Why Prop. 14 is unaffordable, unnecessary, fatally flawed and unsupportable
By Jeff Sheehy,
San Diego Union-Tribune
| 09. 15. 2020
It must seem odd that someone who has spent countless hours over the last 15 years as a member of the governing board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) would oppose Proposition 14, which seeks to provide $5.5 billion in new funding for the stem-cell agency. While I value CIRM and its work to date, Proposition 14 commits California to spending money it does not have — $7.8 billion including interest for research that is already well-funded. Plus, CIRM’s pre-existing flaws are actually exacerbated by new provisions in the measure.
Adding debt amid the current fiscal crisis is a terrible idea. Issuing bonds is not free money — bonds have to be paid back, with interest. CIRM is already costing the state $327 million a year to repay the $3 billion in bonds authorized by voters in 2004 via Proposition 71. And after spending all of that money, not a single U.S. Federal and Drug Administration-approved product has materialized on which CIRM’s funding played an important role. I know Proposition 14 proponents cite two approved products, but...
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Bioethics needs an update
The National Research Act is now 50 years old. It was signed into law on July 12, 1974, as a direct response to publicity about the 1932 “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.” The Hastings Bioethics Forum celebrated its anniversary with an...
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
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