|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Governments are deregulating biotechnology. What will that mean for us?
An article in the UK Daily Mail entitled “The wave of new £2m-a-dose NHS drugs that can alter our DNA to beat heart disease, cancer and even blindness… and are already curing patients” gives us a clue. It touts genetic interventions as “the greatest medical breakthrough since antibiotics” and promises to banish cancer, heart disease, blindness, and you name it.
The article continues: “For example, the pioneering treatment has already been used to combat a number of previously incurable conditions.” The next sentence reveals that NHS experts have made a pledge (yes, a real old-fashioned pledge) to roll out a £1.7 million (NZ$3.6 million) per patient treatment for haemophilia.
There are about 6,000 people in the UK suffering from haemophilia. So redeeming this pledge will cost the NHS about 10 billion pounds or 6% of the current UK health budget spent on a single condition suffered by 0.01% (one in ten thousand) of the population. According to the article, there are many more such gene treatments on the way which are going to benefit not thousands but millions of patients.
Six million such cures (of single conditions) at the going rate will cost the NHS ten trillion dollars. That is about 8 times the current entire budget of the UK government or in simpler terms, £136,000 required from every man woman and child. The current median wage for working adults in the UK is £36,000. According to the article, this approach will “give people their lives back” (???)
Houston, we have a problem. Taxes will have to rise, people (including new born children) will have to borrow money continuously from the banks who will have to print a lot more of it…. Joking aside, how did the hapless Meike Leonard, health reporter of the Daily Mail and Microsoft’s MSN news network, manage to churn out this kind of drivel without pausing to think through the obvious financial implications?
Well, read on, Meike does start to tackle some of the issues. Apparently the treatments are risky as well as being astronomically costly and they don’t always work. Dr Tony Lockett, a rare diseases expert and lecturer at King’s College London, believes there are a number of serious risks to CRISPR gene editing used in the treatments. He claims that inserting genetically modified cells into the body could raise the risk of (not cure) cancer. There is also the danger that the virus used to deliver the CRISPR gene therapy may damage the patient.
But this doesn’t stop genetics expert Professor Lovell-Badge of the Francis Crick Institute from waxing lyrical about the future prospects for gene therapies who says: “Soon we’ll have a number of patients who have successfully had gene-editing treatment themselves but who can still pass the faulty genes on to their children. So in the future there will be much more demand for inheritable gene editing than now.” I can just see the cash registers at the Francis Crick Institute working overtime into the far distant future.
Apparently, mathematically illiterate government ministers are relying on the advice of medical bio-technocrats and deciding to give them free rein to experiment on our genes, well at least a few of us until the money runs out. They seem to be wilfully blind to the glaringly obvious, we are still suffering the global fall out from an engineered virus and a failed vaccine both developed in an unregulated biotechnology experimental research environment. This has involved a massive global surge in disease rates and excess deaths which is still continuing.
Governments haven’t taken sufficient notice of key characteristics of biotechnology in medicine. It entails:
- A class of highly paid bio-technocrats and bio-scientists
- A high ratio of bio-scientists and bio-machines to patients
- Complex individualised approaches
- Contamination errors endemic to mass bio-manufacturing
- Elevated serious adverse health risk profiles for patients
- Uncertain and uneven outcomes
- High potential for lab escapes which cannot be recalled or mitigated
- Astronomical high costs of patented procedures and drugs
A similar class of serious risks plagues animal and agricultural biotechnology.
All of this is very good news for bio-pharmaceutical companies, bio-technocrats, and bio-investors, as the massive, government-bankrupting costs of the Covid pandemic reveal. On the surface, biotechnology experimentation is being sold as life-saving medicine using a bait and switch approach. In reality, it is ushering in a government by bio-technocrats whose hidden persuaders are busy every day influencing us to accept a very profitable and very dangerous nonsense.
A lot of people are very eagerly getting on board the deregulated biotechnology gravy train, including biotech investors, board members, scientists and patent holders. Global media and social media tech companies who filter our news feeds have crossover interests in biotechnology. Pharmaceutical giants expect novel bio-treatments to be mandated as gold standard approaches, whatever the cost. It is a long list that overlaps with party politics through a process of saturation lobbying and hand-outs. Welcome to the government of bio-technocrats.
The concerns we have raised above are very serious indeed, they involve human health and life. In 2021 Covid vaccine regulations around the world in many cases virtually excluded any right of choice about vaccine safety and overrode the legal protections afforded by the Human Rights legislation concerning medical experimentation. The growth of biotechnology experimentation and the risks it poses suggest Human Rights legislation is in need of both updating and stronger clauses to ensure it is enforceable. These concerns speak to a compelling need for the International Genetic Charter. Its simple terms spell out in a few sentences the safeguards necessary to protect human life from genetic degradation driven by government ignorance, corporate greed and academic hubris. Please take a couple of minutes to sign up to The International Genetic Charter here.
