Drugs & Pharmaceuticals

Six months ago it seemed that every other lab had a kick-ass, re-purposed drug that was only weeks away from putting the hurt on COVID. How did that work out? 

“This will go down in history as one of science and medical research's greatest achievements. Perhaps the most impressive.

Over the past several days, the world has received monumentally good news: Vaccines exist against the coronavirus, and they are effective. Even better, vaccines are being developed by multiple companies.

Although the clinical trials are not complete and there are still many questions to be answered, it is difficult not to be optimistic about Pfizer’s new COVID-19 vaccine.

Not in our wildest imagination would anyone have thought that we would have two 90+% effective COVID vaccines by mid-November. Most vaccine experts were estimating 50%, maybe 70% if everything went right. Wow!

I'm a huge fan of 2,6-diisopropylphenol (aka Diprivan, propofol, "Milk of Amnesia").

Our resident chemist, Dr. Josh Bloom, has followed the opioid crisis for several years. He was the first to raise the alarm that opioid overdoses and deaths were being driven largely by fentanyl, not Vicodin or other prescription pills.

In any normal year, an academic debate about the efficacy of a certain drug to treat an infection would never garner media attention. But this isn't a normal year.

“The initiative — to accelerate the development of Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics — lacks the scale, and the degree of secrecy, of the effort to build the atomic bomb.

Anyone in the mood for some confusion? If so, keep reading. Below are some random quotes I stumbled across while doing a Google news search of the term "synthetic opioids." It didn't take long.