Cuban dictatorship’s doctor slave trade brought $5 billion in revenue in 2022
Translated excerpt:
n 2019, the year prior to the pandemic, they generated a total of $5.382 billion in revenue from the sale of medical services. The export of professionals, including doctors, engineers, teachers, and military experts, remains one of the top three sectors contributing the highest amount of dollars, alongside remittances and tourism.
The total value of exported services in foreign trade in 2022 was $7,063,889,800 ($5,884,178,200 in 2021; $6,879,664,900 in 2020, and $9,867,141,200 in 2019). This means that over 69% of this figure corresponds to the export of labor.
However, this economy of services harms the availability of professionals in the domestic market. In fact, the ONEI itself acknowledged that from 2021 to 2022, the Public Health sector had lost over 31 thousand professionals, including 12,065 doctors, 7,414 nurses, 3,246 dentists, and 4,579 technicians.
This exodus of healthcare professionals occurs in a context of a medicine and resource crisis used in hospital care, which has serious consequences for the well-being of the Cuban people.
Exporting medical services is more profitable than sugar, nickel, and cocoa combined.
According to ONEI data, the sale of professional services is more than double the export of several commodities, such as mining products, cocoa, tobacco, and sugar, combined.
The 2022 Yearbook reflects foreign sales in the order of $26 million in agricultural products, $54 million in fishery-derived products, $61 million from the sugar industry, $230 million from the tobacco industry, and $961 million from mining. The aforementioned only adds up to $2.17 billion, a figure that contrasts with the nearly $5 billion from medical services.
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Slave trade 90 miles from Florida but don’t expect anything from the DC sewer rats. They are envious./s
FDA approving drugs after fewer trials, providing less information to public, studies find
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2023-08-fda-drugs-trials.html
Excerpt:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is approving more novel pharmaceutical drugs based on single clinical trials and with less public disclosure about those trials than was the norm just a few years ago, a pair of recent studies from Oregon State University has found.
Researchers agree it is important to minimize delays in making treatments for diseases such as cancer available to patients, but they say their findings point to a need for greater transparency around how drugs receive approval.
For many drugs that have been tested in multiple clinical trials, pharmaceutical companies are only required to share the results from two trials, leaving questions about why they chose those two for submission and what happened in the other trials, study co-author Veronica Irvin said.
.....The research team focused on the period after implementation of the federal 21st Century Cures Act, passed with bipartisan support in 2016 and meant to accelerate approval of new medicines so patients could gain access to life-saving drugs that would otherwise take years to become available.
As part of that law, the FDA relaxed some standards to allow treatments for priority health conditions such as cancer to be approved with fewer supporting studies, and placed less emphasis on randomized clinical trials, allowing pharmaceutical companies to rely on surrogate markers instead of clinical outcomes in certain cases. Surrogate markers are used as substitutes when the direct clinical outcomes take a long time to study, and they should be related to the clinical outcomes.
For example, Irvin said, it might take years of following patients in a long-term clinical trial to determine if a drug reduces their risk of a heart attack, so measuring the surrogate marker of blood pressure enables the drug to move through the approval process more quickly. However, reduced blood pressure does not assure reduced risk of death from heart disease, she said.
.....Of the 37 drugs approved by the FDA in 2022, 24 (about 65%) were approved based on a single study. Four of the 37 drugs (about 11%) reported three or more studies before approval. Roughly half of the 413 studies available for analysis were classified as randomized clinical trials, while results were publicly posted on ClinicalTrials.gov for only 103 of the 413 studies.
In 2016, prior to the Cures Act, only four of 20 novel drugs (20%) were approved based on a single trial.
In the Health Affairs Scholar article, researchers found that of the 46 novel drugs approved in 2017, 19 (41%) were approved based on results from a single study—though the drugmakers conducted an average of 2.2 studies per drug, including 165 studies for the popular weight-loss drug Ozempic.
Despite drugmakers completing an average of 5.82 studies per drug prior to FDA approval, results were disclosed on ClinicalTrials.gov prior to approval for only 1.42 studies on average.
.....When the FDA states that it has reviewed drugmakers’ two submitted studies, consumers are missing information about how many other studies were conducted, what those results showed and why those specific two studies were chosen for evaluation, Irvin said.
“We want doctors and patients to be able to see the whole picture,” she said.
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More evidence of everything big gov touches turns to s***. Plus the study doesn’t even discuss the influence big pharma has on the FDA approval process. More reason to tell your doctor no to new drugs entering the market.