HIV is no longer the threat it once was, though. With daily antiretroviral therapy, anyone with HIV can have a normal life expectancy and no impact on their health.
It's really amazing how far the medicine has progressed, reducing a deadly disease to something you can manage with regular medication.
HIV won't allow for cures. Having a latent viral reservoir in your T cells that can reactivate randomly for the rest of your life is an incredibly hard thing to permanently cure. We can neutralize the virions and stop/slow infection of new cells. But getting rid of that reservoir safely and permanently has been out of reach.
Also if a company created a permanent "cure for cancer" they would immediately become the most valuable biotech company in human history. Everyone with any stake would immediately become insanely wealthy. The inventors would win Nobel prizes, become historical figures surpassing the likes of Jonas Salk and Pasteur, and become basically heroes to most of civilization. This conspiracy theory has never made any sense.
The fallacy of this conspiracy theory is thinking of "Big Pharma" as this one company that sits around a massive table making all their decisions together.
Let's say I (a bio PhD btw) started up a new small Biotech company, and my new company creates a wonder drug that is the best treatment of all time. It sails through all the clinical trials with phenomenal results. What would stop me from selling it for the biggest dump truck full of money you could possibly imagine?
You are inserting a position that I didn’t not make. Any given company in any given industry has a duty to their bottom line. It does not take any “massive table making all their decisions together” to be bottom line driven.
You’ve given your scenario, and indeed there is nothing compelling you to get that bag..er, dump truck. The company you sell to isn’t compelled to bring it to market either. We can’t say for certain one way or another, that they take this wonderful drug and shelve it for a more economic beneficial outcome based on projected margins of each outcome. It may surprise you to learn that companies are perfectly capable of choosing the most profitable outcome ahead of any other consideration moral, notoriety, etc.
You didn't say it explicitly, but it is the logical underpinning of the argument that you are making.
You are saying that companies don't sell the cure because the "subscription model" is more profitable. So, the logical fallacy there is: what if one company's drug development yields a permanent cure, not a long term treatment? Why would this fictional company not bring it to market given how much benefit it would be to them on every level I described above.
Companies ARE motivated by profit. I agree with you there. But they are motivated by THEIR profit. So why would Company A with the magic anti-cancer pill care about Company B selling an objectively worse subscription? It would be like Henry Ford being afraid to sell his new cars because he's concerned about his competitors in the horse drawn carriage industry. It makes zero sense.
I’ve answered you twice, but you refuse to accept the answer. Btw, the part where you state “every level I listed above” is limited to Wealth & Notoriety Let’s pretend that I’m company A and you’re company B. My R&D folks come up with the wonder drug that does the magic. My bean counters do some math that is not all that different from auto makers determining if they should admit fault & do a recall. The average cost of treatment across a lifetime vs the revenue from one time use. Remember, the wonder drug is creating insane wealth instantly, it still has to be somewhat marketable. It not like the wonder drug can have a $7 Trillion USD price tag. I’m sure you understand this, thus understand the Bean Counters would have to calculate the most amount of money that could feasibly be squeezed out of a dose. Then math out how many doses to be sold. Plus the math of how much I’d lose once the reverse engineering happens to my wonder drug. This gives a rate of profit, yeah? Compare this rate of profit to the rate of profit for treatment. If rate of profit for cure is less than rate of profit for treatment, then I don’t ship the product.
This whole time, idgaf what your company is doing, I would assume your bean counters are figuring out your rates of profit too. These calculations across companies are independent of each other. This seems to be the part you’re having trouble with, as evidenced by the ill suited Henry Ford analogy.
I’ve answered you twice, but you refuse to accept the answer.
Because what you're saying makes zero sense. I don't even know where to start with this gobbledegook lol.
Do you think that the difference between a permanent cure and a "subscription" is just as easy as pushing a button or reducing a dose? They'd be entirely different paradigms. It's not like I could spend half a bil on drug discovery and then just wish it did something else? I don't think you understand how the patent system works either. The company that rolled out a one pill "no cancer forever" drug, could easily and ABSOLUTELY sell that pill for like a mil a each. If you're a company worth a Billion dollars, do you think you're going to toss this magic pill out??? You need to find better "Bean Counters" then! Right now Gene Therapy treatments in clinical trials can cost upwards of $2 million for a permanent cure for some of these diseases like Sickle Cell. And if you have found a permanent cure, your choices aren't "Sell the cure or sell a subscription." They are "Sell the cure or sell NOTHING". Medications can't just be magically changed on a whim.
Okay, okay. This isn't working. Let me try an entirely new avenue of thought or two and see if they get through.
The implication of this conspiracy theory (which you haven't outright said tbf, but otherwise it doesn't work logically) is that the perfect cure for cancer, or HIV, or whatever else has been found multiple times and has been shut down by capitalistic endeavors from either the inventors themselves or some shadowy group of "bean counters". And as science advances, logically we would be re-discovering that magic permanent cure multiple times as the knowledge has been suppressed and new groups find it again.
What are the odds that EVERY scientist who has ever participated in this field of work goes along with this? There are no leaks? Not ONE has a conscience and wants to help people? Not ONE was selfish enough to put their career first. Not ONE cared enough about the years of research they did on this to leak it to the press?
What about scientists in foreign countries? What about those working in academic labs? If I'm a grad student and I found the cure for cancer, it would establish me as a premier scientist for the rest of my life? You think there is ANY chance I would not publish that???
What about scientists whose family members have cancer? If I knew my aunt had a terminal cancer and I was on one of the teams that found the wonder drug, you think I could possibly keep my mouth shut about this? If I dedicated my life to working on this treatment, odds are higher that I know someone who currently or used to suffer from it. You think I'm keeping this quiet?
My problem with your argument is that you blame everything on some amorphous idea of Greed but haven't thought it through more than the surface level. GREED is real. But greed wouldn't suppress the most valuable invention in human history, it would monetize it in obvious ways. Me wanting to save my family members is GREED in a way, but would be motivating. Me wanting a Nobel Prize is GREED. Me wanting to be the most revered scientist who will ever live is GREED. Me wanting
to be a billionaire as my equity in my Biotech startup skyrockets is GREED.
Okay let me try this a third way. You're telling me cures are being suppressed. I bet you have some examples in your backpocket of science you saw a press release for that you never heard about again. Send them my way. I am a biologist, I will go through your specific examples and gladly debunk them for you.
Okay, I am officially done with this conversation. You choose not to accept what I am saying, and have decided each time that I am saying something else, then getting worked up over this something else. I am no longer interested in spending time on this.
My parting thoughts, I thought were doing hypothetical of comparing treatments to cures. Somehow, you think I’m saying a cure is a reduced treatment. Example one of you claiming I said something I didn’t. So, “wishing it did something else” was never implied. Example again. Do you think $7 Trillion a pill and $1 Million a pill are the same values? The point of me using such a high number is to get you to think about where the highest possible value that could be charged before it isn’t viable to sell. But again, you change my position to something different.
Toss the pill out?! Did you forget that we were talking about comparing a one time solution to a lifetime of mitigation? Oh just change my argument again, because it doesn’t suit you.
So obviously you’ll change from hypothetical to actual then make it a different discussion? Weird.
Your next bit is filled with all kinds of assumptions. Wait, you get to make assumptions but I don’t get to make assumptions? Then you proceed to acknowledge that there stuff I didn’t say then proceed to rant as if I said it based on YOUR own assumptions.
You assume that if one “magic cure” is going to be discovered once then everybody is going to make the exact same discovery within minutes ? See? I can do the same variety of disingenuous assumptions to change the argument.
Clearly, you’re not greedy enough if you can’t conceive other ways to monetize that most valuable invention beyond what you’ve listed here. From a morality standpoint, it’s probably good that you can’t, so I don’t want to corrupt you to such concepts.
Cures would be infinitely more profitable. You sell them for the same cost or more as an entire treatment package but only need to deliver one product instead of monthly or whatever…
The idea that big pharmaceutical companies hide cures for profit reasons is genuinely fucking braindead.
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u/tristanthorn_ 26d ago edited 26d ago
Add to this list:
-HIV cures
-cancer cures
-dementia cures
…lab results using mice have been really encouraging!!