We all know that the big 3 “bad” companies in the world are pharmaceutical companies, oil companies and arms manufactures
its common knowledge that those 3 profit the most from ongoing wars all over the world
so just from a economic standpoint: Pharmaceutical companies would be stupid to release cures for AIDS, cancer etc
They will hold them back as long as they can since a “customer” who has cancer for example will likely pay for years … would he get cured with one pill they would lose a patron
I know it sounds dark but 99,9% of the people don’t have intelligence about what those companies are really doing with their billions
beside that: with their powerful lobby they can likely hold back any information they want
The General Questions forum is for factual questions. Since your original post was a bunch of unsupported opinions with no actual questions, I’m going to move this to our Great Debates forum. However, you should be aware that you will be asked for factual support for your assertions. If you can’t supply them from reliable sources, your arguments won’t get very far on this board.
sweat09, it’s not for you to decide if there are “too many medical threads,” or to instruct other posters on whether or not they should post a new thread. This is junior modding, and is against the rules. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.
Did you know that pharmaceutical company employees and their family members and friends get cancer too? So do former employees, and their family members and friends. I don’t quite see how the companies keep them quiet while and after they watch their parents and children and siblings and friends die unpleasantly.
I don’t know about you, but I would be strongly tempted to say “Chuck you Farley” and let the cat out of the bag and slip them the cure on the QT, and I imagine the doctors and nurses and orderlies and people like that would notice pretty quick when those patients got better and everyone else died.
So either pharmaceutical companies are really good at inspiring company loyalty, or there’s something wrong with your theory.
Sure, there’s even a once daily pill (simeprevir) that in conjunction with another anti-viral drug can cure Hepatitis C. It’s pretty pricey, but not as expensive as a lifetime of treatment or a liver transplant.
Besides, it’s not as if the big (American) pharmaceutical companies are the only people working on cures. There are literally thousands of smaller companies, start-ups and universities around the world who are working on cures for any ailment you could think of, and all of them want to hit the jackpot.
Actually, they make more of a profit from lifetime treatments than they would from a cure or a vaccine. And a cure or any new treatment would require that they retool their drug factories, which takes money.
By preference, pharmaceutical companies will avoid research into vaccines or cures*, preferring palliatives instead; and often research new drugs for no other purpose than to patent them and not use them - to in fact forbid anyone from using them until the patent runs out**. They tend to concentrate on advertising and rebranding to create new markets & customers, not original research.
*My (limited) search skills fail me, but there was a minor media flareup some years ago when a pharmaceutical executive publicly admitted that they had no interest in researching a cure or a vaccine for AIDS because it would be less profitable than a lifetime of anti-AIDs drugs.
**The latter being a common use of the patent laws, not just a practice of the pharmaceutical companies. Patents & copyrights really need a “use it or lose it” provision IMHO.
There are dozens of competing pharmaceutical companies. Let’s say there are 20 of them that make cancer treatments. The entire industry of cancer treatment might take in less money if there were a cure for cancer (although obviously they could charge a very high price for the drug and make a shitload of profit, so that it’s not clear that it would make much less money), however, the collective money involved in that treatment is going to 20 different companies.
If one company invented a Cure For Cancer™ - and there wouldn’t actually be a single cure for cancer because it’s dozens of related but different diseases - even if you were right and, say the total money going to the cancer treatment industry was cut in half because of this - then the company that invented it would still have the entire market to themselves, even if it were half as large, they would still be taking in 10 times more profit than their 1/20th share of the current cancer treatment market.
So even ignoring other implausibilities of the problem, the idea that a particular pharmaceutical company would come out ahead by not releasing the cure is bullshit. That particular company would make a ridiculous amount of money. Why would they suppress the cure so that the entire treatment industry makes more money overall if they’re only getting a small slice of that overall market when they could increase their own profits 10 fold?
So even if you assume that pharmaceutical companies were pure evil and driven only by greed, they STILL would release the cure for cancer and rake in the bucks.
Similarly, the idea that “GM designed a car that can run on water but big oil suppressed it” makes no sense. Why in the world would GM pass up the chance for massive profits and taking control of the world’s auto market in order to benefit entirely separate companies in a different industry?