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What went wrong? In short, Pfizer made a massive miscalculation about how patients with diabetes manage their disease. What initially attracted the company to Nektar’s invention was the idea that inhaled insulin would offer an attractive alternative to patients afraid to stick themselves with needles multiple times a day. But the needle sticks really aren’t that much of a hassle, many patients report, and the needles themselves have gotten so thin that they cause virtually no pain.<\/p>\n
They also priced Exubera too high. Most insurance companies refused to pay for it.<\/p>\n
Mannkind’s management tells me: They have met with insurance companies who say they will pay for it if<\/strong> Mannkind prices it within 5% of injected insulin. Which it will. Secondly, Mannkind’s insulin is a better insulin. I don’t understand the entire science of it all. But Mannkind’s explanation sounds convincing.<\/p>\n The BIG wild card here is the FDA. We’re looking at a December approval, maybe.<\/p>\n Until then stock will bounce around.<\/p>\n Mannkind remains an interesting spec at $6.50 and a meager market cap of $912 million.<\/p>\n Elections approach. What’s the Tea Party all about?<\/strong><\/span> Matt Taibbi wrote a long piece on the Tea Party in the latest Rolling Stone magazine. it begins:<\/p>\n It’s taken three trips to Kentucky, but I’m finally getting my Tea Party epiphany exactly where you’d expect: at a Sarah Palin rally. The red-hot mama of American exceptionalism has flown in to speak at something called the National Quartet Convention in Louisville, a gospel-music hoedown in a giant convention center filled with thousands of elderly white Southerners. Palin \u2014 who earlier this morning held a closed-door fundraiser for Rand Paul, the Tea Party champion running for the U.S. Senate \u2014 is railing against a GOP establishment that has just seen Tea Partiers oust entrenched Republican hacks in Delaware and New York. The dingbat revolution, it seems, is nigh.<\/p>\n “We’re shaking up the good ol’ boys,” Palin chortles, to the best applause her aging crowd can muster. She then issues an oft-repeated warning (her speeches are usually a tired succession of half-coherent one-liners dumped on ravenous audiences like chum to sharks) to Republican insiders who underestimated the power of the Tea Party Death Star. “Buck up,” she says, “or stay in the truck.”<\/p>\n Stay in what truck? I wonder. What the hell does that even mean?<\/p>\n Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd, I am immediately struck by two things. One is that there isn’t a single black person here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware: Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized wheelchair-scooters. As Palin launches into her Ronald Reagan impression \u2014 “Government’s not the solution! Government’s the problem!” \u2014 the person sitting next to me leans over and explains.<\/p>\n “The scooters are because of Medicare,” he whispers helpfully. “They have these commercials down here: ‘You won’t even have to pay for your scooter! Medicare will pay!’ Practically everyone in Kentucky has one.”<\/p>\n A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea Party represents, I can’t imagine it. …<\/p>\n So how does a group of billionaire businessmen and corporations get a bunch of broke Middle American white people to lobby for lower taxes for the rich and deregulation of Wall Street? That turns out to be easy. Beneath the surface, the Tea Party is little more than a weird and disorderly mob, a federation of distinct and often competing strains of conservatism that have been unable to coalesce around a leader of their own choosing. Its rallies include not only hardcore libertarians left over from the original Ron Paul “Tea Parties,” but gun-rights advocates, fundamentalist Christians, pseudomilitia types like the Oath Keepers (a group of law- enforcement and military professionals who have vowed to disobey “unconstitutional” orders) and mainstream Republicans who have simply lost faith in their party. It’s a mistake to cast the Tea Party as anything like a unified, cohesive movement \u2014 which makes them easy prey for the very people they should be aiming their pitchforks at. A loose definition of the Tea Party might be millions of pissed-off white people sent chasing after Mexicans on Medicaid by the handful of banks and investment firms who advertise on Fox and CNBC.<\/p>\n You can read Taibbi’s wonderful (but not entirely accurate) piece here.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n
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