Is big pharma really deceiving humanity?

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

Allegedly, big pharma hides a cure for cancer, bribes politicians and even creates disease.

What is Big Pharma

Big Pharma, or Big Pharma (from the English Big Pharma), is a shorthand name for some of the largest pharmaceutical companies. These include:

• American Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co, Wyeth, Eli Lilly and Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb;
• British GlaxoSmithKline, and British-Swedish AstraZeneca and British-Dutch Unilever;
• French Sanofi;
• Swiss Roche and Novartis;
• German Boehringer Ingelheim and Bayer;
• Japanese Takeda Pharmaceutical and Astellas Pharma;
• Israeli Teva Pharmaceutical Industries;
• Chinese Sinopharm;
• other.

This word also denotes a group of theories according to which the medical community, primarily large pharmaceutical companies, in the pursuit of profit, deceive the whole world. For example, they hide really working drugs, sell "dummies" and even harmful drugs, so that later people have to be treated for side effects.

Medical corporations are allegedly assisted by high-ranking politicians, officials, scientists and doctors. Ordinary people do not know anything about the conspiracy, and they hide the truth from them.

These theories can also include accusations against the largest private sponsor of the World Health Organization Bill Gates, fear of 5G towers, rumors about chipping and other crazy concepts.

What is Big Pharma accused of?

Information about the conspiracy is spread primarily by conspiracy theorists.

Lobbying your interests

The global pharmaceutical market is estimated at no less than one trillion US dollars. And in order to snatch a bigger piece from him, Big Pharma supposedly stops at nothing.

For example, it bribes inspection bodies, politicians and scientific journals. This allows for more convenient laws to be pushed through, the strict requirements of government commissions bypassed, and useless drugs on the market. And then also publish pseudoscientific articles about the effectiveness of such drugs.

Some even believe that powerful medical corporations are creating pocket politicians. French President Emmanuel Macron is called one of these. He worked in his youth at the bank of David de Rothschild, which conducted major successful deals with Pfizer. Yes, that was enough to be included in the list of conspirators.

However, according to the conspiracy theorists, drug manufacturers do not disdain even smaller bribery. For example, they allegedly influence doctors: they donate medical equipment, give gifts, take them to restaurants, or simply pay bribes. As a result, corrupt physicians begin to prescribe and recommend more expensive and useless drugs instead of cheaper or effective alternatives.

Manufacture of pacifiers and harmful drugs

Opponents of big pharma are confident that companies are not interested in fighting diseases, because this will reduce drug sales. So firms produce a huge number of drugs that are not just useless, but harmful. Many conspiracy theorists also believe that corporations seek to create funds that the patient will be hooked on and will have to buy for life.

So, writer and journalist, author of independent investigations Celia Farber in a Harper's Magazine column accused the developers of the drug nevirapine for HIV and AIDS of conspiracy. Among other things, she stated that HIV does not lead to AIDS, and during experiments, nevirapine was administered to pregnant women, which caused them to die. Farber's claims have been refuted. But the resonance raised actually made the AIDS denial movement widely known and led to many followers.

Concealment of working funds

By selling useless drugs, pharmaceutical companies allegedly keep effective treatments secret from people or slow down their creation. For example, they do not patent really acting drugs and use corrupt officials in order not to let the development of independent researchers enter the market.

Opponents of corporations believe that a cure for all forms of cancer has already been invented. In addition to cancer, Big Pharma allegedly interferes with the fight against a number of diseases. Here are just a few of them:

• herpes;
• arthritis;
• AIDS;
• phobias;
• depression;
• obesity;
• diabetes;
• multiple sclerosis;
• lupus;
• chronic fatigue;
• ADHD - attention deficit hyperactivity disorder;
• muscular dystrophy and others.

Conspiracy theorists also talk about hidden drugs. For example, coral calcium supposedly cures cancer, while Biotape pain reliever relieves pain forever.

Disease creation

Some go further and accuse drug manufacturers of inventing non-existent diagnoses. Everything to increase the drug market. Sometimes supporters of the theory even claim that big pharma itself creates viruses and contributes to the spread of diseases. For example, it deliberately does everything to continue the coronavirus pandemic in order to force governments to vaccinate people.

Many conspiracy theorists believe that the vaccination itself is carried out in order to weaken the immunity of people, infect them with new diseases or make them more obedient. All this supposedly allows pharmaceutical giants to earn even more. Such views give rise to rumors about the dire side effects of vaccinations and medications. For example, the link between mumps vaccine and autism risk.

What's really going on

Most often, conspiracy theorists come up with problems, play on the fears and ignorance of people who trust them. However, sometimes conspiracy theorists are not so far off the mark.

Large companies really control the pharmaceutical market

Pharmaceuticals is a complex but highly lucrative business that accounts for 8% of the global health market and is growing rapidly. Thus, 13 pharmaceutical corporations were included in the list of the 500 largest companies in the world.

But it is not unusual for firms to seek to increase profits and gain substantial market share. This happens in many industries. If you look at the global economy, there are world leaders everywhere: for example, in the automotive industry, the IT industry, the clothing and food industries.

Pharmaceutical lobby exists

For example, in the United States in 1998-2004 alone, two organizations associated with large drug manufacturers lobbied for 1,600 laws. Pharma corporations spent $ 900 million on this - more than any other firm in the economy. On average, US pharmaceutical companies spend $ 235 million on lobbying annually. The total amount of investments in 1998-2018 amounted to 4.7 billion.

This helps to promote laws that are beneficial to themselves. For example, avoid controlling the retail price of drugs. Indeed, the price of drugs in the United States can be 2-3 times higher than in other developed countries.

However, there is an alternative view, according to which the lack of regulation stimulates innovation. Pharmaceutical companies themselves refer to this. They say the cost is high due to research programs that are getting more expensive every year. Nevertheless, their costs are several times less than the revenue received by drug manufacturers and are comparable to marketing costs.

And pharmaceutical companies use advertising very actively. In the middle of the last century, it was placed only in special medical journals, rightly believing that only a professional can assess the advantages and disadvantages of the drug. Today, advertisements of all kinds of media can be seen anywhere. This often misleads people and contributes to the demand for newer, more expensive drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies did release harmful drugs and tried to hide it

There are many examples when drugs released on the market did real harm. One of the most notorious scandals was the banning of the sleeping pill thalidomide in the 1960s. Its reception by pregnant women led to terrible bone abnormalities in newborns. After many cases were opened, the drug was banned, and a large-scale test began in the United States. She confirmed that 40% of the funds on the market are completely ineffective.

Show the consequences of taking thalidomide Hide

There have also been cases when corporations deliberately violated the law and tried to avoid publicity of high-profile failures. For example, this happened when Pfizer was illegally selling the psychotropic drug Geodon (ziprasidone). The company paid a $ 301 million fine, but did not acknowledge the violation.

An even darker story came from Pfizer in Nigeria, where one of the company's drugs for meningitis was tested. Then, numerous cases of corruption and death of children were revealed. The pharmaceutical giant never pleaded guilty and settled the case out of court.

Another company, GlaxoSmithKline, pleaded guilty in 2012 to withholding information about the safety of its drugs, bribery of doctors and inconsistency of the actual action of the drugs with the advertised. The total compensation was $ 3 billion, one of the largest fines in pharmaceutical history.

Dummy drugs exist, but the academic community is holding back their distribution

Big Pharma does sponsor studies that show positive results with drugs of questionable effectiveness. They hire authors to write mock articles, conduct educational programs for doctors, and sponsor some journals. It is no coincidence that drug efficacy studies funded by pharmaceutical companies yield positive results more often than independent ones.

Therefore, scientists are required to report potential conflicts of interest. Simply put, tell who paid for the research.

Along with dubious research, articles criticizing dummy are published. For example, the respected British medical journal BMJ has published a review of studies showing that paracetamol does not help with lower back pain and is almost useless for osteoarthritis.

Reputable scientific publications always review publications, require authors to indicate potential conflicts of interest, and analyze articles in other journals.

This makes it possible to fairly successfully detect facts of abuse. However, such information rarely reaches ordinary people.

Working drugs hit the market

Despite the dominance of large companies, the market is still very competitive. The effectiveness of a drug largely determines its success, and selling pacifiers forever is a losing strategy.

Therefore, only a madman will refuse to patent, for example, a cure for cancer, which will bring not only huge profits, but also numerous awards. For example, the Nobel Prize.

In addition, conspiracy theorists for some reason forget that medicine is already quite advanced in the treatment of many diseases. For example, the number of deaths from cancer has been steadily declining. Every year, new surgical and therapeutic methods of dealing with it appear.

It is significant that the rumors about the concealment of effective techniques and drugs are spread by supporters and creators of alternative medicine methods. So they try to explain why scientists do not recognize unconventional treatments, which do not have scientifically proven data on effectiveness. For example, such ridiculous means as a magnetic mattress topper or crocodile protein peptide.

In reality, they certainly don't work. This does not stop "truth-tellers" from selling their natural medicines and miracle pills.

Big pharma conspiracy theory distracts people's attention from real problems

Vaccinations helped to defeat most infectious diseases, and medicines saved many people's lives. However, this does not prevent the supporters of the theory from considering their conclusions convincing.

The arguments of conspiracy theorists are irrational, based on a misinterpretation of reality, ignoring statistics for the sake of special cases, or simply erroneous. Most often, opponents of big pharma believe in several conspiracy theories at once and live in their own reality, so it is almost impossible to convince such people.

Unfortunately, conspiracy theorists divert public attention from the real problems of pharmaceuticals. For example, fraud by large companies or the existence of drugs with low efficiency.

So is there a big pharma conspiracy

No, this is not possible statistically. According to researchers, the number of participants in the big pharma conspiracy should be more than 700 thousand people. The existence of such a ramified and secret agreement is simply impossible mathematically. Too many people have to be “on the topic”. So the information would have leaked quickly enough to the media and scientific publications.

For example, a conspiracy of doctors and pharmacists to prolong the coronavirus pandemic was going to become common knowledge very quickly. The likelihood of someone spilling out or otherwise divulging a secret would increase to 50% in just 10 weeks after the first infections.