Wuhan Killer Sneeze (thanks Tea)

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Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Leo said:
isn't IVERMECTIN made by big Pharma (Merck)?
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It's just a template phrase beloved of right-wing cranks, in my experience. Funny how often it comes up in conversations about the evils of vaccines or the ability of almonds to cure cancer, and how rarely it does when the subject is, say, the role of Perdue Pharma in creating the opioid addiction epidemic, which I suppose is just good old American capitalism doing its thing.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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The right wing are only talking about it now because the role has been left vacant by the left, which has presumably either died, got its nose in the trough or finds virtue-signalling more important.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
mixed_biscuits said:
What are you on about? It was the left wing that was banging on about Big Pharma - which is cartel capitalism in action - for decades.
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My point is that it's overwhelmingly used by cranks who insist that something they call "Big Pharma" is suppressing information such as, I dunno, drinking hot water with a slice of lemon in it cures cancer. I mean many of the ones that revolve around "home cures" of that sort are really that ridiculous and can easily be dismissed as such. But many of them are on the make and are selling anything from essential oils to a little box with a coiled wire in it that are supposed to protect you from illness that may be real (e.g. cancer) or not (e.g. chakra-disrupting EMF from phones or whatever). Even the ones who aren't directly selling their snakeoil often have a YouTube channel to promote or whatever.

So it's hardly surprising that this whole scene has a rightwards tilt, because it is itself inherently capitalistic. And the funny thing is that, in criticism of the pharma industry, many of them are *so close* to getting it, but they invariably fail before reaching any useful conclusion such as "Perdue Pharma benefited from a grossly under-legislated market and has helped get the better part of two million Americans hooked on hard opioids", because it is legislation itself that these people object to. Legislation that, while it may often be inadequate, as the Perdue case shows, does nonetheless get some things right, such as saying no, you can't claim your CBD eyedrops cure cancer, depression and autism, because there is no evidence that they do any of those things.
 
mixed_biscuits

mixed_biscuits

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@Mr. Tea I've only recently come to this Big Pharma realisation through close observation of the corona ongoings and cold, hard logic. Since this manipulation is real, it's no wonder that so many people imagine it even where it doesn't apply; you shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
 
luka

luka

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Tea idolises Ben Goldacre who wrote this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Pharma

Goldacre argues in the book that "the whole edifice of medicine is broken", because the evidence on which it is based is systematically distorted by the pharmaceutical industry.[n 1] He writes that the industry finances most of the clinical trials into its own products and much of doctors' continuing education, that clinical trials are often conducted on small groups of unrepresentative subjects and negative data is routinely withheld, and that apparently independent academic papers may be planned and even ghostwritten by pharmaceutical companies or their contractors, without disclosure.[3] Describing the situation as a "murderous disaster", he makes suggestions for action by patients' groups, physicians, academics and the industry itself.[4]
 
luka

luka

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Drugs are tested by the people who manufacture them, in poorly designed trials, on hopelessly small numbers of weird, unrepresentative patients, and analysed using techniques which are flawed by design, in such a way that they exaggerate the benefits of treatments. Unsurprisingly, these trials tend to produce results that favour the manufacturer. When trials throw up results that companies don't like, they are perfectly entitled to hide them from doctors and patients, so we only ever see a distorted picture of any drug's true effects. Regulators see most of the trial data, but only from early on in a drug's life, and even then they don't give this data to doctors or patients, or even to other parts of government. This distorted evidence is then communicated and applied in a distorted fashion.
In their forty years of practice after leaving medical school, doctors hear about what works through ad hoc oral traditions, from sales reps, colleagues or journals. But those colleagues can be in the pay of drug companies – often undisclosed – and the journals are too. And so are the patient groups. And finally, academic papers, which everyone thinks of as objective, are often covertly planned and written by people who work directly for the companies, without disclosure. Sometimes whole academic journals are even owned outright by one drug company. Aside from all this, for several of the most important and enduring problems in medicine, we have no idea what the best treatment is, because it's not in anyone's financial interest to conduct any trials at all.[11]
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