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Bully for the Bully Pulpit… Eli Lilly & Co. CEO Dave Ricks claims the decision to put a $35 cap on insulin had been in the works for some time.
That may be the case but president Joe Biden’s move to cap the cost of the diabetes drug at $35 for Medicare patients certainly must have swayed Ricks just a bit.
During his State of the Union Address, Biden noted that millions of Americans, including 200K young people with Type I diabetes, are not on Medicare.
“Let’s cap the cost of insulin for everybody at $35,” he said.
Ricks saw the handwriting on the wall as Congress is expected to limit insulin costs.
He did get a good PR jump on his competitors. Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi account for 90 percent of the US insulin market.
Noting that 70 percent of Americans don’t use Lilly’s insulin, Ricks urged “policymakers, employers and others to join us in making insulin more affordable.”
Lilly plans an aggressive nationwide public awareness push to promote its “industry-leading affordability solutions.”
Ricks plans to get as much PR mileage as he can from the decision to cut the price of insulin before being mandated to do so.
Actions speak louder than words… Rupert Murdoch has testified that he should have told Fox News hosts to stop spreading the “fake news” about the “stolen” presidential election.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries have called Rupert out. In their March 1 letter to the Fox Corp. chairman they wrote that Fox hosts “continue to promote, spew and perpetuate election conspiracy theories to this day.”
They demanded that Murdoch reel in his hosts. Murdoch has a clear choice. “You can continue a pattern of lying to your viewers and risking democracy or move beyond this damaging chapter to your company’s history by siding with the truth and reporting the facts.”
The ball is in Murdoch’s court.
Don’t let the facts get in the way. The mayors of Jersey beach towns and groups fueled by the fossil fuels sector are using the spate of whale deaths along the Atlantic coast in a misinformation campaign to thwart off-shore wind projects, according to a report in USA Today.
“They are using whales as pawns in an effort to undermine offshore wind projects,” said Leah Stokes, a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
A similar tactic is used to fight onshore wind projects, where the focus shifts to protecting birds from flying into turbines.
In his final debate with Joe Biden, president Donald Trump said wind energy “kills all the birds.”
The US Fish & Wildlife Services said wind turbines account for 0.02 percent of bird kills.
Cats are, by far, the No. 1 killer of birds.
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