the "Headline That Caught My Attention or the WTF" thread
- Thread starter wader
- Start date
Guess you forgot about this when I posted it way back when they announced they were going woke and ghey.
M&Ms says it's replacing 'beloved spokescandies' with Maya Rudolph
"We have decided to take an indefinite pause from the spokescandies," M&Ms said in a statement on Twitter. "www.yahoo.com
What the hell??
Now who are the snowflakes???
Conservative critics on outlets like Fox News immediately took issue with the campaign, suggesting that M&M's had gone "woke." Meanwhile, Fox News' Tucker Carlson took issue with the more empowered depiction of the female spokescandies, complaining that Purple appeared "plus-sized" and suggesting that the Green character was coded as a lesbian. While Carlson's objections inspired some trolling on social media, his argument improbably took root in conservative media circles and may have influenced Mars's decision to relegate the M&M's spokescandies to the sidelines. In their Twitter statement, the brand notably suggested that the recent decisions have been "polarizing," adding: "We're all about bringing people together."
On Twitter, M&M fans are certainly suggesting that the brand has bowed to Carlson and his candy-related rants.
=============
Add in this "manufactured controversy" - new album art for the 50th Anniversary reissuance of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon. These people have gone off the rails seeing things that aren't there & then blowing them up.
View attachment 58523
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M&M's Redesigns Its Characters' Looks and Personalities to Be 'Representative of Today's Society'
The most notable changes are to the brown and green M&M's, the two female characters
Avenger
Well-Known Angler
Guess you forgot about this when I posted it way back when they announced they were going woke and ghey.
M&M's Redesigns Its Characters' Looks and Personalities to Be 'Representative of Today's Society'
The most notable changes are to the brown and green M&M's, the two female characterspeople.com
Gee, couldn't be the backlash from the majority that's not into divisive identity politics, could it?
Guess those Mormons don't get many boob jobs...
Utah Plastic Surgeon Sold Fake Covid-19 Vaccine Cards for $50, U.S. Says
Dr. Michael Kirk Moore and three of his associates were indicted this month in a scheme that federal prosecutors said lasted from May 2021 to September 2022.A Utah plastic surgeon and three associates were charged recently with selling fake Covid-19 vaccine cards for $50 apiece in a scheme that lasted more than a year, and during which they destroyed more than $28,000 worth of the vaccine doses, according to federal prosecutors.
Dr. Michael Kirk Moore Jr., a board-certified plastic surgeon in the Salt Lake City area, sold hundreds of cards falsely claiming to be proof of vaccination in exchange for cash payments or donations to an unspecified charity, the U.S. attorney’s office in Utah said. Under the scheme, Dr. Moore and his associates then destroyed the government-issued vaccines, prosecutors said, noting that many child patients were given saline shots instead of vaccine doses at their parents’ request.
Dr. Moore and his colleagues sold enough of the falsified vaccine cards to equal 1,937 doses of the vaccine, according to charging documents, which say that the scheme lasted from May 2021 to September 2022.
Dr. Moore and three others — Kari Dee Burgoyne, his office manager; Sandra Flores, a receptionist in his office; and Kristin Jackson Andersen, his neighbor — were each indicted on Jan. 11 on a charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States, and two other charges.
According to the indictment, Dr. Moore was a member of a private organization that aimed to “liberate” the medical profession from government and medical industry intervention.
“By allegedly falsifying vaccine cards and administering saline shots to children instead of Covid-19 vaccines, not only did this provider endanger the health and well-being of a vulnerable population, but also undermined public trust and the integrity of federal health care programs,” Curt L. Muller, special agent in charge with the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Inspector General, said in a statement last week.
Reached by phone on Tuesday, a man who identified himself as Dr. Moore hung up. Ms. Burgoyne declined to comment. Neither Ms. Flores nor Ms. Andersen immediately responded to requests for comment.
In the last three years, dozens of people have been prosecuted for Covid-19 vaccine fraud. Cases have included ones involving two nurses on Long Island who were charged with forgery in January 2022 after earning more than $1.5 million from sales of falsified proofs of vaccination, and a New Jersey mother who was accused in August 2021 of selling more than 250 fake vaccine cards on Instagram.
In the current case involving Dr. Moore and his associates, prosecutors intend to seek the forfeiture of the remaining vaccine cards and shots in their possession, and to have them pay a judgment of roughly $125,000.
The website for Dr. Moore’s plastic surgery practice notes his certifications with both the Utah Department of Occupational and Professional Licensing as well as the Idaho Board of Medical Examiners. His medical licenses with those two authorities were listed as active on Tuesday, according to the offices’ websites. A representative for the American Board of Plastic Surgeons said that Dr. Moore had maintained his certification with the board.
UNBELIEVABLY HEARTBREAKING J6 VIDEO! Exclusive CRYSTAL CLEAR Video of Rosanne Boyland as She DIED on Steps of US Capitol on January 6 - WHY WON'T THE POLITICIANS & MEDIA SAY HER NAME?
The Gateway Pundit has obtained never-before-seen footage from January 6th that will absolutely break your heart. It is unbelievable that this footage exists and is just being seen now. In this poignant video that plays like a scene in a feature film, the unconscious body of Rosanne Boyland lay...
www.thegatewaypundit.com
I’m a model with a 100-pound leg — being different is beautiful
Mahogany Geter, 24, was born with lymphedema, a chronic condition that has caused her left leg to swell to 100 pounds — but it hasn’t stopped her yet.
nypost.com
Brave woman. I couldn't deal with it.
I’m a model with a 100-pound leg — being different is beautiful
Mahogany Geter, 24, was born with lymphedema, a chronic condition that has caused her left leg to swell to 100 pounds — but it hasn’t stopped her yet.
I cut out all the man-on-man ghey stuff. 🤪 but thought you guys would like to see Paul and his friend.
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View attachment trim.E874E05D-7400-4C72-8EFD-589181B2D917.MOV
WTF are you talking about?
"man-on-man ghey stuff"?
Nothing's cut out - that's the whole video as released by the police..
What I saw was two men gripping a hammer - appraently stoped in fighting over it because the police showed up. You can see that. Both have a hold of it & the attacker has his hand over Pelosi's wrist in a restrainning position.
Two men
One is his underwear (Pelosi) - it was the middle of the night & he was in bed.
The other (the attacker) in a pair of shorts.
this was the video as released showing nothing cut out
Last edited:
See how excited you are over nothing, that’s why I cut out the ghey stuff. You’d spew all over yourself.WTF are you talking about?
"man-on-man ghey stuff"?
Nothing's cut out - that's the whole videoas released by the police..
What I saw was tweo men gripping a hammer - appraently stoped in forghting over it becauswe the police showed up. You can see that. Both have a hold of it & ther attacker has his hand over Pelosi's wrist in a restrainning is position.
Two men
One is his underwear (Pelosi) - it was the middle of the night & he was in bed.
The other (the attacker) in a pair of shorts.
this was the video as released
this is the survelliance video showing the attacker breaking into Pelosi's home
video.search.yahoo.com
video of attacker breaking into pelosi house - Yahoo Video Search Results
The search engine that helps you find exactly what you're looking for. Find the most relevant information, video, images, and answers from all across the Web.
video.search.yahoo.com
Not in my house. I added this. (Don’t watch if you can’t handle Woke Gheyism)this is the survelliance video showing the attacker breaking into Pelosi's home
video of attacker breaking into pelosi house - Yahoo Video Search Results
The search engine that helps you find exactly what you're looking for. Find the most relevant information, video, images, and answers from all across the Web.
View attachment trim.40B4F270-7FB2-49E7-AD9D-65CF3620A77B.MOV
Ahhh, the veracity of Joe Rogan's guests...
The surveying vessel Red Rogers made its way up the East River on a recent Saturday, stopping at a precise location off the Manhattan shoreline. Two guests on board — a fossil collector and a treasure hunter with large audiences on social media — tugged on scuba gear and dropped overboard into the frigid waters.
The boat, based in Staten Island, is named for a Korean War veteran and former New York City firefighter — and a redhead — and carries state-of-the-art equipment designed to map and scan the ocean floor to assist in construction, dredging and investigating wrecks.
On this day, they were drawn to their spot, near East 65th Street, not by scientific data or the boat’s keen instruments, but by a massively popular podcast: “The Joe Rogan Experience.” In a recent interview on that show, which has an estimated audience of 11 million listeners per episode on Spotify, a guest from Alaska presented an explosive discovery: There are tens of thousands of priceless woolly mammoth tusks lying on the river floor.
“I’m going to start a bone rush,” the guest, John Reeves, a fossil collector and gold miner, announced.
“A bone rush?” Mr. Rogan asked.
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “We’ll see if anybody out there’s got a sense of adventure.”
The answer came quickly. The podcast episode, which aired Dec. 30, was an instant sensation. Without hesitation, several teams of men and women from around the country drove, flew and floated to New York City for a chance at finding a many-thousands-year-old artifact that could be worth at least six figures.
“You can’t win the lottery if you don’t play,” said Jake Koehler, a 31-year-old underwater treasure hunter known on his YouTube channel as Scuba Jake, who booked a flight to New York from his home in Georgia after listening to Mr. Rogan. “What a story to tell your family and talk about at dinner.”
The search would be fraught; navigating the rapid currents of the heavily trafficked East River is a challenge for even the most experienced divers, particularly in the middle of winter when water temperatures dip into the 30s.
“Very popular river — very large boats go through there,” said Rick Cochrane, a fellow diver with his own YouTube channel, DigDiveDiscover, who traveled with Mr. Koehler. “Very strong currents go through there. It’s just not safe.”
Don Gann, an underwater construction worker from New Jersey who is better known as Dirty Water Don from the Discovery reality show “Sewer Divers,” put it another way: “I’m too stupid to be afraid.”
The divers attracted a virtual flotilla of news crews, photographers, livestreamers on social media, curious dog-walkers, joggers and moms with strollers who paused on the river’s chilly bank for a closer look. On this particular Saturday, Jan. 7, a drone hovered over the Red Rogers, as if peering over a diver’s neoprene shoulder for a closer look.
But an examination of the evidence Mr. Reeves relied upon to make his sensational claim on the podcast raised questions about just how many bones might be involved in this bone rush.
Mr. Reeves described it as “a boxcar load,” or about “50 tons” of bones and tusks that had been shipped to the American Museum of Natural History around 1940 but were instead dumped because, in his telling, the museum was not interested in them.
The tale of the power of what is arguably the world’s most popular podcast and the unquestioning acceptance of its sensational content begins eons ago, when mammoths and other so-called megafauna roamed the earth. Fast forward to the end of the 19th century and the gold rush that swept Alaska, which led to the discovery of countless bones, fossils, intact skeletons and even mummified prehistoric remains preserved in permafrost.
Around 1917, Childs Frick, a son of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick and a trustee at the American Museum of Natural History, began excavating prehistoric remains in several locations, including Alaska. It was hard work done quickly — the gold miners were impatient to see the bones removed so they could continue digging.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/...2449&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity
Young men in college seeking a job and adventure on the frontier arrived to help. One of them was Richard H. Osborne, who worked on what became known as the “bone wagon” in Alaska in the early 1940s. He and his fellow diggers unearthed some 250,000 specimens, which were sent to the museum in New York. Today, many of them are stored there in the Childs Frick Building, which is used for research and not open to the public.
Mr. Osborne found the work fascinating and went on to careers in paleontology and genetics. Around 2000 or so, looking back on his life at age 80, Mr. Osborne wrote a paper he hoped to turn into a book someday about his adventures collecting bones in Alaska, its scientific aspirations evident in its unwieldy title: “Early Man in Eastern Beringia: Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Artifacts and Associated Fauna Recovered from the Fairbanks Mining District, Alaska.”
He never wrote the book, and the paper was never published. Mr. Osborne died in 2005, a few years after it was written. But nearly two decades later, a stray thought in the manuscript about an early 1940s shipment that never made it to the museum would take on a remarkable new life that he could not have imagined.
“Mistakes made in the field as to acceptable condition of the bones shipped to New York City,” the report reads. These mistakes, the paper suggests, somehow led to specimens being dumped in the East River off the East River Drive at 65th Street.
The remains could make for a challenging recovery dig, Mr. Osborne added, “in the distant future.”
The general public was introduced to that distant future in the very last days of December 2022 by the tall, broad-shouldered Mr. Reeves from Fairbanks, himself a subject of a television show, “Goldfathers,” and a documentary about his fossil-rich property, “Boneyard Alaska.” Mr. Reeves owns land where the bone wagon collected its specimens some 80 years ago, and since 2000 he has sought to have some bones at the New York museum returned to Alaska for local display.
Seated across from Mr. Rogan during his episode, Mr. Reeves revealed Mr. Osborne’s typed paper with fanfare worthy of a drumroll. He read its long title and identified its three authors: Mr. Osborne; Robert L. Evander, a former paleontologist at the museum; and Robert A. Sattler, an archaeologist from Fairbanks. Then he slowly read the passage about remains dumped at East 65th Street and the river.
“They’re finders, keepers,” he told Mr. Rogan and his millions of listeners. “So if you want to go and find some bones, I’ll tell you exactly where they’re at.” He added an expletive.
Reached over Instagram, Mr. Reeves declined to elaborate for this story: “I’m perfectly happy with letting things play out the way they’re going to play out without any more comments from me,” he wrote.
He did say, however, that he obtained the document from Mr. Osborne himself — suggesting it has been in his possession for at least 17 years. He did not say why he waited until 2022 to make it public or what prompted him to do so.
Both of Mr. Osborne’s co-authors cast some level of doubt on the bone-dumping story.
Mr. Evander, who worked for the museum for 25 years until 2015, said he had no recollection of the document but nonetheless called the idea that tusks were dumped “implausible.”
Mr. Sattler said Mr. Osborne, his friend, had shared his belief that bones had been dumped in the river in conversation and in writing. This week, looking through his files, he found a document written by Mr. Osborne that repeated that claim and singled out Mr. Frick, who bankrolled one of the world’s greatest fossil collections, as a culprit.
“To simply dump specimens in the East River as Frick did with those he considered sufficiently studied or no longer of use — or useless — is not really viable in today’s world,” Mr. Osborne wrote in the late 1990s. He provided no evidence or context.
But Mr. Sattler said he believed Mr. Osborne was referring to tiny fragments, like crumbs or powder, perhaps of use to future scientists but worthless to a museum in the 1940s. “I really don’t think they would have been dumping tusks,” he said.
Finally, the museum issued a measured response to Mr. Reeves’s claim this month.
“We do not have any record of the disposal of these fossils in the East River,” said Scott Rohan, a museum spokesman, in a statement. “Nor have we been able to find any record of this report in the museum’s archives or other scientific sources.”
The young men who showed up early this month to dive for tusks harbored no apparent skepticism.
Mr. Koehler — Scuba Jake from Georgia — said fans began tagging him on social media immediately after the Joe Rogan episode aired. He was at first hesitant: “I wasn’t going to do it because it’s cold,” he said. But then Mr. Cochrane, the diver from Florida, called. “He said, ‘I’ll go if you go.’”
Mr. Koehler was also drawn to the novelty of the dive. “Not many people probably have been down to the bottom of the East River that are alive,” he said.
They reached out to Rogers Surveying on Staten Island, home of the Red Rogers, where they found an immediate welcome. Connor Rogers, the son of the owner, is a Joe Rogan fan and was eager to join the bone rush.
And so on Jan. 7, the two divers and their companions — Mr. Cochrane’s wife, Mr. Koehler’s girlfriend and a videographer — and the crew of the Red Rogers motored up the East River toward East 65th Street.
“Let’s make some dreams come true today,” Mr. Koehler said on camera. “Let’s find some bones!”
When they arrived, they made an unpleasant discovery: Another diving crew was already there. It was Mr. Gann — Dirty Water Don from “Sewer Divers” — leading a team that included two personalities from the media site Barstool Sports. On that boat, cameras were rolling and spirits were high: “We’re going to Bone Depot today, baby!” a passenger cried out.
Mr. Koehler and Mr. Cochrane waited until slack tide, when the currents would be the weakest, and around 4 p.m. that frigid Saturday, 45 minutes before sunset, clad head to flipper in gear, they dropped into the water.
Each diver carried a powerful flashlight to the riverbed, which revealed itself to be an epic field of debris. Concrete blocks, rebar, tires — even what appeared to be multiple Citi Bikes and a car. Mr. Koehler surfaced at one point with a skateboard covered in muck.
As the cold set in and their fingers went tingly and numb, the divers hastily combed the debris, finding nothing that resembled a tusk but some promising fragments, which they scooped into bags. Finally, after 15 or 20 minutes, the cold became too oppressive and they ascended to the Red Rogers.
Downriver, the Barstool Sports guys emerged from the water holding a huge femur — a gag they had brought with them, taken from a plastic Halloween skeleton.
The crews returned home to sift their specimens. Weeks passed. Then, last weekend, Mr. Cochrane posted an update on YouTube: “None of them actually are bone,” he said. He was disappointed.
But the tantalizing tug of the story held anyway. The young college student in Alaska who uncovered hundreds of thousands of specimens, his documented theory about what the river contained, the podcast interview — what if?
“The bones,” he told viewers, “could still be there.”
Mammoth Tusks in the East River? How Joe Rogan Started a ‘Bone Rush.’
After a podcast guest claimed that tons of prehistoric remains were dumped decades ago, scuba divers suited up. But the truth is as murky as the water.The surveying vessel Red Rogers made its way up the East River on a recent Saturday, stopping at a precise location off the Manhattan shoreline. Two guests on board — a fossil collector and a treasure hunter with large audiences on social media — tugged on scuba gear and dropped overboard into the frigid waters.
The boat, based in Staten Island, is named for a Korean War veteran and former New York City firefighter — and a redhead — and carries state-of-the-art equipment designed to map and scan the ocean floor to assist in construction, dredging and investigating wrecks.
On this day, they were drawn to their spot, near East 65th Street, not by scientific data or the boat’s keen instruments, but by a massively popular podcast: “The Joe Rogan Experience.” In a recent interview on that show, which has an estimated audience of 11 million listeners per episode on Spotify, a guest from Alaska presented an explosive discovery: There are tens of thousands of priceless woolly mammoth tusks lying on the river floor.
“I’m going to start a bone rush,” the guest, John Reeves, a fossil collector and gold miner, announced.
“A bone rush?” Mr. Rogan asked.
“Yes, sir,” he replied. “We’ll see if anybody out there’s got a sense of adventure.”
The answer came quickly. The podcast episode, which aired Dec. 30, was an instant sensation. Without hesitation, several teams of men and women from around the country drove, flew and floated to New York City for a chance at finding a many-thousands-year-old artifact that could be worth at least six figures.
“You can’t win the lottery if you don’t play,” said Jake Koehler, a 31-year-old underwater treasure hunter known on his YouTube channel as Scuba Jake, who booked a flight to New York from his home in Georgia after listening to Mr. Rogan. “What a story to tell your family and talk about at dinner.”
The search would be fraught; navigating the rapid currents of the heavily trafficked East River is a challenge for even the most experienced divers, particularly in the middle of winter when water temperatures dip into the 30s.
“Very popular river — very large boats go through there,” said Rick Cochrane, a fellow diver with his own YouTube channel, DigDiveDiscover, who traveled with Mr. Koehler. “Very strong currents go through there. It’s just not safe.”
Don Gann, an underwater construction worker from New Jersey who is better known as Dirty Water Don from the Discovery reality show “Sewer Divers,” put it another way: “I’m too stupid to be afraid.”
The divers attracted a virtual flotilla of news crews, photographers, livestreamers on social media, curious dog-walkers, joggers and moms with strollers who paused on the river’s chilly bank for a closer look. On this particular Saturday, Jan. 7, a drone hovered over the Red Rogers, as if peering over a diver’s neoprene shoulder for a closer look.
But an examination of the evidence Mr. Reeves relied upon to make his sensational claim on the podcast raised questions about just how many bones might be involved in this bone rush.
Mr. Reeves described it as “a boxcar load,” or about “50 tons” of bones and tusks that had been shipped to the American Museum of Natural History around 1940 but were instead dumped because, in his telling, the museum was not interested in them.
The tale of the power of what is arguably the world’s most popular podcast and the unquestioning acceptance of its sensational content begins eons ago, when mammoths and other so-called megafauna roamed the earth. Fast forward to the end of the 19th century and the gold rush that swept Alaska, which led to the discovery of countless bones, fossils, intact skeletons and even mummified prehistoric remains preserved in permafrost.
Around 1917, Childs Frick, a son of the industrialist Henry Clay Frick and a trustee at the American Museum of Natural History, began excavating prehistoric remains in several locations, including Alaska. It was hard work done quickly — the gold miners were impatient to see the bones removed so they could continue digging.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/23/...2449&surface=home-featured&variant=0_identity
Young men in college seeking a job and adventure on the frontier arrived to help. One of them was Richard H. Osborne, who worked on what became known as the “bone wagon” in Alaska in the early 1940s. He and his fellow diggers unearthed some 250,000 specimens, which were sent to the museum in New York. Today, many of them are stored there in the Childs Frick Building, which is used for research and not open to the public.
Mr. Osborne found the work fascinating and went on to careers in paleontology and genetics. Around 2000 or so, looking back on his life at age 80, Mr. Osborne wrote a paper he hoped to turn into a book someday about his adventures collecting bones in Alaska, its scientific aspirations evident in its unwieldy title: “Early Man in Eastern Beringia: Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene Artifacts and Associated Fauna Recovered from the Fairbanks Mining District, Alaska.”
He never wrote the book, and the paper was never published. Mr. Osborne died in 2005, a few years after it was written. But nearly two decades later, a stray thought in the manuscript about an early 1940s shipment that never made it to the museum would take on a remarkable new life that he could not have imagined.
“Mistakes made in the field as to acceptable condition of the bones shipped to New York City,” the report reads. These mistakes, the paper suggests, somehow led to specimens being dumped in the East River off the East River Drive at 65th Street.
The remains could make for a challenging recovery dig, Mr. Osborne added, “in the distant future.”
The general public was introduced to that distant future in the very last days of December 2022 by the tall, broad-shouldered Mr. Reeves from Fairbanks, himself a subject of a television show, “Goldfathers,” and a documentary about his fossil-rich property, “Boneyard Alaska.” Mr. Reeves owns land where the bone wagon collected its specimens some 80 years ago, and since 2000 he has sought to have some bones at the New York museum returned to Alaska for local display.
Seated across from Mr. Rogan during his episode, Mr. Reeves revealed Mr. Osborne’s typed paper with fanfare worthy of a drumroll. He read its long title and identified its three authors: Mr. Osborne; Robert L. Evander, a former paleontologist at the museum; and Robert A. Sattler, an archaeologist from Fairbanks. Then he slowly read the passage about remains dumped at East 65th Street and the river.
“They’re finders, keepers,” he told Mr. Rogan and his millions of listeners. “So if you want to go and find some bones, I’ll tell you exactly where they’re at.” He added an expletive.
Reached over Instagram, Mr. Reeves declined to elaborate for this story: “I’m perfectly happy with letting things play out the way they’re going to play out without any more comments from me,” he wrote.
He did say, however, that he obtained the document from Mr. Osborne himself — suggesting it has been in his possession for at least 17 years. He did not say why he waited until 2022 to make it public or what prompted him to do so.
Both of Mr. Osborne’s co-authors cast some level of doubt on the bone-dumping story.
Mr. Evander, who worked for the museum for 25 years until 2015, said he had no recollection of the document but nonetheless called the idea that tusks were dumped “implausible.”
Mr. Sattler said Mr. Osborne, his friend, had shared his belief that bones had been dumped in the river in conversation and in writing. This week, looking through his files, he found a document written by Mr. Osborne that repeated that claim and singled out Mr. Frick, who bankrolled one of the world’s greatest fossil collections, as a culprit.
“To simply dump specimens in the East River as Frick did with those he considered sufficiently studied or no longer of use — or useless — is not really viable in today’s world,” Mr. Osborne wrote in the late 1990s. He provided no evidence or context.
But Mr. Sattler said he believed Mr. Osborne was referring to tiny fragments, like crumbs or powder, perhaps of use to future scientists but worthless to a museum in the 1940s. “I really don’t think they would have been dumping tusks,” he said.
Finally, the museum issued a measured response to Mr. Reeves’s claim this month.
“We do not have any record of the disposal of these fossils in the East River,” said Scott Rohan, a museum spokesman, in a statement. “Nor have we been able to find any record of this report in the museum’s archives or other scientific sources.”
The young men who showed up early this month to dive for tusks harbored no apparent skepticism.
Mr. Koehler — Scuba Jake from Georgia — said fans began tagging him on social media immediately after the Joe Rogan episode aired. He was at first hesitant: “I wasn’t going to do it because it’s cold,” he said. But then Mr. Cochrane, the diver from Florida, called. “He said, ‘I’ll go if you go.’”
Mr. Koehler was also drawn to the novelty of the dive. “Not many people probably have been down to the bottom of the East River that are alive,” he said.
They reached out to Rogers Surveying on Staten Island, home of the Red Rogers, where they found an immediate welcome. Connor Rogers, the son of the owner, is a Joe Rogan fan and was eager to join the bone rush.
And so on Jan. 7, the two divers and their companions — Mr. Cochrane’s wife, Mr. Koehler’s girlfriend and a videographer — and the crew of the Red Rogers motored up the East River toward East 65th Street.
“Let’s make some dreams come true today,” Mr. Koehler said on camera. “Let’s find some bones!”
When they arrived, they made an unpleasant discovery: Another diving crew was already there. It was Mr. Gann — Dirty Water Don from “Sewer Divers” — leading a team that included two personalities from the media site Barstool Sports. On that boat, cameras were rolling and spirits were high: “We’re going to Bone Depot today, baby!” a passenger cried out.
Mr. Koehler and Mr. Cochrane waited until slack tide, when the currents would be the weakest, and around 4 p.m. that frigid Saturday, 45 minutes before sunset, clad head to flipper in gear, they dropped into the water.
Each diver carried a powerful flashlight to the riverbed, which revealed itself to be an epic field of debris. Concrete blocks, rebar, tires — even what appeared to be multiple Citi Bikes and a car. Mr. Koehler surfaced at one point with a skateboard covered in muck.
As the cold set in and their fingers went tingly and numb, the divers hastily combed the debris, finding nothing that resembled a tusk but some promising fragments, which they scooped into bags. Finally, after 15 or 20 minutes, the cold became too oppressive and they ascended to the Red Rogers.
Downriver, the Barstool Sports guys emerged from the water holding a huge femur — a gag they had brought with them, taken from a plastic Halloween skeleton.
The crews returned home to sift their specimens. Weeks passed. Then, last weekend, Mr. Cochrane posted an update on YouTube: “None of them actually are bone,” he said. He was disappointed.
But the tantalizing tug of the story held anyway. The young college student in Alaska who uncovered hundreds of thousands of specimens, his documented theory about what the river contained, the podcast interview — what if?
“The bones,” he told viewers, “could still be there.”
For once in my life I got in when the getting was good, selling a car to Carvarna a year ago for a couple of thousand more than CarMax was willing to buy it for...
Eighteen months ago, the online used car retailer Carvana had such great prospects that it was worth $80 billion. Now it is valued at less than $1.5 billion, a 98 percent plunge, and is struggling to survive.
Many other tech companies are also seeing their fortunes reverse and their dreams dim. They are shedding employees, cutting back, watching their financial valuations shrivel — even as the larger economy chugs along with a low unemployment rate and a 3.2 percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter.
One largely unacknowledged explanation: An unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates has abruptly ended. Money is no longer virtually free.
For over a decade, investors desperate for returns sent their money to Silicon Valley, which pumped it into a wide range of start-ups that might not have received a nod in less heady times. Extreme valuations made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly boosted market share.
It was a boom that seemed as if it would never end. Tech piled up victories, and its competitors wilted. Carvana built dozens of flashy car “vending machines” across the country, marketed itself relentlessly and offered very attractive prices for trade-ins.
“The whole tech industry of the last 15 years was built by cheap money,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst with Guidehouse Insights. “Now they’re getting hit by a new reality, and they will pay the price.”
Cheap money funded many of the acquisitions that substitute for organic growth in tech. Two years ago, as the pandemic raged and many office workers were confined to their homes, Salesforce bought the office communications tool Slack for $28 billion, a sum that some analysts thought was too high. Salesforce borrowed $10 billion to do the deal. This month, it said it was cutting 8,000 people, about 10 percent of its staff, many of them at Slack.
Even the biggest tech companies are affected. Amazon was willing to lose money for years to acquire new customers. It is taking a different approach these days, laying off 18,000 office workers and shuttering operations that are not financially viable.
Carvana, like many start-ups, pulled a page out of Amazon’s old playbook, trying to get big fast. Used cars, it believed, were a highly fragmented market ripe for reinvention, just the way taxis, bookstores and hotels had been. It strove to outdistance any competition.
The company, based in Tempe, Ariz., wanted to replace traditional dealers with, Carvana said grandly, “technology and exceptional customer service.” In what seemed to symbolize the death of the old way of doing things, it paid $22 million for a six-acre site in San Diego that a Mazda dealer had occupied since 1965.
Where traditional dealerships were literally flat, Carvana built multistory car vending machines that became memorable local landmarks. Customers picked up their cars at these towers, which now total 33. A corporate video of the building of one vending machine has over four million views on YouTube.
In the third quarter of 2021, Carvana delivered 110,000 cars to customers, up 74 percent from 2020. The goal: two million cars a year, which would make it by far the largest used car retailer.
An eye-catching Carvana car vending machine in Uniondale, N.Y.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Then, even more quickly than the company grew, it fell apart. When used car sales rose more than 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic, that created a supply problem: Carvana needed many more vehicles. It acquired a car auction company for $2.2 billion and took on even more debt at a premium interest rate. And it paid customers handsomely for cars.
But as the pandemic waned and interest rates began to rise, sales slowed. Carvana, which declined to comment for this article, did a round of layoffs in May and another in November. Its chief executive, Ernie Garcia, blamed the higher cost of financing, saying, “We failed to accurately predict how all this will play out.”
Some competitors are even worse off. Vroom, a Houston company, has seen its stock fall to $1 from $65 in mid-2020. Over the past year, it has dismissed half of its employees.
“High rates are painful for almost everyone, but they are particularly painful for Silicon Valley,” said Kairong Xiao, an associate professor of finance at Columbia Business School. “I expect more layoffs and investment cuts unless the Fed reverses its tightening.”
At the moment, there is little likelihood of that. The market expects two more rate increases by the Federal Reserve this year, to at least 5 percent.
In real estate, that is trouble for anyone expecting a quick recovery. Low rates not only pushed up house prices but also made it irresistible for companies such as Zillow as well as Redfin, Opendoor Technologies and others, to get into a business that used to be considered slightly disreputable: flipping houses.
In 2019, Zillow estimated it would soon have revenue of $20 billion from selling 5,000 houses a month. That thrilled investors, who pushed the publicly traded Seattle company to a $45 billion valuation and created a hiring boom that raised the number of employees to 8,000.
Zillow’s notion was to use artificial intelligence software to make a chaotic real estate market more efficient, predictable and profitable. This was the sort of innovation that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen talked about in 2011 when he said digital insurgents would take over entire industries. “Software is eating the world,” he wrote.
In June 2021, Zillow owned 50 homes in California’s capital, Sacramento. Five months later, it had 400. One was an unremarkable four-bedroom, three-bath house in the northwest corner of the city. Built in 2001, it is convenient to several parks and the airport. Zillow paid $700,000 for it.
Zillow put the house on the market for months, but no one wanted it, even at $625,000. Last fall, after it had unceremoniously exited the flipping market, Zillow unloaded the house for $355,000. Low rates had made it seem possible that Zillow could shoot for the moon, but even they could not make it a success.
Ryan Lundquist, a Sacramento appraiser who followed the house’s history closely on his blog, said Zillow realized real estate was fragmented but perhaps did not quite appreciate that houses were labor-intensive, deeply personal, one-to-one transactions.
“This idea of being able to come in and change the game completely — that’s really difficult to do, and most of the time you don’t,” he said.
Zillow’s market value has now shrunk to $10 billion, and its employee count to around 5,500 after two rounds of layoffs. It declined to comment.
The dream of market domination through software dies hard, however. Zillow recently made a deal with Opendoor, an online real estate company in San Francisco that buys and sells residential properties and has also been ravaged by the downturn. Under the agreement, sellers on Zillow’s platform can request to have Opendoor make offers on their homes. Zillow said sellers would “save themselves the stress and uncertainty of a traditional sale process.”
That partnership might explain why the buyer of that four-bedroom Sacramento house, one of the last in Zillow’s portfolio, was none other than Opendoor. It made some modest improvements and put the house on the market for $632,000, nearly twice what it had paid. A deal is pending.
“If it were really this easy, everyone would be a flipper,” Mr. Lundquist said.
The easy money era had been well established when Amazon decided it had mastered e-commerce enough to take on the physical world. Its plans to expand into bookstores was a rumor for years and finally happened in 2015. The media went wild. According to one well-circulated story, the retailer planned to open as many as 400 bookstores.
The company’s idea was that the stores would function as extensions of its online operation. Reader reviews would guide the potential buyer. Titles were displayed face out, so there were only 6,000 of them. The stores were showrooms for Amazon’s electronics.
Being a showroom for the internet is expensive. Amazon had to hire booksellers and lease storefronts in popular areas. And letting enthusiastic reviews be one of the selection criteria meant stocking self-published titles, some of which were pumped up with reviews by the authors’ friends. These were not books that readers wanted.
Amazon likes to try new things, and that costs money. It took on another $10 billion of long-term debt in the first nine months of the year at a higher rate of interest than it was paying two years ago. This month, it said it was borrowing $8 billion more. Its stock market valuation has shrunk by about a trillion dollars.
The retailer closed 68 stores last March, including not only bookstores but also pop-ups and so-called four-star stores. It continues to operate its Whole Foods grocery subsidiary, which has 500 U.S. locations, and other food stores. Amazon said in a statement that it was “committed to building great, long-term physical retail experiences and technologies.”
Traditional book selling, where expectations are modest, may have an easier path now. Barnes & Noble, the bricks-and-mortar chain recently deemed all but dead, has moved into two former Amazon locations in Massachusetts, putting about 20,000 titles into each. The chain said the stores were doing “very well.” It is scouting other former Amazon locations.
“Amazon did a very different bookstore than we’re doing,” said Janine Flanigan, Barnes & Noble’s director of store planning and design. “Our focus is books.”
For Tech Companies, Years of Easy Money Yield to Hard Times
Rock-bottom rates were the secret engine fueling $1 billion start-ups and virtual attempts to conquer the physical world. But in 2023, reality bites.Eighteen months ago, the online used car retailer Carvana had such great prospects that it was worth $80 billion. Now it is valued at less than $1.5 billion, a 98 percent plunge, and is struggling to survive.
Many other tech companies are also seeing their fortunes reverse and their dreams dim. They are shedding employees, cutting back, watching their financial valuations shrivel — even as the larger economy chugs along with a low unemployment rate and a 3.2 percent annualized growth rate in the third quarter.
One largely unacknowledged explanation: An unprecedented era of rock-bottom interest rates has abruptly ended. Money is no longer virtually free.
For over a decade, investors desperate for returns sent their money to Silicon Valley, which pumped it into a wide range of start-ups that might not have received a nod in less heady times. Extreme valuations made it easy to issue stock or take on loans to expand aggressively or to offer sweet deals to potential customers that quickly boosted market share.
It was a boom that seemed as if it would never end. Tech piled up victories, and its competitors wilted. Carvana built dozens of flashy car “vending machines” across the country, marketed itself relentlessly and offered very attractive prices for trade-ins.
“The whole tech industry of the last 15 years was built by cheap money,” said Sam Abuelsamid, principal analyst with Guidehouse Insights. “Now they’re getting hit by a new reality, and they will pay the price.”
Cheap money funded many of the acquisitions that substitute for organic growth in tech. Two years ago, as the pandemic raged and many office workers were confined to their homes, Salesforce bought the office communications tool Slack for $28 billion, a sum that some analysts thought was too high. Salesforce borrowed $10 billion to do the deal. This month, it said it was cutting 8,000 people, about 10 percent of its staff, many of them at Slack.
Even the biggest tech companies are affected. Amazon was willing to lose money for years to acquire new customers. It is taking a different approach these days, laying off 18,000 office workers and shuttering operations that are not financially viable.
Carvana, like many start-ups, pulled a page out of Amazon’s old playbook, trying to get big fast. Used cars, it believed, were a highly fragmented market ripe for reinvention, just the way taxis, bookstores and hotels had been. It strove to outdistance any competition.
The company, based in Tempe, Ariz., wanted to replace traditional dealers with, Carvana said grandly, “technology and exceptional customer service.” In what seemed to symbolize the death of the old way of doing things, it paid $22 million for a six-acre site in San Diego that a Mazda dealer had occupied since 1965.
Where traditional dealerships were literally flat, Carvana built multistory car vending machines that became memorable local landmarks. Customers picked up their cars at these towers, which now total 33. A corporate video of the building of one vending machine has over four million views on YouTube.
In the third quarter of 2021, Carvana delivered 110,000 cars to customers, up 74 percent from 2020. The goal: two million cars a year, which would make it by far the largest used car retailer.
An eye-catching Carvana car vending machine in Uniondale, N.Y.Credit...Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Then, even more quickly than the company grew, it fell apart. When used car sales rose more than 25 percent in the first year of the pandemic, that created a supply problem: Carvana needed many more vehicles. It acquired a car auction company for $2.2 billion and took on even more debt at a premium interest rate. And it paid customers handsomely for cars.
But as the pandemic waned and interest rates began to rise, sales slowed. Carvana, which declined to comment for this article, did a round of layoffs in May and another in November. Its chief executive, Ernie Garcia, blamed the higher cost of financing, saying, “We failed to accurately predict how all this will play out.”
Some competitors are even worse off. Vroom, a Houston company, has seen its stock fall to $1 from $65 in mid-2020. Over the past year, it has dismissed half of its employees.
“High rates are painful for almost everyone, but they are particularly painful for Silicon Valley,” said Kairong Xiao, an associate professor of finance at Columbia Business School. “I expect more layoffs and investment cuts unless the Fed reverses its tightening.”
At the moment, there is little likelihood of that. The market expects two more rate increases by the Federal Reserve this year, to at least 5 percent.
In real estate, that is trouble for anyone expecting a quick recovery. Low rates not only pushed up house prices but also made it irresistible for companies such as Zillow as well as Redfin, Opendoor Technologies and others, to get into a business that used to be considered slightly disreputable: flipping houses.
In 2019, Zillow estimated it would soon have revenue of $20 billion from selling 5,000 houses a month. That thrilled investors, who pushed the publicly traded Seattle company to a $45 billion valuation and created a hiring boom that raised the number of employees to 8,000.
Zillow’s notion was to use artificial intelligence software to make a chaotic real estate market more efficient, predictable and profitable. This was the sort of innovation that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen talked about in 2011 when he said digital insurgents would take over entire industries. “Software is eating the world,” he wrote.
In June 2021, Zillow owned 50 homes in California’s capital, Sacramento. Five months later, it had 400. One was an unremarkable four-bedroom, three-bath house in the northwest corner of the city. Built in 2001, it is convenient to several parks and the airport. Zillow paid $700,000 for it.
Zillow put the house on the market for months, but no one wanted it, even at $625,000. Last fall, after it had unceremoniously exited the flipping market, Zillow unloaded the house for $355,000. Low rates had made it seem possible that Zillow could shoot for the moon, but even they could not make it a success.
Ryan Lundquist, a Sacramento appraiser who followed the house’s history closely on his blog, said Zillow realized real estate was fragmented but perhaps did not quite appreciate that houses were labor-intensive, deeply personal, one-to-one transactions.
“This idea of being able to come in and change the game completely — that’s really difficult to do, and most of the time you don’t,” he said.
Zillow’s market value has now shrunk to $10 billion, and its employee count to around 5,500 after two rounds of layoffs. It declined to comment.
The dream of market domination through software dies hard, however. Zillow recently made a deal with Opendoor, an online real estate company in San Francisco that buys and sells residential properties and has also been ravaged by the downturn. Under the agreement, sellers on Zillow’s platform can request to have Opendoor make offers on their homes. Zillow said sellers would “save themselves the stress and uncertainty of a traditional sale process.”
That partnership might explain why the buyer of that four-bedroom Sacramento house, one of the last in Zillow’s portfolio, was none other than Opendoor. It made some modest improvements and put the house on the market for $632,000, nearly twice what it had paid. A deal is pending.
“If it were really this easy, everyone would be a flipper,” Mr. Lundquist said.
The easy money era had been well established when Amazon decided it had mastered e-commerce enough to take on the physical world. Its plans to expand into bookstores was a rumor for years and finally happened in 2015. The media went wild. According to one well-circulated story, the retailer planned to open as many as 400 bookstores.
The company’s idea was that the stores would function as extensions of its online operation. Reader reviews would guide the potential buyer. Titles were displayed face out, so there were only 6,000 of them. The stores were showrooms for Amazon’s electronics.
Being a showroom for the internet is expensive. Amazon had to hire booksellers and lease storefronts in popular areas. And letting enthusiastic reviews be one of the selection criteria meant stocking self-published titles, some of which were pumped up with reviews by the authors’ friends. These were not books that readers wanted.
Amazon likes to try new things, and that costs money. It took on another $10 billion of long-term debt in the first nine months of the year at a higher rate of interest than it was paying two years ago. This month, it said it was borrowing $8 billion more. Its stock market valuation has shrunk by about a trillion dollars.
The retailer closed 68 stores last March, including not only bookstores but also pop-ups and so-called four-star stores. It continues to operate its Whole Foods grocery subsidiary, which has 500 U.S. locations, and other food stores. Amazon said in a statement that it was “committed to building great, long-term physical retail experiences and technologies.”
Traditional book selling, where expectations are modest, may have an easier path now. Barnes & Noble, the bricks-and-mortar chain recently deemed all but dead, has moved into two former Amazon locations in Massachusetts, putting about 20,000 titles into each. The chain said the stores were doing “very well.” It is scouting other former Amazon locations.
“Amazon did a very different bookstore than we’re doing,” said Janine Flanigan, Barnes & Noble’s director of store planning and design. “Our focus is books.”
I've always quipped that "He with the best lawyers wins"...
In 2016, a blockbuster drug called Humira was poised to become a lot less valuable.
The key patent on the best-selling anti-inflammatory medication, used to treat conditions like arthritis, was expiring at the end of the year. Regulators had blessed a rival version of the drug, and more copycats were close behind. The onset of competition seemed likely to push down the medication’s $50,000-a-year list price.
Instead, the opposite happened.
Through its savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system, Humira’s manufacturer, AbbVie, blocked competitors from entering the market. For the next six years, the drug’s price kept rising. Today, Humira is the most lucrative franchise in pharmaceutical history.
Next week, the curtain is expected to come down on a monopoly that has generated $114 billion in revenue for AbbVie just since the end of 2016. The knockoff drug that regulators authorized more than six years ago, Amgen’s Amjevita, will come to market in the United States, and as many as nine more Humira competitors will follow this year from pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer. Prices are likely to tumble.
The reason that it has taken so long to get to this point is a case study in how drug companies artificially prop up prices on their best-selling drugs.
AbbVie orchestrated the delay by building a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year.
The strategy has been a gold mine for AbbVie, at the expense of patients and taxpayers.
Over the past 20 years, AbbVie and its former parent company increased Humira’s price about 30 times, most recently by 8 percent this month. Since the end of 2016, the drug’s list price has gone up 60 percent to over $80,000 a year, according to SSR Health, a research firm.
One analysis found that Medicare, which in 2020 covered the cost of Humira for 42,000 patients, spent $2.2 billion more on the drug from 2016 to 2019 than it would have if competitors had been allowed to start selling their drugs promptly. In interviews, patients said they either had to forgo treatment or were planning to delay their retirement in the face of enormous out-of-pocket costs for Humira.
AbbVie did not invent these patent-prolonging strategies; companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca have deployed similar tactics to maximize profits on drugs for the treatment of cancer, anxiety and heartburn. But AbbVie’s success with Humira stands out even in an industry adept at manipulating the U.S. intellectual-property regime.
“Humira is the poster child for many of the biggest concerns with the pharmaceutical industry,” said Rachel Sachs, a drug pricing expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “AbbVie and Humira showed other companies what it was possible to do.”
Following AbbVie’s footsteps, Amgen has piled up patents for its anti-inflammatory drug Enbrel, delaying a copycat version by an expected 13 years after it won regulatory approval. Merck and its partners have sought 180 patents, by one count, related to its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda, and the company is working on a new formulation that could extend its monopoly further.
Humira has earned $208 billion globally since it was first approved in 2002 to ease the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. It has since been authorized to treat more autoimmune conditions, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Patients administer it themselves, typically every week or two, injecting it with a pen or syringe. In 2021, sales of Humira accounted for more than a third of AbbVie’s total revenue.
An AbbVie spokesman declined to comment. The company’s lawyers have previously said it is acting within the parameters of the U.S. patent system. Federal courts have upheld the legality of AbbVie’s patent strategy with Humira, though lawmakers and regulators over the years have proposed changes to the U.S. patent system to discourage such tactics.
In 2010, the Affordable Care Act created a pathway for the approval of so-called biosimilars, which are competitors to complex biologic drugs like Humira that are made inside living cells. Unlike generic equivalents of traditional synthetic medications, biosimilars usually are not identical to their branded counterparts and cannot be swapped out by a pharmacist.
The hope was that biosimilars would drastically drive down the cost of pricey brand-name biologics. That is what has happened in Europe. But it has not worked out that way in the United States.
Patents are good for 20 years after an application is filed. Because they protect patent holders’ right to profit off their inventions, they are supposed to incentivize the expensive risk-taking that sometimes yields breakthrough innovations. But drug companies have turned patents into weapons to thwart competition.
AbbVie and its affiliates have applied for 311 patents, of which 165 have been granted, related to Humira, according to the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, which tracks drug patents. A vast majority were filed after Humira was on the market.
Some of Humira’s patents covered innovations that benefited patients, like a formulation of the drug that reduced the pain from injections. But many of them simply elaborated on previous patents.
For example, an early Humira patent, which expired in 2016, claimed that the drug could treat a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the joints, among other diseases. In 2014, AbbVie applied for another patent for a method of treating ankylosing spondylitis with a specific dosing of 40 milligrams of Humira. The application was approved, adding 11 years of patent protection beyond 2016.
The patent strategy for Humira was designed to “make it more difficult for a biosimilar to follow behind,” Bill Chase, an AbbVie executive, said at a conference in 2014.
AbbVie has been aggressive about suing rivals that have tried to introduce biosimilar versions of Humira. In 2016, with Amgen’s copycat product on the verge of winning regulatory approval, AbbVie sued Amgen, alleging that it was violating 10 of its patents. Amgen argued that most of AbbVie’s patents were invalid, but the two sides reached a settlement in which Amgen agreed not to begin selling its drug until 2023.
Over the next five years, AbbVie reached similar settlements with nine other manufacturers seeking to launch their own versions of Humira. All of them agreed to delay their market entry until 2023.
Some Medicare patients have been suffering as a result.
Sue Lee, 80, of Crestwood, Ky., had been taking Humira for years to prevent painful sores caused by a chronic skin condition known as psoriasis. Her employer’s insurance plan had helped keep her annual payments to $60. Then she retired. Under Medicare rules, she would have to pay about $8,000 a year, which she could not afford.
“I cried a long time,” she said.
For months, Ms. Lee stopped taking any medication. The sores “came back with a vengeance,” she said. She joined a clinical trial to temporarily get access to another medication. Now she is relying on free samples of another drug provided by her doctor. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if that supply runs out.
Barb Teron, a book buyer in Brook Park, Ohio, plans to delay her retirement because she is worried about Humira’s cost. Ms. Teron, who takes Humira for Crohn’s disease and colitis, has never had to pay more than $5 for a refill of the drug because her employer’s insurance plan picks up most of the tab. The cost, according to a pharmacy app on Ms. Teron’s phone, was $88,766 in the past year.
Ms. Teron, who turns 64 in March, would have liked to retire next year, but that would have meant relying on Medicare. She fears that her out-of-pocket costs will spiral higher. “When I look at that $88,000 charge for a year, there’s no way,” Ms. Teron said.
AbbVie executives have acknowledged that Medicare patients often pay much more than privately insured people, but they said the blame lay with Medicare. In 2021 testimony to a congressional committee investigating drug prices, AbbVie’s chief executive, Richard Gonzalez, said the average Medicare patient had to pay $5,800 out of pocket annually. (AbbVie declined to provide updated figures.) He said AbbVie provided the drug for virtually nothing to nearly 40 percent of Medicare patients.
The drug’s high price is also taxing employers.
Soon after she started taking Humira, Melissa Andersen, an occupational therapist from Camdenton, Mo., got a call from a human resources representative at her company. The company directly covers its employees’ health claims, rather than paying premiums to an insurer. Her Humira was costing the company well over $70,000 a year — more than Ms. Andersen’s salary.
The H.R. employee asked if Ms. Andersen would be willing to obtain the drug in an unconventional way to save money. She said yes.
As soon as March, her company plans to fly Ms. Andersen, 48, to the Bahamas, so that a doctor can prescribe her a four-month supply of Humira that she can pick up at a pharmacy there. Humira is much cheaper in the Bahamas, where the industry has less influence than in it does in Washington and the government proactively controls drug pricing.
It is not yet clear how much the knockoff products will cost and how quickly patients will switch over to them. Billions of dollars in drug spending will ride on the answers to those questions.
“We price our products according to the value they deliver,” said Jessica Akopyan, a spokeswoman for Amgen, whose biosimilar product comes to market on Tuesday. She added that the company would “employ flexible pricing approaches to ensure patient access.”
Even now, as AbbVie prepares for competitors to erode its Humira sales in the United States, the company will have a new way to make more money from the drug. Under the terms of the legal settlements it reached with rival manufacturers from 2017 to 2022, AbbVie will earn royalties from the knockoff products that it delayed.
The exact sizes of the royalties are confidential, but analysts have estimated that they could be 10 percent of net sales. That could translate to tens of millions of dollars annually for AbbVie.
In the longer run, though, AbbVie’s success with Humira may boomerang on the drug industry.
Last year, the company’s tactics became a rallying cry for federal lawmakers as they successfully pushed for Medicare to have greater control over the price of widely used drugs that, like Humira, have been on the market for many years but still lack competition.
How a Drug Company Made $114 Billion by Gaming the U.S. Patent System
AbbVie for years delayed competition for its blockbuster drug Humira, at the expense of patients and taxpayers. The monopoly is about to end.In 2016, a blockbuster drug called Humira was poised to become a lot less valuable.
The key patent on the best-selling anti-inflammatory medication, used to treat conditions like arthritis, was expiring at the end of the year. Regulators had blessed a rival version of the drug, and more copycats were close behind. The onset of competition seemed likely to push down the medication’s $50,000-a-year list price.
Instead, the opposite happened.
Through its savvy but legal exploitation of the U.S. patent system, Humira’s manufacturer, AbbVie, blocked competitors from entering the market. For the next six years, the drug’s price kept rising. Today, Humira is the most lucrative franchise in pharmaceutical history.
Next week, the curtain is expected to come down on a monopoly that has generated $114 billion in revenue for AbbVie just since the end of 2016. The knockoff drug that regulators authorized more than six years ago, Amgen’s Amjevita, will come to market in the United States, and as many as nine more Humira competitors will follow this year from pharmaceutical giants including Pfizer. Prices are likely to tumble.
The reason that it has taken so long to get to this point is a case study in how drug companies artificially prop up prices on their best-selling drugs.
AbbVie orchestrated the delay by building a formidable wall of intellectual property protection and suing would-be competitors before settling with them to delay their product launches until this year.
The strategy has been a gold mine for AbbVie, at the expense of patients and taxpayers.
Over the past 20 years, AbbVie and its former parent company increased Humira’s price about 30 times, most recently by 8 percent this month. Since the end of 2016, the drug’s list price has gone up 60 percent to over $80,000 a year, according to SSR Health, a research firm.
One analysis found that Medicare, which in 2020 covered the cost of Humira for 42,000 patients, spent $2.2 billion more on the drug from 2016 to 2019 than it would have if competitors had been allowed to start selling their drugs promptly. In interviews, patients said they either had to forgo treatment or were planning to delay their retirement in the face of enormous out-of-pocket costs for Humira.
AbbVie did not invent these patent-prolonging strategies; companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and AstraZeneca have deployed similar tactics to maximize profits on drugs for the treatment of cancer, anxiety and heartburn. But AbbVie’s success with Humira stands out even in an industry adept at manipulating the U.S. intellectual-property regime.
“Humira is the poster child for many of the biggest concerns with the pharmaceutical industry,” said Rachel Sachs, a drug pricing expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “AbbVie and Humira showed other companies what it was possible to do.”
Following AbbVie’s footsteps, Amgen has piled up patents for its anti-inflammatory drug Enbrel, delaying a copycat version by an expected 13 years after it won regulatory approval. Merck and its partners have sought 180 patents, by one count, related to its blockbuster cancer drug Keytruda, and the company is working on a new formulation that could extend its monopoly further.
Humira has earned $208 billion globally since it was first approved in 2002 to ease the symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. It has since been authorized to treat more autoimmune conditions, including Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. Patients administer it themselves, typically every week or two, injecting it with a pen or syringe. In 2021, sales of Humira accounted for more than a third of AbbVie’s total revenue.
An AbbVie spokesman declined to comment. The company’s lawyers have previously said it is acting within the parameters of the U.S. patent system. Federal courts have upheld the legality of AbbVie’s patent strategy with Humira, though lawmakers and regulators over the years have proposed changes to the U.S. patent system to discourage such tactics.
In 2010, the Affordable Care Act created a pathway for the approval of so-called biosimilars, which are competitors to complex biologic drugs like Humira that are made inside living cells. Unlike generic equivalents of traditional synthetic medications, biosimilars usually are not identical to their branded counterparts and cannot be swapped out by a pharmacist.
The hope was that biosimilars would drastically drive down the cost of pricey brand-name biologics. That is what has happened in Europe. But it has not worked out that way in the United States.
Patents are good for 20 years after an application is filed. Because they protect patent holders’ right to profit off their inventions, they are supposed to incentivize the expensive risk-taking that sometimes yields breakthrough innovations. But drug companies have turned patents into weapons to thwart competition.
AbbVie and its affiliates have applied for 311 patents, of which 165 have been granted, related to Humira, according to the Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge, which tracks drug patents. A vast majority were filed after Humira was on the market.
Some of Humira’s patents covered innovations that benefited patients, like a formulation of the drug that reduced the pain from injections. But many of them simply elaborated on previous patents.
For example, an early Humira patent, which expired in 2016, claimed that the drug could treat a condition known as ankylosing spondylitis, a type of arthritis that causes inflammation in the joints, among other diseases. In 2014, AbbVie applied for another patent for a method of treating ankylosing spondylitis with a specific dosing of 40 milligrams of Humira. The application was approved, adding 11 years of patent protection beyond 2016.
The patent strategy for Humira was designed to “make it more difficult for a biosimilar to follow behind,” Bill Chase, an AbbVie executive, said at a conference in 2014.
AbbVie has been aggressive about suing rivals that have tried to introduce biosimilar versions of Humira. In 2016, with Amgen’s copycat product on the verge of winning regulatory approval, AbbVie sued Amgen, alleging that it was violating 10 of its patents. Amgen argued that most of AbbVie’s patents were invalid, but the two sides reached a settlement in which Amgen agreed not to begin selling its drug until 2023.
Over the next five years, AbbVie reached similar settlements with nine other manufacturers seeking to launch their own versions of Humira. All of them agreed to delay their market entry until 2023.
Some Medicare patients have been suffering as a result.
Sue Lee, 80, of Crestwood, Ky., had been taking Humira for years to prevent painful sores caused by a chronic skin condition known as psoriasis. Her employer’s insurance plan had helped keep her annual payments to $60. Then she retired. Under Medicare rules, she would have to pay about $8,000 a year, which she could not afford.
“I cried a long time,” she said.
For months, Ms. Lee stopped taking any medication. The sores “came back with a vengeance,” she said. She joined a clinical trial to temporarily get access to another medication. Now she is relying on free samples of another drug provided by her doctor. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if that supply runs out.
Barb Teron, a book buyer in Brook Park, Ohio, plans to delay her retirement because she is worried about Humira’s cost. Ms. Teron, who takes Humira for Crohn’s disease and colitis, has never had to pay more than $5 for a refill of the drug because her employer’s insurance plan picks up most of the tab. The cost, according to a pharmacy app on Ms. Teron’s phone, was $88,766 in the past year.
Ms. Teron, who turns 64 in March, would have liked to retire next year, but that would have meant relying on Medicare. She fears that her out-of-pocket costs will spiral higher. “When I look at that $88,000 charge for a year, there’s no way,” Ms. Teron said.
AbbVie executives have acknowledged that Medicare patients often pay much more than privately insured people, but they said the blame lay with Medicare. In 2021 testimony to a congressional committee investigating drug prices, AbbVie’s chief executive, Richard Gonzalez, said the average Medicare patient had to pay $5,800 out of pocket annually. (AbbVie declined to provide updated figures.) He said AbbVie provided the drug for virtually nothing to nearly 40 percent of Medicare patients.
The drug’s high price is also taxing employers.
Soon after she started taking Humira, Melissa Andersen, an occupational therapist from Camdenton, Mo., got a call from a human resources representative at her company. The company directly covers its employees’ health claims, rather than paying premiums to an insurer. Her Humira was costing the company well over $70,000 a year — more than Ms. Andersen’s salary.
The H.R. employee asked if Ms. Andersen would be willing to obtain the drug in an unconventional way to save money. She said yes.
As soon as March, her company plans to fly Ms. Andersen, 48, to the Bahamas, so that a doctor can prescribe her a four-month supply of Humira that she can pick up at a pharmacy there. Humira is much cheaper in the Bahamas, where the industry has less influence than in it does in Washington and the government proactively controls drug pricing.
It is not yet clear how much the knockoff products will cost and how quickly patients will switch over to them. Billions of dollars in drug spending will ride on the answers to those questions.
“We price our products according to the value they deliver,” said Jessica Akopyan, a spokeswoman for Amgen, whose biosimilar product comes to market on Tuesday. She added that the company would “employ flexible pricing approaches to ensure patient access.”
Even now, as AbbVie prepares for competitors to erode its Humira sales in the United States, the company will have a new way to make more money from the drug. Under the terms of the legal settlements it reached with rival manufacturers from 2017 to 2022, AbbVie will earn royalties from the knockoff products that it delayed.
The exact sizes of the royalties are confidential, but analysts have estimated that they could be 10 percent of net sales. That could translate to tens of millions of dollars annually for AbbVie.
In the longer run, though, AbbVie’s success with Humira may boomerang on the drug industry.
Last year, the company’s tactics became a rallying cry for federal lawmakers as they successfully pushed for Medicare to have greater control over the price of widely used drugs that, like Humira, have been on the market for many years but still lack competition.
Rhode Island high school staff solicits ‘donations’ to pay cartel ‘coyote’ who brought student to U.S.
A Rhode Island high school assistant principal asked staff to donate over $2000 to help pay a cartel "coyote" that brought one if its students into the country.
www.foxnews.com
According to leaked emails confirmed by local school officials, an assistant principle at a Rhode Island high school solicited "donations" from school staff members to pay off a cartel coyote who brought one of its students to the U.S.
Screenshots of the email shared to Twitter, Friday, revealed that Mount Pleasant High School Assistant Principal Stefani Harvey asked school staff to help an unnamed student meet his goal of raising $5000 to pay off the cartel member that brought him across the border into the U.S.
Harvey claimed the student was only $2000 short of his goal and needed support.
Scientists invented a melting liquid robot that can escape from a cage
This tiny robot can melt, escape from a prison by sliding through secure bars, and then reform into a solid and complete tasks. The metal microbot, made out of liquid metal microparticles that can be steered and reshaped by external magnetic fields, has been widely compared to the character...
Scientists invented a melting liquid robot that can escape from a cage
Leo Sands
Thu, January 26, 2023 at 9:48 PM EST
This tiny robot can melt, escape from a prison by sliding through secure bars, and then reform into a solid and complete tasks.
The metal microbot, made out of liquid metal microparticles that can be steered and reshaped by external magnetic fields, has been widely compared to the character T-1000 in "The Terminator" movie franchise, a cyborg assassin played by Robert Patrick that could morph his way around solid objects before embarking on a murderous rampage.
But, in contrast with the film, the inventors of this robot believe their discovery can be used for good - particularly in clinical and mechanical settings - by reaching hard-to-reach spaces.
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what could possibly go wrong??
🤣 I’ve been hearing for two years they injected just this crap into your vaccine from Q, and here you go and add to it. 😆
Scientists invented a melting liquid robot that can escape from a cage
This tiny robot can melt, escape from a prison by sliding through secure bars, and then reform into a solid and complete tasks. The metal microbot, made out of liquid metal microparticles that can be steered and reshaped by external magnetic fields, has been widely compared to the character...
Scientists invented a melting liquid robot that can escape from a cage
Leo Sands
Thu, January 26, 2023 at 9:48 PM EST
This tiny robot can melt, escape from a prison by sliding through secure bars, and then reform into a solid and complete tasks.
The metal microbot, made out of liquid metal microparticles that can be steered and reshaped by external magnetic fields, has been widely compared to the character T-1000 in "The Terminator" movie franchise, a cyborg assassin played by Robert Patrick that could morph his way around solid objects before embarking on a murderous rampage.
But, in contrast with the film, the inventors of this robot believe their discovery can be used for good - particularly in clinical and mechanical settings - by reaching hard-to-reach spaces.
==============
what could possibly go wrong??
Get in on the fishing talk and join now!
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