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Eric Feigl-Ding

4 Feb, 9 tweets, 3 min read

BREAKING—Opioid drug pushing firm McKinsey has agreed to pay $573 million to settle investigations for its role that “turbocharged” opioid sales. McKinsey worked to drive sales of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin amid opioid epidemic that led to 450,000 deaths.🧵
nytimes.com/2021/02/03/bus…

2) The firm has reached the agreement with attorneys general in 47 states, the District of Columbia and five territories.

The firm also worked with a number of opioid makers to band together to “defend against strict treatment” by the Food and Drug Administration.

3) McKinsey’s extensive work with Purdue included advising it to focus on selling lucrative high-dose pills, the documents show, even after the drugmaker pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal charges that it had misled doctors and regulators about OxyContin’s risks.

4) McKinsey will not admit wrongdoing in the settlement, to be filed in state courts on Thursday, but it will agree to court-ordered restrictions on its work with some types of addictive narcotics, according to those familiar with the agreement.

5) in a move similar to the tobacco industry settlements decades ago, it will put tens of thousands of pages of documents related to its opioid-related work onto a publicly available database.

6) States will use the civil penalties — $478 million of which must be paid within 60 days — for opioid treatment, prevention and recovery programs, the people said.

7) It will be the first money states will see after Purdue Pharma in October agreed to plead guilty to federal criminal charges over its marketing of OxyContin and to pay $8.3 billion. Purdue declared bankruptcy, meaning the states party will have to line up with other creditors.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1341453618835316737

8) Now Im waiting for state AGs to also join DOJ in holding Walmart accountable for opioid epidemic too...

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1341453618835316737

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1349405447988588545

9) Now we must hold rest of pharma and drug middlemen accountable. Especially on insulin price gouging. Companies can sell things for a small margin, but not exorbitant margins. Insulin is not a small margin product.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1349405447988588545

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More from @DrEricDing

Eric Feigl-Ding

@DrEricDing

5 Feb

What’s worse than simple mutation? RECOMBINATION! Recombination is the large scale “copy and pasting” mixing of whole sections of genome 🧬 swapping from one virus to another.

And the bad news is—many experts think it’s likely happening with #SARSCoV2.🧵
nytimes.com/2021/02/05/hea…

2) But it is not just these small genetic changes that are raising concerns. The novel coronavirus has a propensity to mix large chunks of its genome when it makes copies of itself.

3) “Unlike small mutations, which are like typos in the sequence, a phenomenon called recombination resembles a major copy-and-paste error in which the second half of a sentence is completely overwritten with a slightly different version.

Read 11 tweets

Eric Feigl-Ding

@DrEricDing

5 Feb

Israel 🇮🇱 is seeing a sharp rise in the number of children and teens getting #COVID19.

>50,000 children & teens have been diagnosed with coronavirus since the start of the month, many more than Israel saw in any month during the first or second waves. 🧵
jpost.com/health-science…

2) “We got a letter from the Israeli Association of Pediatrics that says they are very worried about the rate of disease in younger students,” Health Minister Yuli Edelstein told The Jerusalem Post. “This is something we did not witness in previous waves of corona.”

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1357599530296958982

2) Although the exact strain in these Israel 🇮🇱 pediatric cases are unclear, there is another similar pediatric outbreak in a village in Italy 🇮🇹. 10% of the town is infected and mostly children.

https://twitter.com/drericding/status/1357599530296958982

Read 6 tweets

Eric Feigl-Ding

@DrEricDing

5 Feb

Holy cow: 10% of the village of Corzano 🇮🇹 has the #B117 variant—10% of all residents! 60% of cases are kids from kindergarten and primary school, other 40% are their parents, says the mayor. Schools in the village now closed. ansa.it/amp/lombardia/…

2) Israel is seeing a sharp rise in the number of children and teens getting infected with coronavirus, according to 🇮🇱 Health Ministry.

“This is something we did not witness in previous waves of coronavirus,” Health Minister Yuli Edelstein said.#COVID19
m.jpost.com/health-science…

3) forgot to mention, the mayor of the village in Italy 🇮🇹 is also #COVID19 positive.

Read 7 tweets

Eric Feigl-Ding

@DrEricDing

5 Feb

⚠️TWO DIFFERENT #COVID19 PANDEMICS—Many think with cases dropping that pandemic is nearly over. But truth is, there are now 2 different #SARSCoV2 pandemics diverging—old strain is waning, while the more contagious #B117 strain is dominating. We will be soon slammed very hard. 🧵

2) Here is what is really going to happen... most countries are having a gentle case decline with R(e) currently around 0.9. But this is deceiving. The #B117 is still relatively rare so far, so the R is being influenced mostly by the old common variant. But not for long...

3) Here is what is going to happen... currently R is ~0.9 in many places, but with the more infectious #B117, the R will jump 50% approximately. And it is inevitable (all CDC and Danish models say this) that B117 will take over as the reigning dominant variant soon...

Read 32 tweets

Eric Feigl-Ding

@DrEricDing

5 Feb

https://twitter.com/publichealthmw/status/1357411516933431296

An outbreak in Ireland 🇮🇪—what’s the source? 61 #COVID19 cases from a student social gathering, 16 from a hotel wedding.

Why haven’t we learned college parties & indoor weddings are a bad idea yet?

Some say I’m overdramatic in tweets, but this is why I shout from the rooftops.

https://twitter.com/publichealthmw/status/1357411516933431296

2) If anyone knows me personally, I’m actually not a loud or dramatic person. I’m quite low key in person. And I never cared to really use Twitter in the decade that I’ve had an account. I’ve only begun using during the pandemic because of the lack of urgency for public health.

3) when I shouted aloud in Jan 2020, i only had 2000 or so followers collected over 10 years. It didn’t define my life or career. But I see the power in which we can mobilize action if we join together to warn others. And that is my only goal. nymag.com/intelligencer/…

Read 10 tweets

Eric Feigl-Ding

@DrEricDing

4 Feb

@RonDeSantisFL

Florida. Notice all the elderly ladies at the grocery store checkout aisle with zero masks.

Welcome to @RonDeSantisFL’s Florida, plus no travel restriction to anywhere else in America. #COVID19