Yeah fuck pharma and their life saving drugs!
Clearly the problem is capitalism and not the cult of media worship and the church of the science.
I'm in the field of biomedical science. I see what goes on and I know what these fucking people do. I know how that fucking sausage is made. Pharma is exactly the fucking problem. I've seen drugs skyrocket in price for no fucking reason other than one company makes them. Insulin is a drug I can fucking make right now in my lab. Give me the gene and some e. coli and I can make you some insulin (I'll need some chemistry to make it injectable but that's what the industrial pharm people are for) but drug companies choose to manufacture the most expensive brands only because it is literally a life and death medication. Epi-pens went up to insane prices because the companies involved colluded with each other to keep prices high. Lexapro is just a fucking enantiomer of celexa and it was granted a fresh ten year patent. Do I even have to fucking mention opioids? Oh and there was the 'female viagra' that was pushed on women that nobody asked for except this small weirdo group that suddenly propped up overnight...which was funded by the pharmaceutical industry. Yeah, they basically hired them to scream at the FDA that they were sexist until they approved a drug that basically did fucking nothing and fucked you up hard if you drank alcohol. Then there were the pharma firms who paid this research outfit to get patients to take their drugs and their records were so incredibly sloppy it gave the pharma companies the results they wanted by being grossly incompetent. But with just enough doubt, legally, that they could claim "I'm sorry government, we're just that retarded, its totes not on purpose to get this drug approved." Then you've got things like Vioxx, and Bayer giving people AIDs and HIV because they couldn't be bothered to fucking autoclave blood transplants.
So don't fucking tell me they're in the business of saving lives. They're just a business, period end of story. Saving lives is like....tenth on the list. MAYBE. The absolute
second you stop looking at the pharmaceutical industry it will try and fucking kill you as well as sell you a pill you don't need and then try to buy your corpse for more medical research and then fuck your family out of a payout by doing a 'bankruptcy' and then change its name so everyone forgets it killed you and sold your spare parts off. I'm ALREADY seeing a deluge of articles with the American Academy of Pediatrics saying the solution for childhood obesity is drugs and surgery. You wanna know fucking why? Two drugs have just been recently found and approved for weight loss. And that's one of the fucking least evil things its done.
Drug companies have been evil and unethical ever since they were a thought in a person's mind, and if you think any different, holy fucking lol. If the choice is cure cancer or boner pills, they'll go with boner pills, because there's no return on a cured patient. And honestly, to a pharmacetical company, I'd say that's actually one of their more ethical decisions (you know, as long as the boner pills work and they fund them properly and aren't just inventing yet another boner pill because their other boner pill is going generic....there's a lot of caveats to 'ethical pharmaceutical decisions'). Money and saving lives don't fucking go together. They never have and they never ever will. Its why your medical decisions aren't being made by a doctor, its made by an insurance company actuary telling you what it can 'afford' (IE: What it will cost the company the least amount of money) and a pharmaceutical company shoving bribes to a doctor to push its drugs on you. Its why a shotgun needs to be perpetually up the ass of every pharma executive and if that sphincter twitches wrong, that trigger gets pulled.
I work in the ‘getting research to patients’ field, and it’s a strange place to be. I know some incredibly dedicated scientists who have dragged work from the lab to patient to market to be almost-cures for one form of cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy forms of progressive blindness and developed new antibiotics and there was some fantastic work out last week about a hugely effective gene therapy for epidermolysis bullosa (if your stomach is strong, look that one up.) so there are some of us who genuinely are ethical, genuinely want to do good and work very hard to do that. We do a valuable job.
And then… in the same organisations you have asbestos in baby powder, dodgy as fuck marketing, lethal contaminants, and every poor practice under the sun. You have entire societies manipulated to create diseases that were not culturally recognised (look up ‘a cold of the soul’ in the context of Japan and prozac marketing. You have drugs that kill and people know it but they’re not pulled. All for money. And you have the whole sorry covid injection saga. Which was money and maybe something even worse.
So yes, while we do make lifesaving drugs, and we need to exist, I agree with
@Secret Asshole that we also need to be watched like a hawk and regulated harder than hard. The love of money has been a big root of the old school pharma behaviour (‘yeah it kills one percent but it’s made us billions so sit in that data!’’ Is pure greed) but you are right to pick out the church of scientism as one cause of the more recent stuff. The covid hysteria could NOT have played out as it did without that cult like attitude.
It’s a strange industry at the moment, but it’s a strange world
Oh boy, you poor motherfucker. I'm more on the academic/regulatory side (honestly, my discipline is so small, mentioning it is actually a power level) but yeah. Mine is at least more tolerable. But...its not an enviable position to be in.
The cult of science is a huge problem. I fucking despise the "I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE" people so much I wish that more people believed in black magic than 'LOVE SCIENCE'. This sort of cultism is how we get the fucking 20 year ruination of the field of dementia research, COVID vaccine cults where you now have executives being forced to admit they KNEW their vaccines wouldn't prevent you from getting the virus or spreading it, making it fundamentally fucking useless as a vaccine. No fucking chance am I touching it ever again.
Also anyone who says 'science is settled' seriously should be beaten to death with a bag of hammers. Holy shit.
Hey no worries be as blunt as you want, this is the farms.
Who watches? I don’t know. We can’t trust anyone any more. I don’t know if you’ve seen those experiments where they test if you’ll steal or hurt someone, but they consistently show that a small minority will always do the bad thing, a small minority will never do the bad thing and the bulk will do it or not depending on peer pressure and if they get caught.
I’m the type who wouldn’t do something I deem immoral even if I knew 100% I wouldn’t get caught because it would eat away at me. (Nb this does not necessarily line up 100% with what the law is.) It’s been a shock to see how few people are like that and what the consequences of that are.
Not absolutely everyone is deeply corrupt, but I think any body or organisation big enough to have an impact is rotten to the core. I dont know how to fix it.
Honestly I’d retire tomorrow if I could. I no longer want to work in this whole thing
What I've learned about a lot of people, from intelligent people to scum on Twitter and Redditt, is that most of them are self-centered to the core. Some are better at hiding it than others, but you really just have to look at the lowest criminal and how honest they are and it basically sums up a lot of people. "I don't know them so I don't care." Is the attitude a lot of people have. Many people are also incurious to the things they do and don't care what is happening.
And then there are people who will do terrible things and know they're terrible but go along with it because everyone is going along with it and they don't want to be the odd one out. Depending on the extremity of it, you sort of have to have an unshakeable will and a morality basically of iron. Its a very rare individual who can stand up to that sort of withering pressure when no one wants to move or lift a finger and it is
not in your best interest to do so or keep fighting.
The saintly individuals you find are rare but its hard to find them, especially when you need them. Everyone has a limit and a price these days.
