"Is Big Pharma Ethical in Effectively Controlling Medication Affordability by a Nation's Populace?"
Is the Pope a Buddhist? — Bitter Crank
What kind of schizophrenic CEOs do you imagine are in charge of these organisations? — Isaac
the drug companies favor drugs that are taken for long periods of time over short periods of time. Bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites pose the greatest threat to human health and well-being (apart from global warming). There are no new antibiotics in the pipeline of drug development, and the existing ones are gradually losing their effectiveness. — Bitter Crank
Pricing of drugs isn't "schizophrenic"; from their POV, it makes perfectly good sense to extract the cost of development and profit-potential as rapidly as possible. — Bitter Crank
It's now so lucrative for pharmaceutical companies to get an anti-cancer drug approved that could make a profit from absolutely any chemical at all and simply run sufficient trials for one to have a positive effect by chance alone. — Isaac
Pharmaceutical companies paid for 6,550 trials out of 7,598 in 2014. — Isaac
Same year that the Cochrane report found Tamiflu had little to no benefit in preventing the flu or shortening the duration of flu symptoms, yet had a chance of life-threatening side effects, including suicide. — Isaac
It's now so lucrative for pharmaceutical companies to get an anti-cancer drug approved that could make a profit from absolutely any chemical at all and simply run sufficient trials for one to have a positive effect by chance alone. — Isaac
That is how a lot of early-stage drug research is done. Colonies of cancer cells are cultivated in many petri dishes, then exposed to one chemical after another to find one that is harmful to the cancer cells. Same thing with AIDS drugs back in the 1980s and 90s -- lots of lab techs in universities testing one chemical after another. — Bitter Crank
Non-drug-company-research is done (not often enough) to determine whether drugs work at all. Fairly often the result is "not that much" or "no better than existing drugs". — Bitter Crank
Famously (though perhaps not famous enough) the Cochrane trials only recently found most common paracetamol to be largely ineffective for the majority of people. — Isaac
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