Humanitarian aid

News broke this week that millions of people around the world should thank Dolly Parton for funding early research on one of the apparently COVID-19 vaccines to the tune of $1M. The money went to researchers at Vanderbilt University, on whose work Moderna has developed its vaccine, which the company says is about 95% effective at protecting against the virus.

Let me first say that this is one of the many things I despise about big pharma—the fact that so much of their “research” is basically just topping off masses of work done by academic scientists and then marketing the living daylights out of it. When they tell you that their therapeutic for [diabetes, asthma, Multiple Sclerosis, whatever] costs the patients $3,000 per month because they’ve spent all this money on research, that’s largely a crock of moose milk. They pick up exploratory work that was frequently funded by public and private grants and soak everyone for those ads that fill up the magazines and air waves, instructing you to “ask your doctor if [whatever] is right for you.”

That aside, Dolly Parton is a goddam humanitarian treasure, and I love the dickens out of her.