It might! But the article I linked also suggests it might destroy ozone and have a net warming effect. We just don’t know. The upper atmosphere has never before had this level of direct pollution injection.

Even though it’s not a space trash problem, it is a regular upper atmosphere polluter of aluminum oxide ash. We don’t yet know the long term consequences.

From the article:

While drug companies profit from the sales of unproven drugs, everyone else — patients, insurers, and the government — pays a heavy price. In just four years, from 2018 through 2021, the taxpayer-funded health insurance programs Medicare and Medicaid shelled out $18 billion for drugs approved on the condition that their manufacturers produce confirmatory trials that had yet to be delivered.

I’m guessing their citation only includes Medicare and Medicaid because those have publicly-available data for the study to review, but I have to assume that private insurers pay a ton as well. I can see your point that insurance denials result in angry sick people, but there’s not really a lot of nuance in “that medication has never been shown to be safe and effective for your (or any) condition.”

I dunno. Everyone sucks here.

American health insurance companies are famously miserly, and this seems like a great area to use penny pinching for good. Where the hell are the insurance CFOs who should be demanding efficacy proof instead of being swindled along with the masses?

One recent podcast episode that explains how BlackRock originally got into caring about ESG, and what that meant in a way that doesn’t at all imply improved morality. Episode two describes in depth the original creation of the Texas blacklist and putting Blackrock onto it.

Both are well produced by American Public Media.

@silence7@slrpnk.net just a quick shout out that I appreciate you, and your continuing cultivation of this space with excellent content. The future feels bleak and difficult to confront, but I’m glad to be reading well-written nonfiction doom and gloom.