Word: contraction
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...familiar sight in Annenberg and House dining halls at Harvard, the administration and students here have largely been quiet about the company’s alleged human rights and environmental violations. According to Jami Snyder, the communications coordinator for the Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS), HUDS currently has three contracts with Coca-Cola—for bottled soda, fountain syrup, and Odwalla juices, respectively. These contracts only supply HUDS, and do not apply to the other schools of the University, she said. Snyder refused to specify how much HUDS spends on Coke products, citing that releasing such information...
...fact, the government has so far spent very little on new biodefense drugs, thanks in part to the long and torturous contracting process. Under BioShield, HHS has paid $5.7 million to buy black raspberry--flavored liquid potassium iodide, a child's version of a pill intended to protect against radioactive iodide in a dirty bomb. The agency is also spending $2.2 million on experimental anthrax treatments (although that money is not coming from the BioShield fund), and a contract for a new smallpox vaccine is expected in 2006. But more than a year into the program, drug companies still complain...
...havoc wrought by the anthrax mailings of 2001, which killed five people and set off a near panic for treatment. So Congress anted up. Eighteen months later, Bush signed BioShield into law. The measure set aside $5.6 billion for drug companies, offered the promise of a guaranteed and speedy contract--even an opportunity to sell the government novel treatments before they are fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The law, Bush promised, "will transform our ability to defend the nation...
...BioShield hasn't transformed much of anything besides expanding the federal bureaucracy. Most of the big pharmaceutical and biotech firms want nothing to do with developing biodefense drugs. The little companies that are vying for deals say they are being stymied by an opaque and glacially slow contracting process. The one big contract that has been awarded--for 75 million doses of a next-generation anthrax vaccine--is tangled in controversy; it went to a California firm, VaxGen, which in its 10-year history has never brought a drug to market. In the scientific community, biodefense is viewed...
Overall, it's a cumbersome process that can leave companies with promising treatments in limbo for years. "You wouldn't expect a defense contractor to build an aircraft carrier without a contract, but they're expecting pharmaceutical companies to develop these drugs without contracts," says Richard Hollis, CEO of Hollis-Eden, a San Diego biotech hoping to sell the government a treatment for acute radiation syndrome (a blood sickness caused by a dirty bomb or nuclear explosion). Hollis says his company has spent $100 million on the drug, Neumeune, betting the feds would stockpile doses for 12 million...