As if to reinforce the point in today's video, I noticed this in the FT yesterday:
GSK launched a rare £2bn share buyback and raised its growth targets on the back of strong sales of speciality medicines, including cancer and HIV drugs, sending shares up as much as 6 per cent on Wednesday.
Shareholders will also benefit from higher dividends, with the payout set to rise to 61p per share for the 2024 financial year, up from 58p last year, after the drugmaker reported an increase in annual sales. The FTSE 100 group raised its long-term annual sales forecast to more than £40bn by 2031, up from a previous forecast of more than £38bn.
As I argue in the video, curing diseases provides no benefit to a drug company. Creating drugs that have to be taken for life to manage a disease - which continues to afflict the sufferer - does, however, provide a massive boost to their profitability. I think GSK proves the point.
In my opinion, big pharma really does not want to cure people. Managing them in their sickness is much more profitable for them. No wonder NHS costs are increasing.
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A health/pharmaceutical market that lives off disease is beyond redemption and morally repugnant and reinforces why government has to be involved. It is as simple as that. But the state needs to put up the money, for sure to make this happen.
This is why Trump, Starmer and Reeves are opposed to the State. They want Growth. Anything that stands in the way of the piratical Entrepreneurial spirit (like international law, nationalisation and the Welfare State) is evil in their eyes and must be destroyed. Just as with Palestine, Starmer and co will find it easy to stand with (not against, however much one might hope) Trump in such matters.
Correct.
Freedom and Growth are what we are sold by Neo-liberalism (it still needs a more accurate name) , but in reality it is actually a freedom and growth that narrowly defined by those pumping their money into the political system.
It is freedom and growth for THEM. Not ‘us’.
Time to nationalise the pharmaceutical companies?
https://jacobin.com/2020/07/national-health-service-covid-health-care-spending
If we go back to the good old days though you had a lot of people presenting with infectious disease that could be cured with a good dose of antibiotics.
Now its more ‘chronic’ conditions that need to be ‘managed’ often for the rest of the patients life. Unlike the good old infectious disease however there is no political will to tackle the environment people live in that makes them sick
Sugar intake, in other words.
Almost all chronic conditions – most of which have grown in significance massively over the last 40 years – have their cause in excess sugar consumption.
Coupled with reduced activity levels……..
Margaret Atwood’s 2003 novel “Oryx and Crake” is to be recommended in this context. A dystopian riff on a future where the food industry and big pharma combine to keep people permanently dependent on their products. Not so far into the future 20+ years later.
I seem to remember a manifesto recently that touted a publicly owned pharma company, precisely to do the disease eradication stuff like vaccines. But apparently that would have caused chaos, so the leader was smeared and betrayed.
We had one, created in the wake of the second world war, to try to make sure Britain never got blindsided again, after we failed to patent penicillin, and the Yanks stepped in and did it instead. And guess what, it was privatised…
You are so right Richard. Look at the amount of money these Cancer research companies get and yet we still can’t find cures for many cancers.
Humanity is faced with a microbial antibiotic resistance problem, a very worrying report re this came from the Ukraine frontline in January. No Pharma company is going to invest in research to deal with this problem because if they are successful, all regulatory bodies will forbid use of the new antibiotic other than in very specific circumstances making the ROI totally unattractive. I wonder who is looking at a solution to this problem or will the world have to go back to pre WW1 times before action is taken?
One way that might encourage the pharmaceutical companies to focus on researching curative drugs is through the tax system. Give them a bung if they successfully bring on-line an efficacious curative drug to market. Tax-free profits on sales of the drug for ‘X’-years; a percentage refund of the research costs for this drug, although I suspect that this might be a nightmare to determine.
Come on Richard, you can do it.
Why would I want to do so?
Giving money from the NHS tax free to big pharma makes no sense
The solution is to solve the chronic diseases at source.
We have dine much of that with smoking. Now we need to do so with food.