Companies like Eli Lilly, Merck, GSK, Bristol-Meyers Squibb cause and perpetuate massive amounts of human suffering. I view them on the same level as Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. Input?
Treating cancer is more profitable than curing it. That’s really all anyone needs to know about that industry.
"Cancer" is actually an umbrella term for a type of disease and there are over 200 kinds of cancer that require different approaches to treatment. We cannot have a "cure for cancer" anymore than a "cure for virus."
I mean eventually gene therapy will be able to target any form of cancer, so long as it can be delivered to the affected cells. Pharmacogenomics is the future of medicine, sadly only the privileged will be able to access it.
And eventually the Navy will have a working railgun and anti-missile lasers
Except what I'm talking about is closer than you might think, not futuristic at all
Sure but it probably won't happen in America, and when it's imported it will be incredibly expensive
I mean, a thing they can do is more profitable than a thing they can't, yes. What do you think cancer treatment is?
The problem being that there’s less of a profit incentive in researching a means to eliminate a disease rather than just treating individuals indefinitely.
Perhaps cancer was a bad example, but I think it gets the point across.
Yeah, as soon as non-chemo, proton, etc. cancer cures are found they will be available to the upper-class, medical advancements aren't kept secret, but...
Guess which form of cancer is at the forefront of research in terms of finding cures/prevention. Melanoma. Can you guess why?
Because it has a well understood oncogenesis, because immunotherapy and selective therapy drugs tend to work well against Melanomas, and because since it's localized in peripheral tissues it's easy to access and model?
All cancer treatments disproportionately benefit white people, as they can disproportionately afford them and disproportionately have better access to diagnostic tests. It actually wouldn't be sufficient to explain the difference in why melanoma treatments are more developed.
insurance companies are worse than any pharmaceutical company and its not even close
True, I kinda see them as one in the same. Medical Industrial Complex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_khH6pZnHCM
I've thought about this particular question a lot because I interact with both pretty much daily because of my area. But I've come to a resolute conclusion.
I think it's not really the case. The function pharma companies fulfill is what gives them the power to extort so much money out of people and put that suffering on them, get them addicted and keep them paying exorbitant bills. There obviously is blood on the hands of the executives and strategists that run those companies, no doubt. But I wouldn't look at someone the same way if I found out they did as much as work an internship at Raytheon. Huge, huge difference between working at a company that produces a good which is so necessary it's got people in debt slavery for the rest of their lives, where as a worker you're just figuring out more cost effective ways to produce medicine; and a company that is enabling the ransacking, r*pe, and genocide of the imperial periphery. There's a reason those ghouls have to literally groom young girls to get more people in the industry: people know how evil it is, no question. Every single person that's ever set foot in a MIC company as anything more than a security guard will surely not see justice, but let me say that if they do, I'll be surprised they found a way to make justice for the kind of thing they deserve for that.
The thing is their evil is more insidious. Sure they aren't blowing people up, but the affect of withholding medical care without monetary compensation has such a widespread impact its unfathomable.
I'd honestly bet the pharmaceutical industry (includes the insurance companies) are responsible for more deaths than the MIC, easily.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)31668-4/fulltext
Universal health coverage has been proposed as a strategy to improve health in low-income and middle-income countries (LMICs). However, this is contingent on the provision of good-quality health care. We estimate the excess mortality for conditions targeted in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that are amenable to health care and the portion of this excess mortality due to poor-quality care in 137 LMICs, in which excess mortality refers to deaths that could have been averted in settings with strong health systems.
15.6 million excess deaths from 61 conditions occurred in LMICs in 2016. After excluding deaths that could be prevented through public health measures, 8.6 million excess deaths were amenable to health care of which 5.0 million were estimated to be due to receipt of poor-quality care and 3.6 million were due to non-utilisation of health care. Poor quality of health care was a major driver of excess mortality across conditions, from cardiovascular disease and injuries to neonatal and communicable disorders.
Universal health coverage for SDG conditions could avert 8·6 million deaths per year but only if expansion of service coverage is accompanied by investments into high-quality health systems.
8.6 million a year
This is the number of lives that could be saved worldwide if distribution of high-quality medical care (insulin, cancer screenings, blood pressure maintenance, etc) was done fairly and with the preservation of human lives as the primary goal.
8.6 million a year is a ridiculous, tragic number, but think for a second what the cost of American imperial hegemony is. That's a throne of literal billions of skulls once you consider climate change. Is it Caesar's corpse with all of capital's knives each stuck in various directions? Absolutely, pharma emits as much as anyone, but the ones responsible for empire carry the most blame. To that end, I think we can cite Lenin's Imperialism to call out finance capital as also just as ghoulish and even more responsible for climate collapse than the MIC. No single part of capital, not even the Lockheed vampires, carries as much political power as the finance demons. Those are the ones with their finger hammered down on the button that kills us all.
Yeah I guess what I'm getting at is that us making healthcare for-profit and a commodity is just an extension of the hegemony.
Quite a disgusting society we have built.
Disagree. Pharma companies ultimately do something beneficial (make medicine) versus military companies that do something evil (make weapons for imperialism.) of course, their execs should be hanged for their capitalist exploitation all the same.
I'm with you. Medicine is inherently good. Weapons are just neutral. Both are used by capital for nefarious means, both are weaponized to maintain white supremacy, both are tools of genocide. But the empire keeps going without Pfizer, it dies in 1 day without its ICBMs.
Gilead could make PrEP freely available to people and reduce the transmission of HIV, but that wouldn't be profitable.
Also hepatitis c is curable, but hell if the average person can afford it.
why would anyone here seek to change that view, why did you phrase it like that?
purge the reddit from your soul please
Sorry, I'm just trying to show people just how bad they really are. Preaching to the choir, maybe. I just haven't seen pharma companies getting their fair share of hate on here.
IDK, I took a little bit of issue with it, see my parent comment. But def agree it's not a competition and any sane society would see all of these companies' boards of directors get
Fun fact: My chronic illness medication originally cost 6000 dollars. They had a co-pay assistance program which ended when a generic version of that same medication.
Aaaaand the generic medication was 2000 as opposed to 6000.
It's profiting from human suffering in a very direct way and it's basically stealing billions of dollars out of people's pockets every day with price gouging and copyright protectionism and insurance bullshit
This is the correct take and health care executives deserve
The only reason this isn't true is that the pharma companies occasionally develop a drug that cures a disease, like hep C. And then they charge out the ass for it so nobody can afford it, sure.
Also I would like to point out that conspiracy-theorizing that companies are suppressing a "cure" for cancer is dumb as fuck, scientifically illiterate, and just a way to show you don't understand the basic nature of cancer as a category of disease.
Yeah, I get that, but these advancements don't happen because the pharmaceutical industry exists, they happen despite it. The exact same people could be developing these treatments while working for the government.
Sure, but we're comparing private sector companies to private sector companies. MIC would also still be evil even if entirely nationalized.
That's fair, but it would at least take part of the incentive for wars and destabilizing the world away.
Would you consider the Chinese military companies to not be evil just because they work under the state? I get that they have to defend themselves, power projection is necessary, etc.
I feel like weapons of war are inherently morally bad, or at least neutral if used for the right reasons. Providing medical care, on the other hand, is an inherently good thing that we have twisted for profit... Which could be an argument against me haha. Apples and oranges, I guess.
for years, i just thought of pharmaceutical companies as another shitty type of corporation doing shitty things, knowing they were generallycomplicit in the prohibition / War on Drugs etc. maybe about 9 years ago, i stumbled upon a deeper investigation into the historical context of pharmaceutical companies as critical building blocks of empire itself.
in her book, Suzanna Reiss makes a potent case for the capital formations of/behind pharmaceutical corporations being uniquely powerful in the direction, strategy and prosecution of American empire, both at home and the later shoring up / hollowing out of resistance to it domestically. she did an interview in 2015 talking about the book in depth here, in audio format.
it's an interesting bit of research that took her down this path, because she started out not realizing how deep into history the connections would go (Opium Wars!) and how openly the public-private "partnerships" communicated as a matter of public record.
personally, i think you're right. among the very first moves in a revolution would to nationalize them, void all of their intellectual property, democratize their production lines among the workers and the communities where they are located, and imprison their executives.
I think it's different in that pharma companies do harm to Americans whereas the MIC exports harm to other people. While on one level no one life is more valuable than any other life, I think it's relevant to consider that the American people could theoretically exercise political and regulatory power over pharma companies whereas the victims of the US MIC have no power to oppose it outside of war.
By withholding medical advancements behind patents, intellectual property, and cost restrictions, while at the same time stealing brilliant scientists and researchers from their home countries by offering them wealth, we shoot the medical communities of the world in the foot.
In late 2021, 60% of the US population was vaccinated against COVID while only 6% of the African continent was. To this day, the disparity is still ridiculous.
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/vaccines/us-states
Show
Not to mention the MIC is literally self sustaining and works similar to a deep state because of its immense amount of unaccountable power. Pharma companies are still at the mercy of feds, Boeing is a state actor. Whole different leagues.
