues. In order for progress to be made, the industry must acknowledge that it is the one entity across the supply chain that is responsible for establishing the initial price of a new medicine. Pointing to others without shouldering responsibility is misleading at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. Those that manufacture and commercialize medicines must play a leadership role in developing meaningful solutions to long-standing pricing issues. Pharmaceutical companies must demonstrate and articulate the value medicines deliver to all stakeholders. Taking a value-based approach, being cognizant of affordability issues, and delivering innovative medicines that address significant unmet medical needs is an important first step. Failing to do so, will leave the industry with a tarnished reputation and the likelihood of others implementing blunt instruments that will address these long-standing issues while threatening the life blood of the industry, innovation. 

1988 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McGhee

I have meditated regularly, following simple Buddhist procedures, for more than ten years, and that seems just about long enough for me to start to offer some preliminary account of it, despite the limitations of my progress and experience, and the difficulty of describing the more intimate and less explored reaches of the mind. I think I have learned enough to say that through prolonged spiritual practice one arrives at the springs of action and at root attitudes, and is in a position to be possessed of them in a purer, stronger form. It may seem difficult to see how the practice of philosophy can be reconciled with the practice of meditation, but I shall describe how I have tried to do so, and say how I think the one bears on the other. In fact all I can do in the present paper is to attempt a limited discussion of moral psychology, and its relation to the foundations of ethics, a discussion, I must concede now, in which I waver uncertainly in my expression of the key issues. But I think that I cannot delay indefinitely, and if I can sketch out the terrain even roughly, better work on it can come later. My references to mindfulness and to meditation will be elementary and not systematic, though adequate, I hope, to what I want to say about ethics. What I am writing in praise of is mindfulness, or awareness, which I take to be a virtue that is developed through the practice of meditation or some comparable contemplative activity. I am also concerned for the future direction of philosophy. It seems to me that our attaining to this virtue will transform its practice, so that it moves closer to traditional expectations, somewhat disappointed in recent years, though supposedly less so now. If I am not deluded, there is an interior route towards the great questions of metaphysics, and we shall be known for not having taken it. It is a task for a new generation of philosophers, and I for one still scan the horizon for their arrival.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-78
Author(s):  
Adnan Al Farisi ◽  
Yopi Handoyo ◽  
Taufiqur Rokhman

The One of alternative energy that is environmentally friendly is by untilize water energy and turn it into a Microhydro power plant. Microhydro power plant usually made from utilize the waterfall with the head fell. While utilization for streams with a head small drop is not optimal yet. This is a reference to doing research on harnessing the flow of a river that has a value of head low between 0.7 m – 1.4 m with turning it into a Vortex flow (vortex). The purpose of this research is to know  the effect variation number of blade on power and efficiency in the vortex turbine. This research uses experimental methods to find current, voltage, torque and rpm using a reading instrument. The materials research vortex turbine used 6 blade, 8 blade and 10 blade with flat plate. The result showed the highest efficiency is 29,93 % with produce turbine power is 19,58 W, generated on turbine with variation 10 blade with load 3,315 kg and the capacity of water 10,14 l/s. Followed with an efficiency 24,17% and produce turbine power is 15,81 W, generated on turbine with the variation 8 blade with load 3,315 kg and the capacity of water is 10,14 l/s. The the lowest turbine efficiency 22,32% with produce tuebine power 14,60 W, generated on turbine with the variation 6 blade with load 3,315 kg, the capacity of water is 10,14 l/s.


Author(s):  
Ramiro Remigio Gaibor Fernández ◽  
Abraham Adalberto Bayas Zamora ◽  
Galo Israel Muñoz Sánchez ◽  
Cristhian Adrián Rivas Santacruz

The objective of the present investigation was to evaluate the physical characteristics of the vermicompost and the quality of the purine of the red Californian (Eisenia foetida) using different substrates of feed for these worms. For this purpose, nine treatments were studied: 75% African palm rachis + 25% cattle manure, 50% African palm rachis + 50% cattle manure, 25% African palm rachis + 75% livestock manure, 50% manure of cattle, 50% of manure of cattle, 25% of manure of cattle, 50% of manure of cattle, 50% of manure of cattle, 50% of rach of coconut + 50% of manure of Livestock, 25% coccus rachis + 75% livestock manure. The substrate made up of 50% of rachis of coconut and 50% of livestock manure can be used in nurseries or nurseries for being the one that registered a value of pH 7.3 plus the closest to the neutral compared to the others, besides this (75% of oil palm rachis and 25% of cattle manure) showed a higher content of humic and fulvic acids (0.87 and 0.45 p / p, respectively), compounds that are important for agriculture by stimulating plant growth, in addition to this reflection 0.06% sulfur content, 4.0 ppm boron, 7.0 ppm copper, 47.5 ppm iron, 6.0 ppm manganese, with a presence of microorganisms of the species Trichoderma, Penicillium, Cladosporium sp. in amounts of 1.91x105 UFC / ml, however in this substrate was obtained between 13.3 and 43.5% less liquid slurry in Comparison with other treatments.


Imbizo ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Naomi Epongse Nkealah ◽  
Olutoba Gboyega Oluwasuji

Ideas of nationalisms as masculine projects dominate literary texts by African male writers. The texts mirror the ways in which gender differentiation sanctions nationalist discourses and in turn how nationalist discourses reinforce gender hierarchies. This article draws on theoretical insights from the work of Anne McClintock and Elleke Boehmer to analyse two plays: Zintgraff and the Battle of Mankon by Bole Butake and Gilbert Doho and Hard Choice by Sunnie Ododo. The article argues that women are represented in these two plays as having an ambiguous relationship to nationalism. On the one hand, women are seen actively changing the face of politics in their societies, but on the other hand, the means by which they do so reduces them to stereotypes of their gender.


Author(s):  
Christopher Hanlon

Emerson’s Memory Loss is about an archive of texts documenting Emerson’s intellectual state during the final phase of his life, as he underwent dementia. It is also about the way these texts provoke a rereading of the more familiar canon of Emerson’s thinking. Emerson’s memory loss, Hanlon argues, contributed to the shaping of a line of thought in America that emphasizes the social over the solipsistic, the affective over the distant, the many over the one. Emerson regarded his output during the time when his patterns of cognition transformed profoundly as a regathering of focus on the nature of memory and of thinking itself. His late texts theorize Emerson’s experience of senescence even as they disrupt his prior valorizations of the independent mind teeming with self-sufficient conviction. But still, these late writings have succumbed to a process of critical forgetting—either ignored by scholars or denied inclusion in Emerson’s oeuvre. Attending to a manuscript archive that reveals the extent to which Emerson collaborated with others—especially his daughter, Ellen Tucker Emerson—to articulate what he considered his most important work even as his ability to do so independently waned, Hanlon measures the resonance of these late texts across the stretch of Emerson’s thinking, including his writing about Margaret Fuller and his meditations on streams of thought that verge unto those of his godson, William James. Such ventures bring us toward a self defined less by its anxiety of overinfluence than by its communality, its very connectedness with myriad others.


Author(s):  
Hugh H. Benson
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

This chapter presents a reading of Plato’s Euthyphro, Apology, and Crito. These dialogues, in which Plato depicts the weeks leading up to Socrates’s last day, are replete with various philosophical explorations. Among those explorations is the question of how to live our lives. On the one hand, Socrates is clear and straightforward. We should live the examined life—making logoi and examining ourselves and others in order to determine whether we are as wise as we think we are, and we should live the virtuous life. This is how Socrates lives his life. On the other hand, the examined life undercuts, or at least should undercut, the confidence with which he seeks to live the virtuous life. It may help bring some stability to the general principles by which he lives his life, but it can do so only defeasibly and without certainty.


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