Big Pharma is more interest in profit than health. This was made clear during the rush for vaccine during the Pandemic in 2020-1. Despite PR triumphs companies like Pfizer and Moderna found new ways of gouging billions from governments in the west, while abandoning the global south to their own efforts. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of financialisation and putting profit before health. This includes the stories of Purdue's rapacious marketing of Oxycontin despite the fears of addiction. Martin Shrekli's devious use of the patent system. How the same system was used to deprive 4.5 million poor South Africans for receiving lifesaving HIV/AIDS medication.
Since the 1990s Big Pharma has gone out if its way to protect it's property through the patent system. Thus the business has become focussed not on finding new medicines but building monopolies that can then be exploited. This system of monopoly power has not only helped restructure our wider economy away from invention or production and towards financial markets. It has also fundamentally reshaped the relationship between richer and poorer countries, formerly the colonisers and the colonised. In Pharmanomics, campaigner and investigative journalist Nick Dearden reveals the truth behind the good news stories, and show s us what we can do about it.
