By The Numbers - part the fifty second

A few times in these essays, I've complained about the socialism/welfare for the rich, in particular the drug industry. They take the work of academia and NGOs and leverage same into about the most profitable sector in the economy. And we, the sick, get to pay more for those drugs than anywhere else on earth.

Now comes new reporting that the gravy train may soon come to a screeching halt. Where does much of this research come from? Who pays for it? In large part, the USofA taxpayer.

According to the National Institutes of Health, the number of postdoctoral fellows supported by NIH grants has been steadily falling for more than 20 years, with a significant dip after 2020. The number of postdocs in the biological and biomedical fields has declined 9% between 2018 and 2022, and those in health-related fields have fallen by 8%, according to a survey published on March 20 by the National Science Foundation.

PhRMA bitches that they don't get enough credit for turning this basic research into sellable drugs. They sure don't seem to care all that much.

By using that technology to develop their mRNA vaccines for Covid-19, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna made a windfall in profits. Between 2020 and 2021, Pfizer saw its revenue nearly double. In the same period, Moderna's total revenue skyrocketed from $803 million to $18.5 billion, astounding growth the company said was "primarily due to commercial sales of (the) COVID-19 vaccine."

The golden goose ain't dead yet, but it's on life support. It's long been my contention that smart people do what they do just because they do what they do; they don't want to do anything else. If we're lucky, those in bio/chem/medicine who choose to skip straight to Big Pharma big bucks jobs are the dumb ones who don't really care about doing smart work. One hopes.