The story of this revelation, in all its necrotic glory, comes from Ars Technica. The Goldman Sachs theory refers specifically to genetic therapies. Goldman Sachs points out primly that while this might be great for patients and society, it’s not a good outcome for developers looking for good cash flow.
They even go to the trouble of pointing out that a cure for Hepatitis C has a 90% cure rate, and that as a result of curing so many people, profits for one company, Gilead, have gone down from $12 billion to a measly $4 billion. How awful. How maggot-worshippingly, slum-fornicatingly bloody terrible. Those poor, deluded, idiotically rich bastards. What WERE they thinking? They even prevented the spread of that nice, highly remunerative and highly contagious disease!
The solution to the terrible risks of medical success is equally elegant: Focus on high incidence diseases where returns will be better. Obviously Big Pharma isn’t making enough money despite gloating every second about how much money it’s making. This peanut-vending exercise in a multi-trillion dollar sector is a good example. Perhaps hoping for a few global pandemics might help, or reintroducing nasty diseases through public disinformation campaigns?
The sheer scale of the irresponsibility and greed of the pharmaceutical sector is legendary. Business models are all about exploitation. There’s no mention of a strong cashflow from reliable, proven cures. There’s not even the suggestion of higher sector values and improved efficiencies from getting the millions of wannabe corpses out of the hospitals.
This is a classic example of the total detachment of GS and its zombie relatives from human realities. The thinking simply doesn’t go beyond “make a buck”. If this is thought leadership, what is death? A cost centre?
On the same basis, selling people food at affordable prices is wrong. They may come back for more food, but to be on the safe side, if prices are kept high enough, that $2000 packet of Cheetos will cushion the margins and keep the cash flow high.
Turning food in to toxic waste before consumption is also good, because people will get sick from ridiculous amounts of high fructose and other poisons. Nothing like a pandemic of diabetes to keep the cashflow going, is there? I’m sure anyone would be prepared to lose a limb to keep the Big Pharma guys in luxury.
How inspiring – There’s nothing like watching Daddy or Mommy rot down for years on end to prove that free enterprise is the only way to do things. You could open a museum, and call it Schmauswitz, highlighting your heroic fight against human health and sanity in all their pernicious forms.
This is a culture of money grubbing mediocrity at best. Also remember this is the sector which will be tasked with dealing with any major outbreak of anything. The fact that one of the world’s leading financial houses can make an idiotic, obscene, statement like this and get mindless acceptance says nothing good about anyone involved in medicine, pharmaceuticals, or policy.
A little challenge
I’ve got a little challenge for the Pharma sector. Why don’t you wonderful “people” go and see what these diseases look like, for yourselves. Share a few moments with people during extreme suffering. Realize that may well be you, sooner or later.
There’s even a technical challenge for those who need one – Why don’t you go and do some real costing for the collateral damage diseases cause across demographics? How about doing an analysis of why very sick people are economically underperforming, which, strangely, relates to everyone’s financial viability?
Big Pharma has THE worst image of any sector. It completely deserves that image. This huge, useless, crap-dispensing cartel of global economic syphilis hasn’t done a damn thing right in decades. Cure thyself, Big Pharma, and you may see the errors of your ways for the last few decades. You’ll find it’s a very interesting diagnostic process, particularly in dollar terms.
Donations to the Temple of Pure Financially Driven Disingenuous Crap may be made at any financial or investment institution.
