Enough is Enough

(Aaron M. Sprecher / Associated Press)

Arnold Ventures is recommitting itself to the work ahead necessary to battle the injustices that are pervasive in our society. The foundation issued this statement on Tuesday:
 

Enough is enough. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland and too many other Black Americans and people of color at the hands of those charged with protecting them are unconscionable.
 

Even before the tragic murder of George Floyd, it was clear that policing in the United States is deeply troubled. A lack of transparency and accountability, and a failure to confront the historic racism in policing, has resulted in a law enforcement system that routinely fails at its fundamental task of protecting and serving the American people.
 

Past efforts at reform have fallen woefully short in no small part because institutional negligence silences the many good actors and allows for racist and brutal policing to persist.

This is a time when those in government, business, education and philanthropy must join with civil rights activists and community leaders to ensure that we achieve deep, systemic, and sustainable changes in policing.
 

Our mission at Arnold Ventures is to maximize opportunity and minimize injustice. Racial injustice is pervasive in each field in which we work. Our pledge is to continue using all the tools in our arsenal, including research, evidence, advocacy and litigation, to dismantle these injustices and thereby achieve true reform.

And our Co-Founders, Laura and John, shared their response in a letter to friends and colleagues.

(Photo courtesy of High Bear family)

Andrea High Bear was a pregnant mother of five when she was transferred to a federal prison facility in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Her death there from the coronavirus a month later, advocates say, is the result of multiple failures in the criminal justice system — and it could have been prevented.

The situation: High Bear was relocated to a federal prison in Texas even after the U.S. Bureau of Prisons had announced it was restricting movement within the federal prison system to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. But her presence in the justice system has also come into question: She was convicted of a rarely prosecuted charge, and also could have had her sentence suspended until after she gave birth or been restricted to home confinement. Instead, she was cleared to fly to a federal prison, despite being seven-and-a-half months into a high-risk pregnancy.

Bottom line: High Bear deserved better. Many wrong steps throughout the criminal justice system led to her untimely death and left six children without a mother. “We had big plans, her and I, for her and her family,” says her grandmother Clara LeBeau. “She was going to be divorced and be on her very own. She was going to go to college. She was going to start all over.”

What happens when pharmaceutical companies thwart competition from generic versions of their brand-name drugs? An estimated $761 million footed by taxpayers is lost to state Medicaid programs, money that states could’ve used to balance budgets, pay teachers, and shore up pensions. That’s according to a new study by Dr. Chintan Dave, Dr. Aaron S. Kesselheim, and other researchers affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

What else: Patent litigation was the most common cause for a delay in generics coming to market, according to researchers, meaning “brand-name manufacturers may be offering incentives to generic manufacturers in exchange for terminating ongoing patent challenges.”

Bottom line: “Brand-name drug manufacturers blocking appropriate price competition has led to millions in lost savings,” said AV’s Kristi Martin, Vice President of Drug Pricing. “With unemployment at an all-time high, and Medicaid enrollment increasing, states and taxpayers cannot afford delayed generic entry. Policymakers need to address patent abuses and anti-competitive behaviors that lead to these market failures.”

By Stuart Buck, Arnold Ventures Vice President of Research

The Lancet just retracted an observational study of over 96,000 COVID-19 patients worldwide whose data had supposedly been collected by a company called Surgisphere (whose CEO was a co-author). The article reported that patients who had been given hydroxychloroquine were around twice as likely to die. Based on this alarming news, the World Health Organization stopped using hydroxychloroquine in a large randomized trial. 

But this study may be a complete fraud. So too may be a New England Journal of Medicine study published by Surgisphere (which was also retracted on Thursday). I can only scratch the surface as to all the inexplicable facts that have arisen about the study and about Surgisphere (see here and here), but these quotes from the Guardian are a taste: 

• “Surgisphere, whose handful of employees appear to include a science fiction writer and an adult-content model, has provided data for multiple studies on COVID-19 co-authored by its chief executive, but has so far failed to adequately explain its data.”

• “Until Monday, the ‘get in touch’ link on Surgisphere’s homepage redirected to a WordPress template for a cryptocurrency website, raising questions about how hospitals could easily contact the company to join its database.”

• “It is not clear from the methodology in the studies that used Surgisphere data, or from the Surgisphere website itself, how the company was able to put in place data-sharing agreements from so many hospitals worldwide, including those with limited technology, and to reconcile different languages and coding systems, all while staying within the regulatory, data-protection and ethical rules of each country.”

It is amazing that such an implausible source of data could make its way into two of the world’s top medical journals. Food for thought: The many obvious flaws in Surgisphere’s studies were exposed by social media, not by peer review.