Short professional translation:
As the regular HBO columnist Ursan Gunnar notes in his article, it seems obvious to any normal person that for any Western pharmaceutical giant with enormous power and financial resources, caring for the sick comes first.
Well, it's true, it is thanks to them that these companies earn their money. And besides, public health is a matter of national security for any country. After all, it is clear to everyone that the country of healthy and selfless people has a much better chance of repelling an external attack than the country of people who are sick and drug addicted.
So why would such companies not only bully people in other countries, but also persecute their own people?
However, it is high time to understand that in those matters where it comes to hundreds of millions of dollars, things that seem to any person to be something for granted, suddenly take on completely different shades.
This is because people who seek to receive such amounts of money, as a rule, will stop at nothing on the way to their goal. Literally everything is used - bribery of doctors, forgery of research results, "gratification" of officials and the purchase of entire hospitals in order to "raise awareness of patients about the company's products."
This situation is complicated by the peculiarities of the legal system existing in the West, where a company, fearing a serious scandal, even greater financial losses and even criminal liability of individual employees, may go to peace not only with the victim, but also with the prosecution.
For example, the American company Pfizer recently decided to pay $ 2.3 billion (!) In order to avoid litigation as to how and where it misled buyers and which officials it bribed. Another pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline, not only paid a $ 500 million fine in China, but also parted with $ 3 billion at his UK home over a similar case.
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However, a special cynicism can be seen in the actions of the world's second largest drug company, Novartis Corporation. In 2012, American media reported that a small hospital in the United States was able to develop drugs for blood cancer with the money that was made as voluntary donations.
By modifying the patient's gene code, doctors were able to achieve complete recovery of those people who should not have been alive, while this effect lasts for life.
But one injection, which is exactly how much is needed for successful treatment, is not very good for business. As a result, after purchasing the rights to revolutionary treatment, the Novatris corporation has raised the price of treatment from $ 20,000 (cost) to $ 300-600,000. Apparently, the author concludes, such a price tag was chosen in order to push the dying to more "traditional" drugs, the production of which has long been put on stream by such corporations.
So much for the Hippocratic Oath!
Translated by Yandex:
Very few have yet come to the realization that Western pharmaceutical corporations and the healthcare systems they have created, control, manipulate and exploit represent not only a particular peak of corruption, but also threaten rather than preserve the health of many millions of people who are in within their reach.
Not only do they threaten the West by undermining what would otherwise be healthy and prosperous populations, but their tentacles stretch deep into Eurasia, South America, Africa and beyond.
At par …
Pharmaceutical corporations, or big-pharma, have been caught up in scandal after scandal from everything from rigging research and efficacy studies to selling dangerous drugs to children.
Some of the largest Western pharmaceutical corporations on the planet have been caught in multinational multi-billion dollar racketeering bribery.
The US Department of Justice's own in a statement titled "Department of Justice Announces Largest Health Care Fraud Settlement in History" admits:
Pfizer will be caught in similar criminal cases around the world, and the Washington Post, in its article “Pfizer Agrees to Pay $ 60 Million to Settle a Foreign Bribery Case,” admitting:
The countries mentioned in the article included Bulgaria, Croatia, Kazakhstan and Russia.
British pharmaceutical giant GSK will also be found guilty of massive bribery. The New York Times, in its article "Drug lord faced retribution as China targets bribery", will argue that:
The bribery of GSK in China was not just an isolated incident for the company. It has been dealing with rampant and dangerous corruption for many years, and on different continents.
The London Guardian will report in an article that GlaxoSmithKline was fined $ 3 billion after bribing doctors to boost sales of drugs that:
In early 2014, the London Telegraph will report in its article “GlaxoSmithKline has bribed“doctors to promote drugs in Europe, claims a former worker”that:
The Pfizer and GSK cases tell us that massive corruption is not isolated from one incident or even one pharmaceutical corporation, but is the norm throughout Western big pharma.
In many ways, Western big-pharma are lab-coat drug dealers armed with massive lobbying resources, public relations and marketing departments to create the illusion of legitimacy where it really is, and as the train of mass scandals shows, no legitimacy in reality does not exist.
But no matter how bad it is to bribe doctors and impose dangerous drugs on children, Western big-pharma is much worse.
Hanging life over the dying
The headline-grabbing scandals emanating from big-pharma occur so often and on such a scale that the general population seems insensitive to them. The fact is that corporations themselves, for some reason, are accused of research, development, production and distribution of essential drugs, seemingly controlled by criminals who enjoy near impunity, have not been registered as a health crisis of the person who really is.
But there are other, far worse rackets big-pharma is working on, illustrating the true depravity of not only the pharmaceutical industry itself, but also Western academics, Western health professionals, and of course Western mainstream media, all of which play a role in perpetuating or justifying well-known scandals as well as well-hidden scandals.
Gene therapy represents a paradigm shift in human health care. Rather than using pharmaceuticals to treat the condition, gene therapy alters the patient's very DNA and treats it constantly at the very source of the disease or condition the patient is suffering from.
For example, deadly blood cancer leukemia has been cured by adjusting the DNA of the cells of the human immune system. The newly programmed cells can detect and destroy leukemia and put the patient in permanent remission. Initial studies were conducted in patients who failed to respond to approved forms of therapy and who would otherwise die if gene therapy did not work.
Even more incredible about gene therapy is that it is administered once and continues to work throughout the patient's life. This is because as the reprogrammed cells copy and divide themselves, they also copy the new DNA code incorporated into them to find, fight, and eliminate leukemia.
For a patient suffering from a terminal illness, the idea that a single infusion heals their condition permanently is a miracle of modern medicine.
For the profit-driven pharmaceutical industry, the idea of permanently treating an illness with a single infusion, which is cheaper than conventional and less effective treatments, is a nightmare.
That's why the gene therapy, developed by a charity and University of Pennsylvania medical team led by Dr. Karl June, who literally cured leukemia, was bought by Norvartis and a massive price tag was imposed on it to provide a breakthrough that remained unrealistic and beyond the reach of most patients.
Refusing Treatment, Ensuring Profitability
The New York Times, in a 2012 article entitled “In Girl's Last Hope, Altered Immune Cells Conquer Leukemia,” reported this impressive breakthrough by charity research and development, stating (my emphasis):
Dr. June said it costs about $ 20,000 per patient to produce artificial T cells - far less than the cost of a bone marrow transplant. Scaling up the procedure should make it even less costly, he said, but added, “Our costs do not include any profitability, facility depreciation or other clinical care and other research costs.”
However, by July 2017, the Washington Post, in its article “The first gene therapy - 'real live drug' - on the cusp of FDA approval,” noted that Novartis was buying back gene therapy and reporting its price tag that:
Novartis did not disclose the price of its therapy, but analysts predict between $ 300,000 and $ 600,000 for a single infusion. Brad Loncar, whose investment fund focuses on companies that develop immunotherapy treatments, hopes the cost won't backfire. “Kar-ti is not EpiPen,” he said. "It really pushes the envelope and is at the forefront of science."
This pattern of large pharmaceutical company buyouts and price increases has influenced gene therapy of all kinds. Big Pharma has clutched at one government or charity project after another, raising prices to ensure they stay out of the reach of dying and desperate patients, while their other far more profitable products remain the only “viable” choice for the vast majority of the population. …
This is an illustration of everything right and wrong about the West at the moment.
The West has an incredible capacity to innovate and improve life on this planet, but it is so fenced in by corrupt, deep-rooted, and apparently unopposed monopolies that it has no means ever to do so.
Newspapers such as the NYT and the Washington Post are complicit, earlier reporting the true costs of these breakthroughs and then presenting their ransom and premiums as reasonable and “sane” to unsuspecting readers.
Universities, academics and healthcare professionals are likely benefactors of either coercion or bribery, bribery that we know is second nature to big pharma also prevents the alarm from being sounded not only about the danger that big pharma poses to current human health, but and that big pharma denies people who need treatment and treatment the most.
For the rest of the world, a healthy population is the key to economic, political and military success. Keeping an industry as corrupt and dangerous as Western big pharmaceuticals as far as possible seems to be a key pillar in any country's National Defense Strategy.
Author: Gunnar Ohlsson