Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

Here’s to yuletide cheer and fewer discussions about the weather!

1. Losing Faith in Healthcare

Five years later, do health systems have their own case of “long COVID”? The FT sees a gloomy global picture. Distrust in healthcare has become “as powerful a factor in predicting health status as more conventional ‘social determinants.’” Of the many reasons why, the COVID-era press conference tops the list:

Zak McMurray, a GP in Derbyshire, recalls his discomfort at seeing NHS leaders sharing the platform with politicians during the daily coronavirus briefings held at 10 Downing Street, home of the UK prime minister, when the pandemic was at its height. This apparent close alignment undermined confidence that doctors’ recommendations were independent and evidence-based, he suggests.

2. Gaining Faith in Healthcare

Could binge watching TV offer an antidote to the FT’s diagnosis? Vulture interviews a Johns Hopkins ER doc about The Pitt, a new medical show that dramatizes ER HCPs and the bureaucracy in which they operate:

We all feel the stresses of a strained hospital system: congested waiting rooms, the patients who are admitted but not yet upstairs. It isn’t typically expressed as interpersonal conflict. I understand why they do that for the show, but in real life, it tends to be more collaborative. There’s a lot of us saying, “How do we get better?”

But the issues are real. It’s certainly not an excuse for prolonged wait times, but my hope is that if a patient sees a show like this, there’s exposure to an issue we’re trying to remedy. Clinicians and nurses are not sitting around and choosing who they want to see. There’s just so much going on. It’s almost an explanation of how we want to get to everybody in time but sometimes can’t. People are constantly busy.

3. Irish Exit?

If US tariffs do end up hitting pharmaceuticals, Ireland will feel the pain. Country towns have become pharma hubs:

According to the Industrial Development Agency, 21,500 people are employed in Ringaskiddy and the surrounding east Cork towns in pharma and biomedicines, with thousands more indirect jobs…While US big tech usually dominates the headlines when it comes to Ireland’s extraordinary success at attracting investment, it is pharma that drives its export surplus with the US.

One local tells The Guardian: “Half the place would be blown to bits, all the workers, the subcontractors, from the guys supplying the toilet rolls, to the farms supplying meat for the canteens.”

4. Paranoid Bodyoid

Bodyoids, according to an opinion piece in MIT Technology Review, are “living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain.” Unsettling? Sure. The stuff of medical breakthroughs? Perhaps. The advantages of bodyoids are many:

If researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman…These could revolutionize medical research and drug development, greatly reducing the need for animal testing, rescuing many people from organ transplant lists, and allowing us to produce more effective drugs and treatments. All without crossing most people’s ethical lines.

5. Deloitte Does the Math

Deloitte’s latest pharma ROI report prescribes a hefty dose of cliche: prioritize unmet needs, embrace cutting-edge technologies, pursue novel collaborations. Yet for all the leveraging, synergizing, and accelerating, the report does offer keen analytics:

 This year, the average cost per asset [“from discovery to launch”] increased to $2.23 billion, an upward trend observed in 12 out of the 20 companies analysed. While reported costs of pharma R&D continue to increase year on year, since 2020 our cohort has reduced their increase in spend to a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.44 per cent, compared to 7.69 per cent in the years 2013 to 2020, reflecting the cohort’s focus on improving the efficiency of R&D spending.