Big business is evil except for big pharma???

Has anyone else ever notice the overlap of the opinion that big business is evil, big business will cheat, lie, and take advantage of anyone and everyone. Yet somehow big pharma gets a pass. Like vaccines have to be good, there is no chance that big pharma could never due harm. I don't get how some can have so much hate for something and at the same time a blind spot to the same thing

a reply to: thinline

If any industry gets a pass, it's the tech industry.

How come no one questions why your telephone now costs you $600+ top replace for something made cheaply in China by slave labor?

Additionally, big pharms is not innocent, but it takes flack for the wrong reasons. People really do not understand what is going on in it. If you want to hammer it, there are things you could hit, but instead everyone takes shots at things that aren't under its control.

a reply to: thinline

Big Pharma takes plenty of heat...
This guy is in the news right now.
www.rawstory.com...

Like vaccines have to be good, there is no chance that big pharma could never due harm.

Not so sure the issue is so black and white as that.
People just see the vast amount of good vaccines have done and don't see all the doom porn people want to say about them.

If you are talking about the current thread with the boost in old drugs as one example, I'll tell you, and I know this because my husband works directly with industry regulations, that the situation in question was created by the government regulatory apparatus. In their effort to create the safe drug environment demanded by consumers (and petty bureaucrats looking to justify their own desk jobs), they created the set of drug validation rules being used by the companies in question.

The oversight was that they didn't think about all the old drugs that have been in existence for so long that they were more or less pennies on the dollar and so old that no one questioned their safety or had patents or new regime safety validation studies on them. I mean, they'd always been around. Everyone knew they worked, right? No need.

All someone needed to do was work out that there was no reason why someone couldn't do the validation sets on them and then claim them as entirely new drugs with all the associated price increases that entails. And you can call them playing dirty for it, but it wasn't against the rules as set by the government, and if the government didn't want them doing it, all the government had to do was change the rules.

That the government hasn't or won't do it, tells you HOW MUCH YOUR GOVERNMENT CARES.

So to me, this is a problem government created the opening for and has no interest in solving, especially as it would mean at least some deregulating to rework the rules. While the companies weren't the most scrupulous in taking advantage of the system. It wasn't one they created, especially as these are not all big name companies who spend time and money lobbying.

a reply to: thinline

Once big business is sponsored by the state, it's ok. Don't you read? /sarcasm

I was reading a lot of articles today about pharmaceutical companies buying patents of certain drugs and then raising their prices through the roof, one went from less a bit over $10 a pill to over $700 a pill.

Related ATS Thread

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: thinline

If any industry gets a pass, it's the tech industry.

How come no one questions why your telephone now costs you $600+ top replace for something made cheaply in China by slave labor?

Additionally, big pharms is not innocent, but it takes flack for the wrong reasons. People really do not understand what is going on in it. If you want to hammer it, there are things you could hit, but instead everyone takes shots at things that aren't under its control.

And look at the price of hearing aids. They're very simple technology yet can cost $4,000 or more. It's price gouging, plain and simple.

As for the OP:
Big Pharma sucks. They get grants & financial assistance from federal governments for research, then turn around and price gouge the final products. And many times, they only create products to treat expensive ailments in wealthier countries. In other words, if there's no profit in making treatments for poor people in poor regions, they won't even bother with it. It's "money over life" to them.

Look into India's battles with Big Pharma & India's generic drugs programs to see what I'm talking about.

isnt that called cognitive dissonance or something? When someone correctly attributes to one thing but not another thats basically the same thing?


i think its easy to pick in big business because most of us arent rich and have very little to do with that world other than feeling were getting scammed or paying too much for things......whereas we ALL partake of delicious little pharmaceutical goodies and i think we cant handle the prospect what we are putting into our bodies or our childrens could be dangerous....even though theres a neverending stream of revelation that shows that is often the case.


selective bias?

a reply to: thinline

This boils down to our inherent need for security. Doctors have been set up as demigods for the past 100 years. Many have stepped out of religion and superstition in many aspects of their lives, but their health is the last bastion of the religious control mechanisms that cause them to bow/submit/check their head at the door to the higher power.

Its scary to come to the conclusion that your gods (pastor, priest, doctor, president, teacher, parent, ______) are fallible, and in many cases outright fraudulent, and in fact instead of protecting you they are abusing you.

In this case the doctors are doing in unknowingly because they have been indoctrinated into the religion of medical science. The megacorps are obviously doing it knowingly, but as you have stated in the OP we can't believe it.

Its just too hard to take this to its logical conclusion.

You are not being protected. They are not making you safe. They are not looking out for your best interest.

The safety of forfeiting your power to the authority even in the face of clear evidence of the authority doing you harm, is much greater to most than coming to terms with said harm.

Whenever I see people give a pass to the medical industry, I see a woman with a black eye saying "but he loves me".

Ultimately we just don't want to grow up all the way. We don't want to take responsibility for our own health, its too scary, and too great a task. So we will just take the pill even though we see that 90% of the pharma ad is a warning about the side effect. "this time it will be different".

a reply to: Sremmos80

I wasn't trying to say big pharma doesn't get heat. I am more pointing out the huge overlap group of people who are on social media, hating on big business (more then one hates on their college's football team rival) never seem to stop and question big pharma. That group of people almost forms a cult around big pharma while hating on big business.

originally posted by: thinline
Has anyone else ever notice the overlap of the opinion that big business is evil, big business will cheat, lie, and take advantage of anyone and everyone. Yet somehow big pharma gets a pass. Like vaccines have to be good, there is no chance that big pharma could never due harm. I don't get how some can have so much hate for something and at the same time a blind spot to the same thing

Pharma kills 100k/year in the US alone. Every manufacturer of pediatric vaccines has been convicted of criminal fraud in the last 5 years. They bought off politicians in 1986 and were granted 100% legal immunity from damage claims. Reagan signed that doozy. They spend more on marketing than R&D. The pay politicians to make them mandatory....

Yet people let them inject vaccines into their newborns. It makes no logical sense.
This is a blood sacrifice to the religion of allopathy.

originally posted by: thinline
a reply to: Sremmos80

I wasn't trying to say big pharma doesn't get heat. I am more pointing out the huge overlap group of people who are on social media, hating on big business (more then one hates on their college's football team rival) never seem to stop and question big pharma. That group of people almost forms a cult around big pharma while hating on big business.

You are pointing out that people with faith based belief system frequently end up with logical inconsistencies. I was in attendance at a Planned Parenthood protest a few days ago. It was 95% Catholics. That is a place to collect signatures to repeal a mandatory vaccine law. It's a fact that some vaccines are cultured in human diploid cells derived from aborted fetuses.

One sign carrying Catholic I talked to said he loves vaccines. I informed him that some contain the fetal material he is referring to on his sign. In response to this obvious incoherence, he shrugged and said nothing bad has ever happened to him from a vaccine. I gave up even attempting to process that.