The profit interests of Big Pharma are fundamentally at odds with the health interests of the public
With a new HHS Secretary there is an opportunity to think big about structural reform
Stopping the iatrogenocide in the U.S. requires understanding and dismantling the structures that produced it. There are lots and lots of specifics that we will get into soon. But for now I just want to lay out four fundamental conflicts that I see as being at the core of this problem:
1.) Actual innovation in medicine is really, really, really difficult.
The human body is nothing like a computer.
There is no “Moore’s Law” in the biosciences.
Animal studies do not directly translate into human results.
The human genome was first mapped 35 years ago and yet this has not revolutionized medicine as once promised.
Any investment in bioscience research comes with 100% risk because one never knows if a particular strategy will produce beneficial outcomes.
Publicly traded pharmaceutical companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to maximize profits and the only sure way to generate profits is through regulatory capture.
So Big Pharma just lies about its products and buys off the regulators (and the politicians and the media) every time.
2.) Under normal circumstances, the market of unhealthy people is really, really, small.
At any given time, only a small percentage of the population is sick (or at least that’s how it used to be).
The biggest profits come from giving a drug to the entire population in the name of preventive care — vaccines and now statins.
By pathologizing natural human emotions, the makers of psychopharmaceuticals also seek to sell treatments to nearly the entire population.
3.) Because the costs of actual innovation are high and the market of sick people is small, the ideal drug — from the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry — is one that causes harm.
Big Pharma already owns the regulators so proper monitoring of side effects is rare.
When investigations do happen, they are usually perfunctory — even the most toxic drugs never lead to jail time and any fines are only a small percentage of profits.
“Cause the harm, treat the harm” is a vastly more profitable business model than cures.
Causing harm increases profits by 100x or more (a single injury can produce a lifetime of profitable treatments).
Said simply, causing harm and disease massively increases the size of the market for pharmaceutical products so that’s Big Pharma’s business model today.
4.) If one actually cares about health, finding new uses for existing drugs that are no longer protected by patents is BY FAR the best use of research time and money.
Research into nutrition and non-pharmaceutical interventions also produces infinitely better outcomes for the public than biochemical research.
But there are almost no profits in these approaches.
What I have described here are structural problems — the profit interests of the pharmaceutical industry are fundamentally at odds with the health interests of the public. Big Pharma is going to keep poisoning the population until we stop them because that’s where the money is. Any proposed reforms of HHS, NIH, FDA, CDC, DARPA, BARDA, ARPA-H, etc. must confront and seek to demolish the legal and incentive structures that are causing the iatrogenocide.
Blessings to the warriors. 🙌
Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏
Huzzah for everyone building the parallel society our hearts know is possible. ✊
In the comments, please let me know what’s on your mind.
As always, I welcome any corrections.
A great book I recently read called The Biology of Belief really helps the reader understand that healthcare, and particularly allopathic medicine, still operates under Newtonian physics. Yet, our cells work in harmony with quantum physics. There is a vast difference between the two. Our cells are intelligent biological machines that make us who we are, and mainstream medicine is out of touch with our cell's ability to heal ourselves.
Today at work, after a Gen Zer blew her nose, she commented on the severity of her allergies and then said to me, “How are your allergies?” When I, a Gen Xer, gently said, “I don’t have allergies,” she didn’t quite know what to do with such an anomaly. She said, “That’s good that you don’t have allergies,” but it almost felt like she didn’t believe me because that doesn’t compute with her general experience. I know that her younger sister was diagnosed with celiac disease when she was still a baby, for example. How sad that the youngsters in our world now view chronic illness as normal.