100 books like Moonshot

Legislators and healthcare insurers are seeking ways to slash healthcare costs, often focusing on cutting the costs of medicines through schemes like price controls. Yet, drugs make up only about 13 percent of the money paid on healthcare. This book does a great job of explaining what is behind the pricing of new drugs but, more importantly,  shows that all life-saving drugs eventually become low-cost generics – truly a Great American Drug Deal.

This book scrutinizes all players in the healthcare industry and offers new ideas for cost-saving measures, such as closing loopholes, dealing with bad actors, and educating consumers. If you want to understand how best to balance innovation and affordability, this book is a must-read. 

How do you put a price on life? That is a question often asked as healthcare providers seek to determine what is a fair price for a new life-saving drug. European governments have come up with a methodology called QALY (“Quality Adjusted Life Year”), which assigns a monetary value to the quality of life and survival length for patients and then assesses the cost-effectiveness of a drug based upon the drug’s potential to both improve a patient’s quality of life and extend that life.

That sounds pretty reasonable. Actually, it isn’t. This book shows that adopting the QALY methodology in the US would be harmful by limiting patient access to breakthrough medicines as well as discouraging investment into the biotech sector by not rewarding innovation.

There are a lot of critics of the biopharmaceutical industry who belittle the contributions of this industry by accusing it of overselling the value of new medicines, underselling safety, and having numerous conflicts of interest with academic researchers.

This book details the importance of collaborations between doctors and industry for the development of new drugs. For anyone involved in pharmaceutical R&D, it is refreshing to read accounts about successful interactions that lead to breakthroughs.

Rather than look at healthcare as “good guys vs. bad guys,” this book gives great examples of partnerships that result in saving lives.

The biopharmaceutical industry needs great young scientists. I often get asked by science majors as to whether they should consider a job in this industry and how to be successful in it. For these folks, I recommend Creating Cures, which is a thoughtful and thorough description of a career that combines doing great science with an eye on the business of developing great new medicines.

Reading this book could help you land the job of a lifetime.

John Rhodes, author of The End of Plagues: The Global Battle Against Infectious Disease now offers us a timely, concise, and easy-to-digest book that spans the history of vaccines, including the recent development of mRNA vaccines now on the frontlines of efforts to quell the COVID-19 global pandemic. Rhodes' experience and expertise in immunology and vaccine development show in his clear and easy-to-understand explanations of how vaccines work and why they are an essential public health tool.

This comprehensive book provides information on the impact of COVID worldwide as it is currently understood, so future researchers will have a basis for comparison. The book’s authors address factors such as lockdowns, job loss, grief, and uncertainty that have led to depression, distress, anxiety, and PTSD. Also covered is how different world populations as refugees, at-risk populations as the elderly and frail, and roles as parents have been both mentally and physically impacted. This information will help communities develop programs to help relieve mental health concerns and protect people against similar threats in years to come. The book also includes wellness activities like meditation that help reduce the negative effects of COVID on mental health.

This U.K. author provides the most insightful analysis of a new category of worker. The portmanteau title combines “precarious” and “proletariat” into “precariat.” The growing number of workers in the “precariat” not only receive low wages but also take precarious jobs in which scheduling can vary week to week, employment guarantees are absent, and fringe benefits are almost nonexistent. Standing looks for the reasons behind the emergence of the precariat and how we might respond to their growing numbers.

This book is for older children. I would offer it to strong readers in grades 4 through 6. Now that I think about it, it would probably be a really informative read for grown-ups… it doesn’t take long to get through the whole book, and the straightforward tone leaves little room for emotions or biases. It’s a refreshing presentation of the facts (though the content, of course, is not “refreshing”). This book opens with a vignette about the lockdown in March 2020 and then goes into a factual description of viruses in general and the coronavirus in particular. It then talks about the early spread of this new disease, the search for treatments, and even the overall economic and governmental impacts that stemmed from the whole phenomenon.

At the end of this book, there are a couple of interesting additions. You will find two timelines: A timeline of the coronavirus… show more.

The authors work for the Sunday Times Insight team and the book they have produced is, you might say, a public inquiry of the kind we won’t be getting from any government, now or in the future. We’ve all been living through this nightmare and the concept of journalism being a first rough history of events is more than adequately demonstrated by this excellently researched text.

Unless you’ve been asleep, or visiting another planet during the past 15 months, you’ll be painfully aware of how badly the pandemic has been handled in the UK. Coming on the back of Brexit, the big event that caused the Government to never have its eye on the Coronavirus ball at the critical moments in January and February, 2020, the pandemic was at first ridiculed, then fatally downplayed by Boris Johnson.

Worse, as we all know to our personal and collective cost, was to… show more.

The COVID-19 virus swept across the world like a hurricane, and 20 survivors of the storm gathered to share the lessons they had learned.

I love how this book centers on the experiences of people living with Long Covid who not only point out the inequities of our health systems but also give practical advice about getting a diagnosis, navigating care, asking for help, and contributing to research.

You don’t have to have Long Covid to benefit. Their wise advice applies to everyone.