07 November 2020
Senator Kamala Harris
112 Hart Building,
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Harris:
Congratulations on breaking so many barriers today. As a woman, you bear the torch to the suffrage movement. As a black person, you the have the burden of muting the racial discrimination. As an Asian gene holder, you assert that every American, except the American Indians, we are a land of immigrants. These are significant responsibilities, but with your passion and youth, I am confident you will serve as a role model, and you have the best wishes of millions behind you.
I am writing to you at the behest of Vice President Joe Biden, who, a few weeks ago, asked me to continue my advisory to President Barack Obama. I was able to educate President Obama about the biosimilars, and he engineered these into the AHCA. Now the AHCA is under attack, and my advisory is now focusing on making medicines affordable, particularly the essential lifesaving medicines like insulin. This was also the subject of my communications that we exchanged when you were a presidential candidate. My communications with President Obama are now present in President Obama's library. And all my advisory submissions to the US FDA are cataloged by the US FDA in www.regulations.gov –all aimed at taking a creative approach to healthcare.
Once you have established your transition office, I will be honored to meet with you and your team to share a possible strategy for making medicines affordable, particularly the lifesaving medicines like insulin, to all. However, this should not be a disincentive to the US pharmaceutical industry that has introduced almost all medicines used today. The cost of medicines is unaffordable to many—that is what we need to address it, and it is possible, as I will demonstrate in my thesis.
I was invited by the CMS early this year to suggest how to reduce the CMS budget and concluded that this require a legislative change; this is one of my advice I will submit to you.
Again, congratulations, and I look forward to meeting you soon.
Sarfaraz K. Niazi, Ph.D., SI, FRSB, FPAMS, FACB.
Adj Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences, College of Pharmacy, University of Illinois
833 S. Wood Street, Chicago| Illinois | 60607 | USA
Phone: +1-312-297-0000; Fax: +1-312-297-1100;
sniazi3@uic.edu; www.niazi.com