Hepatitis with a C
by DrKSSMDPhD | June 24, 2014 10:12 pm
Second of Two Parts
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Source URL: https://www.stockgumshoe.com/2014/06/microblog-hepatitis-with-a-c-part-two/
I truly don’t want to fan any Hobby Lobby debate as at heart I am quite apolitical. But this is a biotech blog where we often discuss medicine, and I feel it is quite necessary to correct a gross misperception that many defenders of Hobby Lobby have: there seem to be readers here who believe that IUD’s work as abortefacients. This is completely untrue, unsupported by data, and is a quaint outdated notion. IUD’s prevent conception, same as other mainstream methods of contraception. The entire SCOTUS falderal is because Hobby Lobby is science-ignorant (as is often the province of the fervently religious). IUD’s do not cause abortions and do not work by preventing conceptus implantation. The entire premise of this case is nonsense, based on willful misconstrual of facts about how certain anti-pregnancy measures work. Which is why the decision is to be feared, The yardstick should not be arguments about freedom and religion but whether Hobby Lobby’s contentions are in any way rooted in data. They are not.
Religion freedom should not mean the right of one group to impose its views on another. Vouchsafing defending freedom they have made many of us less free. This decision was the promulgation of an absurdistly business-friendly chief justice who now routinely equates corporations as people when doing so behooves the corporation. Sotomayor is Catholic and voted against the majority. In fact, this was purely a vote along gender lines, which ought to tell you something. Why is it that conservative men think they know so much about and deign themselves to have aegis over women’s bodies?
I apologize for being so repetitious and my list of superlatives being so short, but:
WOW! Thank you for your post, Dr.
Doc,
I respect everybody’s opinion, but just as in this court case where there are 2 sides, there are many Dr.’s who would disagree with your assertion about these particular IUD’s. That is why we have a case. I don’t pretend to know anything medically that I haven’t learned from you, but I do know that in a free country, founded for the very purpose of religious freedom, an over-reaching government should not have inserted itself into every ones healthcare. If this were not the case, we would not have a case. Case closed. Until we get the case of the 48oz. Big-Gulps. Gotta Bounce!- getting glared at by wife!
I don’t pretend to me an expert on the Hobby Lobby case either, but I understand there were something like sixteen contraceptive methods which HL was perfectly okay with, but only four they objected to on religious grounds. I don’t know if they had an objection to IUDs, but understandably, they did object to paying for the so-called “morning after” pill. According to polls, the Hobby Hobby decision was supported by wide majority of Americans who believed this was a clear violation of HL’s Constitutional religious rights.
Politics Alert – Nothing in this post regarding investing in biotech….
Dan,
We can agree on this topic. Having run a business, I know there are business decisions you make based on your beliefs, not cold hard facts. The thing that I keep seeing is the media is overlooking the fact that they were willing to pay for 16 methods, but had a problem with 4 as they felt they were abortive. So it really boils down to the rights of a woman to receive the reproductive health care of her choice versus the rights of a closely held corporation to omit the four choices they felt infringed on their religious beliefs. One of the four happens to be the morning after pill and I feel confident that the owners of Hobby Lobby think this would mostly be used by those involved in sex out of wedlock which I will assume they believe is a sin, but their stated position is more that it can abort a fertilized cell. In my way of thinking, employers already restrict the behavior of employees while they are at work so this is only complicated because healthcare which the owners subsidize is provided 24/7. I doubt thought that the owner’s of HL’s motives are as altruistic as they’d have us believe (just my opinion).
Personally, I think the whole thing should be moot because the SCOTUS screwed up the decision that would have benched the ACA when they found it did not violate the Commerce Clause of the US constitution and only allowed it due to the loophole they constructed by considering the individual mandate a tax, which Congress went out of their way to define it not as a tax. Forcing someone to buy something whether it be an individual or a business, is a slippery slope and now, anything the government wants us to own, so long as they can construe it as a tax is fair game. This alarms me.
The point I was hoping to make in this post though, is that majority opinion no longer means anything in the US. I think the majority of Americans want access to quality healthcare at an affordable price and most likely they do not want people to receive no healthcare just because they cannot afford it (otherwise we would compromise our own health due to pandemics, epidemics, etc.). What we did not want is the monstrosity that Congress ended up enacting which mostly rewards insurance companies, big pharma, and giant healthcare providers, at the expense of the taxpayer and small providers. It pretty much insures the demise of private practice and I have seen the effects of consolidation already. One of the cornerstones of the legislation was that it would strengthen competition between providers and insurance companies. The reverse is happening before our eyes as huge consolidations of service providers are taking place and in many regions, there is only one provider of insurance available. I suppose the jury is still out but what I am seeing so far does not look good. In any event, our Federal government is not about what the American people want, its about what the large corporations who spend big bucks on lobbyists want. The game in DC is to get reelected and lobbyists fund that game and then ask for favors in the form of favorable legislation for their trouble. The game is fixed and free enterprise isn’t included.
Denis,
I think many would agree with you, but Alan/Travis et al. have created a separate forum for this healthcare discussion @;
http://www.stockgumshoe.com/2014/07/microblog-politics-rights-religion-sex-and-investing-other-unmentionable-subjects/
I will post my only subtle disagreement there.
To add to Joe’s post a reminder to add post number & thread so we know who is being answered. A forum for food ,drink, & frivolity as well as unmentionables? As to posts of well done , good show, many thanks,,,,,,I thought that is what the like /thumbs up button is for?
My Scottrade account finally updated to the BTEBY shares and they are trading. They show a $25 fee but the local rep promised me that he would remove it. Someone asked earlier about their commissions. They do not charge a foreign transaction fee for the BNIKF shares but you cannot buy BLT shares on line, perhaps you can via the phone. Standard commission otherwise is $7.00, is less than my Schwab account which is $8.95. I have only been using them for a couple of months so I can’t say much about them beyond this.
TKMR has had their EBOLA RNAi trial temporarily shut down because of participants’
bad reactions. The company did not precede the trial dosing with an immune suppressor which they had in the past. Some view this as not an RNAi problem because they think at a lesser dose than the current problem level would be effective without the supression because the efficacy would increase w/o the use of this element.
I must say my jaw dropped for fear of the RNAi world when I first read the headline.
08:49 AM EDT, 07/07/2014 (MT Newswires) — Analysts at BMO Capital markets have downgraded their rating on biopharmaceutical company Regado BioSciences(RGDO) to underperform from outperform, while setting their price target on the stock at $1 a share. BMO attributed the downgrade to RGDO’s announcement that it has paused the enrollment of its phase 3 REGULATE-PCI trial pending a Data and Safety Monitoring Board review of serious adverse events related to potential allergic reactions. “We are concerned that likelihood of trial termination is relatively high,” the firm said. Shares of RGDO are up 1.42% to $2.85 in today’s pre-market trading, and move within a 52-week range of $2.70 – $14.10.
Travis, wondering if you could also add a dislike next to the like to give a thumbs down. Maybe enough dislikes would give some a hint that the majority of us don'[t want to read their back and forth commentary that has nothing do with the investment thread, i.e, wine, religion, etc. Thans
RE: post 151 and others on DSCO. Promoted by Larry Smith. Below words lifted from the “MOX Reports”, a long but very interesting article on fake authors and articles.
“The odd thing here is that Smith gets paid only if the company ends up raising new money when the warrants are exercised. Again, this relationship has remained undisclosed on his website and on Seeking Alpha. It helps to explain his views on non-MDM clients such as Athersys (ATHX), Discovery Labs (DSCO) and Mela Sciences (MELA).
Smith most recently published strong findings on Discovery Labs on June 13th, 2014 stating: “I continue to recommend purchase of Discovery Laboratories.”
No free lunch from Smith on Stocks
SmithOnStocks.com is a “subscription” web site which Mr. Smith runs and where he puts up substantially more content than he does on Seeking Alpha. Mr. Smith charges $29.99 per month to subscribe to this site.
Despite the subscription charge, much of the detailed content is 100% free to readers.
Yet “free” is apparently a relative term.
By analyzing the articles on his site, we can see that the majority of content for MDM clients (such as Northwest) and for his warrant clients (such as Discovery Labs and Athersys) is disseminated forfree, maximizing the distribution.
The point of all of this is that Smith only initiated coverage on Northwest after he initiated a relationship with MDM. Since that time he has become a prolific writer on Northwest and suddenly on all of MDM’s other small cap biotech clients. The timing coincides perfectly with the creation of new (fake) authors who focus almost exclusively on MDM clients and who can be tied to Redfish.
Smith has taken deliberate steps to conceal his regulatory background, his IR activities and his relationship with MDM. Yet Smith has also been the loudest and most vocal defender of Northwest Bio against critics who see the company as being promotional and misleading investors. During this time he has been a very vocal and prolific writer on Northwest.”
The full article is here: http://moxreports.com/author/moxadmin/ mostly on Northwest Bio
Les, thank you for your very useful info on Smith. I had “followed” his articles on SA for a while, and my impression was that his “picks” weren’t doing real well. However, I had no idea about his conflicts. Some articles on SA are instantly recognizable as pumper/basher articles, but Smith just didn’t make my radar go off. Of course, there’s a lot of good articles and comments, too, on SA, so the question is how to spot the less obvious pumper/basher articles for what they are.
Dr.KSS: Are you still long HEB?
I've been in and out of $CANF for a quick profit but it looks like its ready to move. They have the QUADfecta of Pharma solutions:
2019
noticed 2 different ads for different Hep c cures
any new news ?
some one else in the space besides GILD ?
GILD @ 66.36 today