Does the pharmaceutical agency really care about your health, or making billions in profit?

I have been working with a lot of human beings working at pharma companies and I can honestly say they all care about patients.

 

They care about making money by researching the f--k out of and improving your health, unlike the Khmer Rouge enforcers you dutifully called out at refineries for scheduling modified DuPont shifts with whole-ass weeks off every month.

 

Even the salesmen/persons?

Don't lie now.

 

I have worked for the legal department at one of the top Pharma companies and they also care a lot about patents, and the diffent restrictions in regions all around the world. Pretty amazing the files they keep and how they monitor every single court case.

 

No, they care about money....need heavy regulation.

DD

 

People get into medicine for good reasons including helping people. Profits are awesome too.

 

The corporate entity as a whole only cares about profits. It’s up to leadership to decide how much care they have towards anything else including people.

 

Sure, employees probably care, but how far do they go when their care for people runs the opposite direction from their fiduciary duty to the shareholder? Even the CEO is powerless in the face of the duty to make the next quarterly earnings target. If their ESG policy says they'll deliver some metric of social justice it might get done, otherwise caring doesn't matter.

 

Well yes, that's an inherent conflict in any business.

The primary responsibility of management in a for-profit business is to create shareholder value.

Personally, I am skeptical of all the ESG stuff.

A lot of it is fake virtue signaling and window dressing.

I do believe in legal frameworks to curb excesses of vulture capitalism, I do believe in fair taxes, but I also believe in (fair) competition and in capitalism in general.

 

Who's doing the research? Research by the time it comes to private corporations is mainly in the realm of maximizing efficiency in terms of delivery of product to the masses. The actual leg work of research of new ideas such as mRNA research almost always starts publicly funded because corporations aren't going to invest in high risk research as in research that is years or decades away from having any ability to monetize.

 

Many people get into medicine for altruistic reasons. Most c-suites are c-suites because they want to maximize return on investment and that is literally all they care about. The scientists and researchers aren't running there companies. MBAs are.

This type of dichotomy between the technical talent and the sales/business talent clashing is pervasive. It's represented in even industries like game development. Look at how the gaming industry turned into season passes and loot boxes because eventually the MBAs made the business decisions rather than the technical talent. In the beginning of the game industry like in the 80s,90s, early 2000s the game industry was mainly run by the technical talent through start ups eventually growing in size where eventually they became faceless organizations managed by c-suites.

 

Opioid epidemic came from a few players in pharma that flooded money to doctors through boosters who then took selectively skewed studies to over prescribe those painkillers to Americans.

Johnson and Johnson managed to whitewash their role in the scandals with a billions dollar settlement (societal damage is in the hundreds of billions) and because covid needed a quick and coordinated vaccine response.

So I generally have to doubt pharma looking to benefit everyone's lives the right way. They might genuinely care for patients...who will pay them money.

Market failures such as what the OP posted... Well that's for the government to solve/ interfere or the real market to figure out the price (no pay, no play).

I get there are factors towards recouping research marketing costs but selling the pill at 3.5M is a helluva lot for making back your investment.

 

I met one of the members of that family.

It was creepy.

 

I wish there was a hell, because there'd be a special place in it for them.

 

Yea, in general. There are some exceptions. I might be mixing up with another name or company, but I think the founder of Merck was a Dr and he or his son provided royalty-free drugs.

We need more pharma companies. More competition and innovation. Lower cost of entry. Hopefully, AI is one path to get there.

Alphabet's DeepMind AI has solved "the protein folding problem" that could aid medicine research | TechSpot

 

The DuPont shift is what many refineries and plants use to set hours for their techs, operators and mechanics. You would never take the time research that before (falsely) alleging worker exploitation industry-wide based on routine shift scheduling or mutliple years R&D costs before popping off unsourced.

 

You're projecting your engineering background onto biomedical development, "maximizing efficiency" will always entail reviewing curative and side effects, treatment regiment and all kinds of other things that are as much tied to patient's health as economic viability.