OP uses fallacious reasoning, that if we do not have a fast, cheap simple fix, then it must only be because staying with the slow, expensive, complicated one has a higher margin. As SenorBeef points out, that’s completely disregarding that whoever came up with the product that safely and reliably eliminates breast or prostate cancer, or permanently cures diabetes, or reverses Alzheimer’s, would make ridiculous hundreds of billions on it before the patent ran out.
And do ***you ***have it, OP?
I’m sure you’re just about to post citations for these absurd accusations so I’ll wait patiently…
As someone who works for an evil pharmaceutical company (albeit in a low-level position), I’m fairly confident that the first company to come up with a definite cure for a serious and wide-spread disease would be racing to submit a new drug application and then a marketing patent application just as fast as they could.
Fierce competition and huge development costs are powerful insensitives for pushing any promising new drug onto the market as soon as possible. Even a few months delay can mean significant losses.
Actually, the opposite of the OP’s premise is often true. Drug makers are often too eager to rush their products to the market, sometimes at the expense of safety. So, if you feel the need to paint drug manufacturers as soulless, moneygrubbing, evil entities (and I’m not saying they aren’t) you should go with that angle. That way it will at least be grounded on fact.
As for the OP’s suggestion that pharmaceutical companies have some kind of overreaching power to silence all governments and news media, a little perusal of any pharmaceutical/medical industry news site or the FDA’s news page will reveal that, yes, pharmaceutical companies do try to get away with a lot of naughty sneaky stuff, and they are constantly getting their arses slapped for it!
Now, if you’ll excuse me; I’ve just reached the office, and I’m a little behind on my orphan-sacrificing quota.
So the basic premise behind the OP and other such claims is that if a course of lifelong treatment for major disease X costs $1 million over that lifetime, then a cure probably costs less than $1 million, therefore the drug companies lose money if it is released.
I can see a few things wrong with this premise (a single company being responsible for all of a lifelong treatment and getting all the money, a “cure” necessarily meaning it’s a one-and-done thing), but what’s the single strongest objection to it?
You know, if you wanted to arbitrarily chose kinds of big corporations that make money off their evil plans, you could chose something more plausible than drug companies. You’ve chosen drug companies and oil companies, I suppose, because there are standard conspiracy theories that drug companies suppress cures and oil companies suppress miraculous new fuels. Both of those sorts of theories are implausible because there are far too many academics who research drugs and fuels for it to be likely that the companies could suppress or hide basic research. Weapons manufacturers make a little more sense since they wouldn’t have to be suppressing research but encouraging it. The standard conspiracy theories about drug and oil companies just show me that most conspiracy theorists don’t even try to make their theories remotely plausible. They don’t want a theory that almost makes sense; rather, they want one that deliberately assumes that the largest number of people have to be lying for it to work at all. Conspiracy theorists prefer to show that everyone is against them.
Weapons companies make a little more sense as a part of such a conspiracy theory, since certainly weapons are used in war. But there now are lots of weapons manufacturers who do quite well even if their weapons aren’t actually used in wars. They just have to convince a country that they need the weapons stockpiled just in case a war starts. If you really wanted to create a plausible conspiracy theory about a kind of corporation, you could do better with banks and other companies that deal in financial instruments like stocks or hedge funds. Maybe there really are no evil conspiracies going on in such companies, but they tend to work in ways that keep their planning secret, making a conspiracy more plausible.
I think he took your advice.
In my experience, pharma companies are pretty secretive about what they’re working on until it’s ready to hit the market. You therefore might want to edit your post; it’s fairly obvious that you’re working on endorphans.
Go. To. Your. Room.
Exactly how much do you know about “retooling” drug factories?
Even assuming this cite exists, it’s an amazingly dumb argument.
The fact that ONE pharmaceutical company has no interest in researching an AIDS cure does not mean that NO pharmaceutical company has such an interest. This is a truly, almost insanely, silly argument. It is logically equivalent to saying that because Dominos Pizza has no interest in making and selling fresh sushi, there must be a conspiracy in Big Restaurants to deny salmon rolls to the public. Or, to use another perfectly exact analogy, it’s like saying that Hyundai not selling a station wagon means Big Auto is conspiring to deny the public the ability to buy station wagons. Maybe it’s just that it makes no sense for Dominos to develop a sushi line, or Hyundai to introduce another model. Doesn’t stop sushi places from selling sushi, or Volkswagen from selling the Golf wagon.
If, say, Eli Lilly elects not to try to cure AIDS, that doesn’t prevent Pfizer, Merck or Novartis from doing so. And if they all elect not to, the potential business benefits to a company that DOES cure AIDS would be insanely tempting. If those companies all become dependent on a revenue stream from HIV-suppressing treatment, they any number of drug companies - there are hundreds of them - could make billions of dollars and wreak catastrophic damage on their competition by inventing an AIDS cure. SmithCo Pharma would simultaneously be making money by the truckload while also denying their competitors zillions in revenue. Some small drug company could turn themselves into Pfizer overnight by curing AIDS; they could increase revenues and profits a hundred times over, have their CEO and top researcher share in the glory of a Nobel Prize, and pave the way for them to take over other firms and reach out in a dozen other markets.
Well, there you go. The perfect business plan would be for YOU to start your own pharm company, rack up some easy cures, and… PROFIT!!!
Well, folks like the OP seem to assume that every single major company acts together as a de facto consortium, and would unite to oppress the smaller companies.
Of course, if they really were that evil, they’d betray their fellows and put out the cure anyway as long as they had a reasonable certainty of injuring the others enough.
I’m not really sure where you’re getting ideas for all these assertions, but it really betrays a lack of understanding of how research works. :dubious:
Scientists, even those working at pharmaceutical companies (who by necessity come out of academic backgrounds, are generally quite independent minded people. While the corporate side of a pharmaceutical company may have some input into the research direction of the R&D side of the company (generally in terms of the big picture direction of what areas the company should go into), the actual specific studies are determined by the R&D side of the company (typically the VP of research, himself a scientist). The scientists publish their research findings in scientist journals and attend scientific meetings, so there’s a lot of information exchange with academia. All this occurs without involvement of the corporate side of the company.
Now, this doesn’t preclude corporate VPs from expressing their (correct or incorrect) opinion that it may make more financial sense to market drugs that control rather than cure disease. I don’t know if any VP has actually said this (as you claim). But this means little in terms of what would actually happen if a scientist working in a pharmaceutical company would do if he did discover a cure for AIDS (or any other disease). Is short, the idea that a scientist would give up the fame–or even potentially the Nobel Prize in medicine–that comes with publishing such important finding is simply laughable.
Really? Let’s leave aside the whole “people in these companies get cancer and AIDS too” issue, and just try to address this premise. What do you reckon a cure for cancer would be worth? I’ve heard estimates as high as $50 trillion. That’s a lotta dough! If I were the CEO or the board of directors of a company like this, my immediate thought would be to cash out. Even if it meant a loss for the company in the long term, in the long term we’re all dead. I want that $50 trillion payoff. Talk about a golden parachute, huh?
And that’s ignoring the issues that others have brought up. Pharma execs get cancer just like the rest of us. Being high up the totem pole in a pharmaceutical company does not make you exempt from unfortunate cell mutations. You think they’re suppressing the cure when them and the people they love are dying of these diseases? I try to have a slightly higher opinion of mankind than that. Hell, even if you and the people you love aren’t dying of cancer, the humanitarian issue is impossible to ignore. The person who cures cancer will go down in history as a hero. A genius on the same level as Louis Pasteur or Jonas Salk. You think these people will give up the insane temporary profit and the incredible accolades that come from this just to help uphold the future profit margin of their businesses (which will be swimming in cash for the foreseeable future)? I don’t think so.
Also, let’s talk about unfortunate implications. If you make this bizarre assumption about pharmaceutical corporations, where does that leave vaccines? After all, vaccines are cheap. They’re horribly inexpensive treatments (in fact, so cheap that some clinics run a loss on them) that prevent diseases that pharma could really make bank on. Why would they sell them? Well, if you listen to conspiracy theorists, the answer is “because vaccines don’t work and cause auto-immune disorders and all the research that’s been done to disprove this link is all bullshit”.
Honestly, I don’t think I’m going to go that far down the rabbit hole. What you’re saying makes sense… until you do more than an absolutely surface-level investigation. I hope you stick around and learn from this, because you’ve bought into some really dumb conspiracy theories.
And you do? Please, come, enlighten us. Offer us some well-sourced research that backs up your assertions.
The president of the united states couldn’t cover up a tiny breaking and entering operation. You think that nobody working at pharmaceutical companies would catch on?
Yeah, I expect this from a new member, but you’ve been here long enough to know this shit don’t fly. Citation, please.
I tried finding this myself – not only was there no sign of such a quote or controversy, but Google actually directed me back to this thread. I think that’s a pretty good indicator of the reliability of this anecdote.
Little help?
Again, cite? Patent trolling is a real thing, primarily in the technology sector, but I can’t find any support for it’s currently being a significant problem in pharmaceuticals. I did find this article from 7 months ago speculating that it could become a problem, but even that holds as its premise that it so far hasn’t been one.
Besides, what you describe isn’t even patent trolling. It’s just … mean. Why would a drug company do that?
Bear in mind that there *has *to be a cite - patents, by definition, are public knowledge. There’s no such thing as a “secret patent”. If a pharmaceutical company were sitting on patents, everyone would know.
Probably also important to remember that the US patent system is now “first to file” like much of the worlds already was. The inventor only gets protection (a time limited monopoly) if they file which makes the cure public knowledge. If it’s public knowledge people could see the cure and ask why it’s not on the market. Imagine the demonstrations that would bring. They could still sit on the cure in the face of public opinion… but their clock on the monopoly to sell it is ticking. If they don’t file and sit on a cure someone else could conceivably invent the same thing (or have it leak) and get the patent with the financial rewards.
There’s a lot of financial risk to just sit on hidden cures.
Also, in the abstract, even if all the pharma companies, universities etc are really that selfish, and have so few scruples (even WRT their own friends and family), why is their objective purely to increase their bank balance?
Surely Dr Evil would also be interested in going down in history, worldwide, for being on the team (or being involved in any way), with curing cancer?
Nah, I guess that adulation, and the knowledge that they had had a huge impact on millions of lives, and basically one of the most successful careers ever, would not be of interest. All that matters is being able to afford a second swimming pool.
They might have the cure to diseases, but the cure might literally be worse than the disease.
For example, the cure to obesity was discovered in the late 1920s, but since the pill was potentially lethal if used in correctly, it was taken off the market and banned.
I work for a small pharmaceutical company. Well fewer than 100 total employees. If we invented a single pill that would cure all cancer tomorrow we would, from the CEO to the glassware washers, be multimillionaires on Wednesday. Our investors would be similarly handsomely rewarded.
This is one of those conspiracy theories that doesn’t even make any sense.
If by “holding back cures” you mean that the actually have a cure but are not releasing it, that doesn’t make sense. Why would they have spent money to research a cure that they have no intention of releasing?
But, for the sake of argument, let’s ignore that and further let’s assume that such a discovery would cause a company to lose profits. If I’ve discovered a cancer cure, that likely means that the state of the art has reached the point where a cancer cure is possible. That means that if I’ve discovered it, someone else will also soon do the same. So the cure will be coming out soon, and it will hurt everyone’s profits. That being the case, the one who patents and releases it won’t take as big a hit as the others, since they’ll at least they’ll be able to offset the loss by selling the cure.