Comment on Open Thread, October 20 - 26, 2013

Fri, 25 Oct 2013 12:40:48 GMT

And big pharma, we meet again. What is this singular, evil, money grabbing entity?

In the most narrow definition big pharma means AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Novartis, Pfizer and Sanofi-Aventis.

If you define it a bit more widely it also includes the other members of PhRMA.

Those companies make money through being gatekeeprs. In the words of Sanofi-Aventis CEO Viehbacher that idea gets expressed:

The new model, where we’re trying to go, we believe that Big Pharma has competencies in validation. So, if a Big Pharma company does a deal with a smaller company, the smaller company’s share price goes up because people believe that Big Pharma has depth of competencies to judge whether this science is any good or not. Now big companies, and not just Big Pharma, big companies I believe, are not any good at doing innovation.

In addition to validation big pharma also invests a lot of money in capturing the political process and pushing their drugs through various forms of marketing on as many people as possible.

As they make money by being a gatekeeper they make it harder for other people to enter the health care market.

If you taboo the associated words, what you're left with is improving people and what's wrong with that? Do you oppose transhumanism on the same grounds?

The goal of transhumaism isn't to make people more normal. Various forms of transhumanism increase human diversity.

Discuss