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Redstate
The
Real Danger of Liberal Bias
It's That the Powerful Keep Winning
and the Weak Keep Losing
By Thomas Crown
June
5th, 2013
I’m
going to tell you what media
bias is really all about. It’s about a dying, 10 year-old girl and a
sexagenarian, politically connected trial lawyer. It’s about official
malfeasance treated as human error when a Democrat is President. It’s
about
power and systemic corruption that is unremarkable to people offended
that
George W. Bush didn’t call his advisers liars to their face.
It
is about Fred Baron and Sarah
Murnaghan.
Fred
Baron was a plaintiff’s
asbestos lawyer, a prolific Democratic bundler, a man who made a great
deal of
money by breaking Fortune 500 companies (possibly through subornation
of
perjury), a personal friend of former Presidential candidate John “Baby
Daddy”
Edwards and of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and in 2008, a man dying of
multiple
myeloma. At 61, Baron had become one of the Democrats’ foremost source
of trial
lawyer funds, and they rewarded him with access and influence.
Politics
as usual, really.
Where
this story diverts from the
usual depressing tale of money and influence is in the closing days of
Baron’s
life. Stage 5 cancer of any kind is a bad day; stage 5 multiple
myeloma, as
Baron (somewhat ironically, given his profession) had is a death
sentence.
Because Baron had the luxury of being rich, he spent a great deal on
doctors to
discover what the rest of us would know: he was a dead man walking.
However,
his doctors believed that
Tysabri — a monoclonal antibody that is used primarily to treat
multiple
sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases (by killing or impeding the
movement of
dysfunctional white blood cells that would otherwise attack the brain)
— might
save Baron’s life. (The mechanism for this is more complicated, but
essentially, they were hoping the drug would slow or block the cancer
cells
through the same mechanism that the drug worked on autoimmune diseases.)
The
problem of course was that the
Food and Drug Administration had not cleared the drug for use on cancer
patients. The drug’s manufacturer had the drug in what are called Phase
I
trials — the first part of the labyrinthine approval process for a drug
that
makes us one of the slowest drug approval regimes among modern
societies — for
use in treating multiple myeloma. The drug’s manufacturer could not
approve the
drug’s use out of the very limited number of test patients receiving
it, and
the drug would be at best 5-7 years from broad market use. (Really,
that would
likely be its turnaround time to Phase III trials, which have a much
broader
number of patients.)
Fred
Baron did not have five years
to live…
For the rest of this article, visit Redstate
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