Drug Companies Delay Cures for Profit

The big pharmaceutical companies often seek to present themselves as committed to fighting disease and ill health, as though they are noble crusaders for our collective wellbeing, but the truth is that the only thing they are truly committed to is maximising their profits. There have been several documented cases of pharmaceutical companies charging obscene amounts of money for drugs that are cheap to manufacture. They fiercely fight through the courts to protect their patents and to prevent others from releasing cheaper versions of the same drugs whilst releasing new and more expensive drugs that don’t really offer an improvement over old cheaper ones. However, is it possible that they are going one step further and actually withholding cures for diseases in order to sell drugs that just treat the symptoms?

At least one of the practices mentioned above suggests that this is unlikely. The drug companies claim to spend millions on research and development for new drugs but in fact they spend a great deal more on marketing and advertising. The majority of supposedly new drugs they bring to market are in fact variants of existing drugs generally developed via taxpayer funding. The drug companies simply push the idea that their latest version is more advanced and manage to squeeze extra cash out of an unsuspecting public for selling the same old product.

The drug industry is worth such a large amount of money now that they wield a great deal of political power. Towards the end of the twentieth century they manoeuvred themselves into a position where they could effectively make the rules themselves and the obscene profits followed. They have been charging Americans much higher prices for drugs simply because many can afford it, but there are many people who can’t, and with the economic downturn employers are less willing to pay for all-encompassing medical insurance. There has been a backlash against the pharmaceutical companies who are now seen by many as the profit-greedy vultures they truly are and consequently there is a rise in theories such as the idea that they are deliberately withholding cures to generate more profits by providing drugs that simply treat the symptoms.

The most popular theory seems to be that there is a cure or vaccine for HIV but that the drug companies are withholding it because of the long-term profits they rake in from selling drugs to treat the HIV virus. Of course, if any company did discover a vaccine they would be more likely to patent it and then charge a fortune for the drug. If they successfully got a drug like that patented they would stand to make huge profits, so why would they sit on it and risk another company patenting a vaccine first? For this theory to be true it would have to be a large-scale conspiracy with pharmaceutical companies colluding to withhold cures.

There is no real evidence to support this conspiracy theory. Despite the fact that pharmaceutical companies already engage in so many clearly immoral and dodgy practices, and that the whole system requires an overhaul, it seems decidedly unlikely that they are withholding cures. For information on hard drives visit this site.