#tuberculosis patents

[beautifulcrownobserves]

Barely Contained Rage: An Open Letter to Johnson & Johnson

[ashirisu]

John Green is on the warpath and I don’t know if I really have the words to describe the emotions I feel having watched the tuberculosis saga from the beginning and seeing it now culminate in him gleefully calling Johnson & Johnson a pick-me bitch for trying to evergreen their patent on bedaquiline.

I think that we don’t acknowledge often enough how genuinely wonderful it is to be on earth at the same time as the Green brothers and to see them doing everything they can with their money and influence to make a real, substantial difference in the world. They’re good and kind and inspiring, and I hope that I can someday use whatever fraction I may get of their combined resources and talent to make a proportionate fraction of positive change.

Also, if you’re mad at capitalism and are eager for an opportunity to take it out on a corporation working on some truly heinous shit, please take this opportunity to go shred J&J for putting profit over patients and denying their part in keeping TB relevant in the year 2023.

[arcticmonkeysjunglepenguins]

Hey all you know tuberculosis right? That old timey disease. When was the last time you heard of someone dying from it? What if I told you that 30,000 people died of Tuberculosis LAST WEEK.

Now tuberculosis is curable. A key drug in the treatment of TB is Bedaquiline which Johnson & Johnson owns the patent for. It cost about $1.50 (USD) per pill. It is was created in 2003 and the patent is due to expire this month. After this generic version of the drug can be made lower the cost to 50c per pill. Which is vital in poorer nations as we can see from the comment posted below. HOWEVER in 2007 the filed a secondary patent. Meaning the drug will

To put it simply I am not happy about this. The secondary patent is an addition to the first and does not make major changes to the drug. The need to enforce this patent is purely motivated by greed. Which is not right. Johnson & Johnson is big company so it is hard to avoid but I want it to be know that decisions the company is making is going to have an impact on the world today.

People will get sick and die. It is estimated that if the patent was allowed to expire over 6 million lives would be saved over the next 4 years due to increase access.

So I just ask that you keep this in your minds and spread awareness of this decision made by Johnson & Johnson and if you have the time let them know you are unhappy with this decision.

The video that introduces me to this issues:

https://youtu.be/tMhgw5SW0h4

Johnson & Johnson Concern Report page:

https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/28704/report.html

[rolandtowen]

hello.

I have returned from the trenches of Twitter to inform yall that there is an effort to mobilize against Johnson & Johnson's decision to extend their patent on a life-saving tuberculosis drug. Renewing this patent will prevent millions of people from accessing life-saving care.

If you would like to learn more, watch this video:

If you would like to do something, you can make memes, @ J&J on social media, and report your concerns here:

https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/28704/report.html

[rivver-b]

So Johnson & Johnson's patent on the life-saving TB drug bedaquiline is about to expire and they're STILL trying to extend it via a loophole, preventing more affordable generic brand versions of the drug from being produced, for another 4 years.

In those 4 year, millions of people will die due to lack of access and affordability.

Please submit an ethics report to J&J via:

https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/28704/report.html

And signal boost everywhere else you can.

[snowgall]

John Green: Barely Contained Rage: An Open Letter to Johnson & Johnson

Hey @JNJNews @JNJGlobalHealth: Evergreening your patent on bedaquiline, denying millions of people access to live-saving treatment, is a violation of your corporate credo: we believe our first responsibility is to the patients

@sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog

[superstrijder00]

Jonhson & Johnson Shady Business and Tuberculosis

All information is in this video by John Green, the intern behind @sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMhgw5SW0h4&ab_channel=vlogbrothers

The important bits:

Johnson & Johnson is a pharma company that in 2003 invented the first tuberculosis medicine since like the 60s. They got a patent, because they like money. That patent expires in just a few days, which means that now other companies should be able to make way cheaper versions.

However they also got a patent in 2006 or so (I forgot the date already), for a specific bit that makes the medicine work a bit better. They are going to enforce this patent in large parts of the world, to prevent other companies from making cheap versions of the original medicine.

This is going to cost roughly 6 million lives, due to the number of people who will remain unable to afford the medicine between the expire of these medicines.

To protest against this, this post is part of a social media campaign of shaming the company and *respectfully* approaching its employees and directors to tell them this is bad, and furthermore to try to get generic versions of their stuff to also hit their profit margin.

This is a provided picture of a number of their products.

And these are their generic socials. Remember, don't act like you did when you bullied John off of tumblr, be polite but angry.

Tell them on twitter: https://twitter.com/JNJNews and https://twitter.com/JNJGlobalHealth Tell them on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jnj/ Tell them on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jnj/?hl=en

Again, further information in the video linked at the top.

[frackmagnet]

[superstrijder00]

I bet you could trend again if you expanded the platforms of the patients not patents campaign against Johnson and Johnson

i saw you were trending #3 on here and the Fear that shot through my body was. unparalleled. but i think it’s just because you made a funny tweet

Things can trend on tumblr? Oh no. That's not good. That explains all the recent asks.

THESE WINGS ARE MADE OF WAX, SWAMPCOWBOY, AND THIS COFFEE COMPANY MAY BE FLYING TOO CLOSE TO THE GODDAMNED SUN.

[ailurinae]

The ethics complaint link he mentions: https://secure.ethicspoint.com/domain/media/en/gui/28704/report.html

[bumblebeerror]

Hey so. I have something I need you guys to know on this disability pride month.

TLDR: Johnson and Johnson has a patent on a drug that is effective against drug-resistant tuberculosis, a curable disease that kills many people in poorer countries. That patent runs out this august, but they have a secondary patent on the drug with an added compound that makes it work better - and are planning to use this patent to keep generic versions of this drug from being produced and distributed to poorer countries. I cannot underline enough that tuberculosis is still a massive killer and is entirely curable, but people die of it because of this patent making the medication too expensive to obtain.

John’s video this week goes more in depth, but the call to action is needed. Spread this. Know about this. Write to the company. If you care at fucking all about this, please tell someone. Johnson and Johnson needs to know that their consumers will not be turning a blind eye to them trying to squeak around this. Put the blood on their hands where it belongs. Please.

https://youtu.be/tMhgw5SW0h4 (John Green’s video about this)

[ironscorpion]

Prospero's Time Period Analysis

Spoilers for Nevermore Episodes 112-113

I'm back at it again analyzing another backstory to see if I can pinpoint when exactly Prospero died. This episode is finally out so I can post this! I had previously analyzed Pluto's possible year of death, which can be read here

So for those who don't wanna read my lengthy analysis about the two most recent episodes, I narrowed down Prospero's year of death to roughly 1903-1919. This of course is a theory and absolutely nothing concrete.

Now getting onto how I came to this conclusion:

My first assumption was that he was treating the bubonic plague due to the whole plague doctor getup he has with his specter. However, he definitely treated tuberculosis as sanatoriums were not used to treat the bubonic plague. TB lines up with how the family member described his family dying. This also lines up with the description of the illness in Masque of The Red Death.

It's unlikely his backstory took place in Italy, his family are likely immigrants who went to the United States. This is mainly assumed due to the slur used against Prospero. Historically the slur was primarily used in the United States and Australia in the early 20th century (1900's). However this is not a definitive indication of where he was currently living. Aside from that, the United States was also just one of the main countries that Sicilians had immigrated to.

Now there is concrete evidence that he died in the 1900's due to the fact his last meal included espresso, which wasn't introduced until 1901.

The espresso machine was optimized and patented in 1901, however production of the machines did not occur until 1903

We can assume that espresso was either an already popularized drink by the time he had died, or a new invention that he wished to try. His last meal doesn't mean that it was something he already had before, as we can see with Ada and assumedly Duke's final meal.

We know he worked in a sanatorium, however it's unknown exactly what sanatorium he could have worked at especially if he was a US immigrant, as there was a large number of them in the early 1900's. I am almost convinced the sanatorium we see was not a 1:1 recreation of any real place, because I could not find any sanatorium in the US that had a funicular for transportation.

Note: Funiculars are like trams but on an incline.

Because he most likely treated tuberculosis, this means he absolutely could not have died any later than 1943. This is due to the belief that the disease he was treating was incurable. Antibiotics for TB wasn't founded until 1943.

However I can narrow down this very large timeframe of 1903-1943 even further!

Surprisingly, the background characters give a big indication of what time period this backstory takes place in. Particularly taking a look at this page. Starting with Prospero, we can see he's most likely wearing an Ulster coat. These were popular in the late 1800's to early 1900's, especially 1903

I can narrow this down even further by taking a look at the women's clothing and hairstyles, which were mostly popular during the Edwardian Era. The hairstyles seem to heavily resemble those that were popular during this era. The clothing we see these women also seem to share a strong resemblance to something the women of that time period may have been wearing.

The Edwardian style was popular from 1901-1919. I can even further support the fact Prospero couldn't have died any later than 1920 due to the fact that no one is wearing a Langsdorf necktie (modern necktie). These weren't popularized until the 1920's. The fact there is not a single character wearing one could be indicative of the fact that the style of tie wasn't popular yet.

This puts Prospero's year of death anywhere from:

1903-1919

[scotianostra]

March 3rd 1847 saw the birth of Alexander Graham Bell in Edinburgh.

Bell’s education was largely received through numerous experiments in sound and the furthering of his father’s work on Visible Speech for the deaf. I covered his father in a post on Saturday.

Bell worked with Thomas Watson on the design and patent of the first practical telephone. In all, Bell held 18 patents in his name alone and 12 that he shared with collaborators.

The second son of Alexander Melville Bell and Eliza Grace Symonds Bell, he was named for his paternal grandfather, Alexander Bell. For most of his life, the younger Alexander was known as “Aleck” to family and friends. He had two brothers, Melville James Bell and Edward Charles Bell, both of whom died from tuberculosis.

During his youth, Alexander Graham Bell experienced significant influences that would carry into his adult life. His Grandfather was a well-known professor and teacher of elocution. Alexander’s mother also had a profound influence on him, being a proficient pianist despite her deafness. This taught Alexander to look past people’s disadvantages and find solutions to help them.

Alexander Graham Bell was homeschooled by his mother, who instilled in him an infinite curiosity about the world around him. He received one year of formal education in a private school and two years at Edinburgh’s Royal High School. Though a mediocre student, he displayed an uncommon ability to solve problems. At age 12, while playing with a friend in a grain mill, he noted the slow process of husking the wheat grain. He went home and built a device with rotating paddles with sets of nail brushes that dehusked the wheat. It was his first invention.

A lot has been written about Bell’s invention but before the family emigrated he was only 16, when he accepted a position at Weston House Academy in Elgin teaching elocution and music to students, many older than he. At the end of the term, Alexander returned home and joined his father, promoting his father, Melville Bell’s technique of Visible Speech, which taught the deaf to align specific phonetic symbols with a particular position of the speech organs (lips, tongue, and palate).

After the death of his two brothers, and Aleck’s health deteriorating his father decided, for the sake of his health they had to move to a better climate in the Americas, his son resisted the move at first but he relented, and in July 1870, the family settled in Brantford, Ontario, Canada. There, Alexander’s health improved, and he set up a workshop to continue his study of the human voice. He later took up a position as a tutor at Boston School for Deaf Mutes and settled in the city in 1871.

Two years later, he was appointed Professor of Vocal Physiology and Elocution at Boston University.

These early experiments in speech creation, along with his knowledge of anatomy, informed his own experiments on transmitting speech, which he began in earnest from 1873.

Bell did not think he was inventing a ‘telephone’ during his early experiments. He was working on the holy grail of the day: sending multiple telegraph messages over the same wire. He aimed to make electro-mechanical devices capable of transmitting and receiving different tones for each message.

He was supported financially in this work by the father of one of his students, Gardiner Hubbard, a wealthy lawyer and politician, whose deaf daughter, Mabel, had been taught to lip-read and speak by Bell. Bell fell in love with Mabel. Her father, being aware of Bell’s experiments with possible ‘speaking telegraph’ devices, refused his permission for the couple to marry until Bell had successfully developed his new invention. To speed matters along, he also funded an assistant, Thomas Watson.

Sensing the danger of rival developments for this valuable invention, Bell’s future father-in-law filed an application for ‘Improvements in Telegraphy’ on 14 February 1876. On that very same day a few hours later – or was it actually a few hours earlier? – inventor Elisha Gray filed his own idea for a telephone at the same office. Bell was granted the patent on 7 March 1876. On 9 July 1877, Bell, Hubbard, Watson (and other funders) established the Bell Telephone Company to market the new device. Bell and Mabel married two days later.

Controversy remains as to whether Bell or his father-in-law might have had access to the details of Gray’s patent through an office clerk in Hubbard’s pay. The clerk seemed to admit as much in a later court case, but Bell’s patent was upheld, as it was in the many cases which followed.

On 11 August 1877, Bell and Mabel arrived in Britain from the USA on honeymoon. In Bell’s luggage was his new communication device, the telephone. Bell travelled the country promoting his invention, even demonstrating the device to Queen Victoria, who was so amused she asked to keep the temporary installation in place. The first telephones went on sale later that year.

Sometimes described as the most valuable patent ever filed, for years following the award, Bell had to defend his patent in expensive and protracted litigation battles brought by a whole range of inventors. In 2002, the US Congress formally recognised Italian Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone, based on prototypes he demonstrated in 1860. Bell and the Italian had shared a workshop in the 1870s. Meucci was pursuing his claim in the Supreme Court when he died in 1889. France and Germany cite their own contenders for the title.

In many respects, Bell’s telephone was flawed, his receiver and transmitter designs being considerably improved by others within a couple of years. Among those were Thomas Edison and Professor David Hughes, who both produced improvements to Bell’s early instrument, transforming the telephone into a truly successful communication device.

Still widely known as ‘the inventor of the telephone’, Bell had given up his interest in this invention by his early thirties. He spent the rest of his life with Mabel and their family in Canada, working on a series of varied projects including flight, sheep breeding, developing a ‘vacuum jacket’ to aid artificial breathing and the founding of the National Geographic magazine. His foremost passion remained enabling deaf people to lip read and speak, therefore blending into a hearing world. This was in itself controversial to sections of the deaf community, disenfranchising those who preferred to communicate using sign language, which they viewed as the primary language of the deaf.

Bell’s last visit to Edinburgh was in November 1920. At a speech given to pupils at the city’s Royal High School, where he had been a student 60 years before, he imagined that this young generation might live to see a time when someone “in any part of the world would be able to telephone to any other part of the world without any wires at all.”

He died on 2nd August 1922 aged 75. On the day of his funeral the telephone systems in the US and Canada were silenced for one minute, can you imagine that happening nowadays!

[reality-detective]

A recent History Lesson 👇

Bill Gates invested a whopping $55 MILLION in BioNTech that made the Pfizer mRNA injection.

You will never believe the date that this happened...

Is this just a coincidence?

You know, the company that partnered with Pfizer to make their mRNA covid vaccine and drove Pfizer's revenue to a record $100 billion in 2022.

Well, I had a look and found something very interesting indeed. When did Bill Gates invest this large sum of money?

Turns out that it was on the 4th of September 2019.

Covid was discovered just two months later in November 2019 (at least the first time we got to hear about it).

This turned out to be very profitable for Bill Gates, his investment increasing by 10 times. The original $55 million was worth over $550 million just a few years later.

"The collaboration will fund the identification of potential HIV and tuberculosis vaccines and immunotherapy candidates in their pre-clinical development. It will further enable BioNTech to build out its infectious disease infrastructure, including platform development" - it says in the press release from BioNTech.

Guess what?

Bill Gates has also donated some $20 million to the BBC.

Now it is being reported that the BBC misrepresented the risk of covid in order to boost public support for lockdown.

In other words, the mainstream media deliberately mislead the public and scared them into supporting draconian lockdown measures, and also probably scared people into rushing to get the brand new mRNA injections.

Meanwhile Bill Gates investment grew and grew...

"One example is that they gave the impression that hospitals were being overwhelmed during the first wave. Some (mainly in London) were, but overall hospital bed occupancy was at an all-time low during that period" Professor Mark Woolhouse said.

Remember when we were told that the hospitals were completely full and we had all the dancing nurses on TikTok? Remember how some people were labelled "conspiracy theorists" for questioning this?

Turns out that the so called "conspiracy theorists" were right once again. The hospitals were not full. We were being lied to. I visited two hospitals during that time and they were empty.

Surely it is just a coincidence that Bill Gates just happened to invest large amounts of money into BioNTech just two months before covid?

In fact there was a patent for the mRNA shot before Covid. They lied about everything including the use of masks to stop the spread of an unconfirmed invisible made up virus.

I'm sure this information has already been out there by other sources. I'm just giving a reminder, the information is still available and you are free to löök this up for yourself. 🤔

[toomuchracket]

Omg YES vampire Matty night - does he share his whole story after girlie finds out he’s a vampire? What’s the story on how he turned (on purpose, accident, victim of a vamp attack)? So much lore!!

he shares his story right after you find out, yeah!! i think he was human during the late victorian era, to be honest - grew up in a middle-class northern family ("dad owned the farm, but we all worked on it"), was honestly a little bit of a fruit/too into literature and music so he moved to london (the way he phrases it to you is "you know... teen angst. like in lady bird where she says she wants to go where culture is. and that one bronski beat song") and hung around the literati ("oscar wilde used to flirt with me, you know. m'serious. i'm the basis for dorian gray" "nice try, healy, he was blonde in the book" "...ah, fuck") of the era. as it turns out, he was turned by an unknown vampire in the early 1900s, when he was in his early thirties, after almost dying from tuberculosis (ironically, also named consumption); he's like "i don't know why they chose me of all people-" and you interrupt like "because you were beautiful, matthew. you were beautiful anyway, and then you got TB, which everyone thought was a flattering malady - one of the brontës said that, i think - and whoever turned you probably thought it would've been a waste to let you die". and matty thinks for a second, and you worry you've offended or upset him, but he just smiles shyly and says "you think i'm beautiful?", the little shit, and you just roll your eyes and grin like "a little bit, yeah". anyway, he laid low for a bit after that, coming to terms with vampirism and relearning how to be a part of society, which meant he missed ww1, and spent ww2 working in paris for the resistance and chilling with sartre and camus - he stayed there for part of the 50s, then split his time between london and new york in the 60s and 70s ("punk was SO fun"), and spent the 80s back in manchester being angsty and emo again on the indie scene, and he's been in london ever since. all his money was made from an invention, inspired by the punks he hung around with: tattoo ink that didn't dissolve in vampires' venom-filled blood, which he patented and made a fucking FORTUNE from, a fortune that only keeps increasing and means he doesn't have to work and can get away with being part of the nightlife. he's gorgeous, he's sweet, he's funny, and he's totally head over heels for you in a way he's never been before. i love him <3