Today starts our series of posts on some personal pet peeves of mine. Since I'm such an angry and bitter guy, this series could go on for a LONG time.
Today's Peeve: Stupid Conspiracy Theories about medicine.
I'm always amazed by the number of people to who believe this. Some otherwise really smart people will believe stuff that just boggles my mind. These are people that I've worked with; people I've gone to school with; people I respect.
Today's is: drug companies could cure disease X (cancer, AIDS, the flu, etc), but they make more money treating the disease instead.
That's just stupid. Look, cancer and AIDS haven't been cured because THEY ARE HARD TO CURE. Not some huge conspiracy where all the drug companies got together and decided not to cure some disease.
Let us assume this one is true. Never mind that the companies would have to somehow keep EVERYONE who knew about the result quiet (almost impossible with the sort of people who devote their lives to research in the first place). My biggest problem with this sort of logic is that the person articulating it clearly has no idea how drug patents work in the first place.
Treating you is not profitable in the long run for a drug company anyways because they have a set window of patent protection (10-15 years. Depends on how long the drug was in clinical trials). Moreover, not every drug company makes a drug for every disease. If I'm company A and my competitor company B makes a drug to treat AIDS, you can bet I would love to make a cure for AIDS. Anything that hurts the competition is good for me. AZT alone made GlaxoSmithKline $1.8 billion dollars over it's life. If Merck or Pfizer or whatever could come up with a cure for AIDS, you can bet they would release it in a heart beat. (1) for the money (imagine what you could charge for a cure to AIDS), and (2) just to screw a competitor out of all that revenue.
6 years ago
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1 comment:
People are so dumb!
Where is Friday's post? You are behind!!
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