On the decline – The Economist:
‘America’s body corporate looks, as a whole, to be in rude health. One large company after another is presenting record quarterly results. Bosses are raising profit forecasts left and right. Poke and prod big business, though, and you find pockets of sickliness. On November 4th Pfizer, maker of drugs from covid-19 vaccines to Viagra, reported year-on-year declines in sales and earnings. To add insult to this financial injury, it has found itself in a bidding war against Novo Nordisk, a Danish rival, over Metsera, a developer of anti-obesity drugs for which Pfizer has raised its offer from $7bn in September to $10bn this week.
Pfizer is not alone among American health-care companies in feeling under the weather. Gilead Sciences, a biotech behemoth, also sold fewer drugs. geHealthCare, a maker of fancy scanners, said net profit had fallen. Illumina, a genomics giant, expects revenue to dip this year.’
(…)
‘Venture capitalists are more interested in artificial intelligence than in human health. And foreign medical researchers are more interested in places that are friendlier to them and their work than Donald Trump’s migrant-wary and science-sceptical America.’
(…)
‘Not long ago the words “Chinese medicine” evoked mainly remedies that were either homeopathic (the traditional variety), hazardous (the modern sort with shoddy quality controls) or rehashed (by low-cost me-too makers). Today the term is becoming a byword for innovation. Chinese firms are at the cutting edge of robotic surgery (MicroPort), medical scanners (United Imaging) and drug development. Many Chinese biotechs appear to be getting a better return on their research efforts than American rivals.’
(…)
‘Chinese companies must still watch their feet, particularly in the world’s biggest health-care market, America. Handwringing over Chinese technology is a rare bipartisan pastime there. The biosecure act advancing through Congress would bar recipients of federal largesse from using biotech tools and services offered by Chinese entities that are deemed to be a national-security risk. This could hobble Chinese genomics firms (such as bgi) and those which conduct r&d on behalf of clients (WuXi AppTec, for instance), among others. This summer Mr Trump was considering an executive order to stop American firms licensing novel treatments from China.
Last month the Senate watered down the biosecure act a bit, for instance by stripping out references to bgi, WuXi and other named firms. The president never signed his executive order. Maybe he never will. Doing so now would jeopardise the one-year trade truce he has just negotiated with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Doing so later would risk depriving Americans of the miracles of medical innovation.’
Read the article here.
I used to say: yes, the American empire is flawed, but please, dear God, prolong the American century because the Chinese century will be worse.
I’m still willing to repeat to this, bot for how long?
No, New York won’t be the Vienna of the 21st century, we didn’t lose a world war, if I may say we, the US will never be the Austrian-Hungarian empire.
And people vote with their feet. If people try to get into China in search of a better life, we know enough.
According to the venture capitalist, the better life is no human life, try to be a machine.
The venture capitalists: the humans don’t deserve health.
They are true Calvinists. The sinners must suffer first here; and burn later, In the afterlife. Unless they left earth on time, or uploaded themselves to their watch, their car, their cloud.