biologyweeps:

It’s stupid. It’s really fucking stupid. It requires the sort of large scale, international, multilevel conspiracy that in real life would last about half a minute before someone blabbed on it.

Worse yet, it fundamentally misunderstands what the actual money makers of the pharma industry at large are. Because cancer treatments? Not it. HIV treatments? also not it. Because they’re by and large too rare to reel in the actual money.

Take ‘cancer’. there’s no one type of dancer, there’s hundreds, each of which needs to be treated differently. For some of them, if caught early, a simple surgery will fix you up. For others, the ‘userbase’ is so small that they basically have to be treated by orphan drugs because otherwise there’s NO monetary pull for anyone to do anything for them. 

You know what does real in the big bucks? The everyday stuff. The cold meds, the weight loss stuff, the insulin and painpills. The things EVERYONE wants or needs. You know what’s one of the biggest sellers ever? Viagra. A medication that virtually nobody actually needs but a lot of people really want. 

The bread and butter base of pharma industry isn’t cancer or HIV or the big scary things. It’s the common shit that people have in significant numbers. They might not turn a big profit per pill, but if you sell millions of these pills a day? Then even one cent of profit per pill means millions of profit per day. Hell even if it’s just a fraction of a cent, you still get that profit accumulated.

The other thing is… look, there’s a contemporary example. You all remember the HPV vaccine, right? The one for the virus that’s associated with like 70% of cervical cancers? We have effectively created a vaccine for cancer and you know what happened to the people who figured out that this virus can cause cancer and that subsequently, we can vaccinate against it? The fucking Nobel Price in Medicine that’s what. 

Now we have vaccines against that. And here’s the other rub about the pharma industry. It lives and dies by its patents. A patent ensures that nobody else can Do The Thing for a period of time (for meds, 25 years because medication development is a long and money intensive process) and while a patent means that your thing is published, it also means that for as long as your patent lasts, you and only you are the final arbiter of how available the thing is and you can sue the fuck out of anyone else. The chance to patent what’s essentially a vaccine against cancer is incredibly tempting, because think back of my first point. The best money you can make on stuff that everyone wants.

How many people are ACTUALLY going to get cervical (or a related HPV caused) cancer? How many of those will need YOUR meds to fix it? A lot, but not that many. 

How many people will want your vaccine? ALL OF THEM. Sure they might only need it once in their lives or once a decade, but your userbase is enourmous. More over, the development of a vaccine is less expensive than a new med for cancer treatment. Because you know the virus, you know how the immune system works, you do in many cases have established booster ingredients that you don’t need to reinvent from the ground up. You need to test for safety and efficiency, sure, but a lot of the false starts of med development you can avoid

And then there’s the final thing: not every researcher works for the pharama industry to begin with. The dude linked above, who got the Nobel price? At the time of the relevant publication/discovery he was working for the National Cancer Research Center in Germany. The one paid for by the German government. And he’s not the only one, loads of countries have their own, paid-for-by-your-taxes research centers!

And then we reach the final point, the researchers themselves. Do people honestly thing that if someone came up with a bona fide, high percentage cure for HIV, that researcher wouldn’t crow it from the roofs? And I don’t mean in youtube videos, I mean in ‘send this to every single peer reviewed journal we have available because THAT’S MY NOBEL PRICE OVER THERE BITCHES’ and that’s assuming the lowest possible motivator, the drive for personal fame/gain. For a lot of people, ‘fame’ factors in it only distantly. They want to learn. They want to help. They’re not in research because it’s pulling in the big bucks. A lot of the time it doesn’t, a lot of the time it’s grueling work with setback after setback and deadlines hanging over you less like Damocles’ sword and more like Damocles’ bulldozer. 

And even if we assume that there’d be a smear campaign out the get go… look whistleblower is a bit of a buzzword these days, but if you can leak highly classified documents of a government, of banks, I can absolutely ASSURE you that someone in the line would have the spine and moral fiber to put the research data out there and let other people see for themselves. And these days? The data is digital. You don’t have to try and sneak 500kg of paperwork out there, you can fit it all onto a thumbdrive small enough to swallow and probably have room to spare. (and here’s another thing: what do you think would happen to the stock price of say your rival pharma company if you could expose that they’re hiding the Cure For HIV somewhere out of greed and you… let that slip…)

In the end, the conspiracy theory doesn’t just require a lot of bold assumptions about how the industry works and how well people with diametral opposed goals can work together for a very very vague ‘common denominator’, it also requires that every single person involved in the research and production would lack even the slightest bit of moral backbone to leak the data. Internationally. Across all firms and every single national research institute that might do ground research. All of them. 

And I would like to think that humanity as a whole doesn’t have an asshole quota high enough to manage that.