How Big Pharma is Killing Americans and Corrupting Our Medical System

In the movies, “evil” corporations are one of the standard villains. Some of them are just outright evil like The Umbrella Corporation from the Resident Evil Franchise. Others could better be described as merely foolish, like Cyberdyne Systems, the company in Terminator that built an advanced AI that ended up launching a war against humans (That one feels a little too close to home these days, doesn’t it?). There’s another corporation, the Union, from the relatively obscure film Repo Men that is particularly relevant here:

The Union makes something genuinely useful: replacement organs. Lose your heart? Your kidneys? Your liver? No problem. They’ll sell you one. The thing is, as you’d expect, it’s EXTREMELY expensive. The rich can afford it, but they don’t just sell to the rich. So, what happens when someone poor or middle-class buys a replacement organ and gets behind on the payments? They send repo men to take back the organs, which inevitably leaves the person losing the organ as a corpse. Now, there are multiple comparisons we could make to Big Pharma here, but there’s one in particular that I’d like to hammer home.

That is, Big Pharma DOES make very useful products that save a lot of lives and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is full of it. There are an awful lot of Americans alive today because of products made by Big Pharma.

However, the flip side of that is Big Pharma has gained an inordinate amount of control over our healthcare system, and they’ve used that in an extraordinarily unethical way to undermine science, hamstring our medical system, and yes, kill people, all because it makes them more money.

First of all, before we go any further, it’s worth noting how Big Pharma has managed to corrupt our entire medical system practically from top-to-bottom.

They fund much of the research into drugs and many of the experiments on their drugs are paid for by them. The researchers doing the experiments? They’ve often taken money from the drug companies and they frequently massage the results of trials to give them a pro-Big-Pharma slant (“A study of 185 meta-analyses of antidepressants showed that four out of five were sponsored by industry or had authors with financial ties.”). Even when the studies are done by colleges, contributions from Big Pharma ensure they get favorable treatment. The medical journals? When they do positive articles, Big Pharma buys so many copies it ends up being a significant contributor to their bottom line. The mainstream media? They take so much money from Big Pharma that they protect them at every turn (“By 2020, the pharmaceutical industry accounted for 75 percent of all televised ad spending in the US.”). Many of the health-related outside interest groups also take big donations from Big Pharma so they do what they’re told. The FDA? There’s a revolving door between them and the drug companies. They don’t directly buy off the doctors giving you meds, but they’re working them multiple ways. They pay for fancy events for the doctors to attend. Their reps give them little gifts. The medical journals the doctors rely on for cutting-edge advances are often doing Big Pharma’s bidding and of course, their patients often see ads on TV and ASK THE DOCTORS for specific drugs.

If you’re looking at that and going, “Who’s left to look out for us?” the answer isn’t quite “nobody,” but it’s pretty close. There are plenty of ethical people in our medical system, but they’re often hamstrung by the environment they’re in:

“So, what if a university scientist receiving government or corporate funds happens to stumble across something concerning? What if he “goes rogue” and follows the science down a path that may not be in the interest of a company’s bottom line? He must be taught a lesson. Perhaps he’ll be discredited and smeared. Monitored. Attacked academically by his peers. Maybe the institution where he works will fall under pressure to fire him or defund his research. There aren’t many who can stand up to the kind of pressure that the government-pharmaceutical partnership can apply with help from the media. As I wrote in The Smear, there’s an entire cottage industry made up of experts-for-hire, nonprofits, LLCs, super PACs, websites, foundations, PR companies, global law firms, and crisis management specialists who make their living destroying those who dare to come down on the wrong side.” -- Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails

People who stand up to Big Pharma have this whole system turned against them and they get portrayed as cranks. Sometimes they are, but frequently they’re just ethical people doing what we ask doctors and scientists to do… putting the truth ahead of personal gain.

This has broken the way our whole medical system works – and people know it:

Disease prevention “doesn’t really fit into the business model of our current healthcare system,” Dr. Peter Attia writes in Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity.

“Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats,” he observes, “or to monitor his blood glucose levels in order to help prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes.

“Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed.”

We have a system that revolves around treating people after something goes wrong, particularly with drugs. What do you do if a drug creates a problem? You change drugs or alternately, you take a second drug to deal with the problems caused by the first one.

As cancer researcher Azra Raza notes, this creates a bizarre situation where very little research is funded to detect and tackle cancer early on, when it’s most treatable, but staggering amounts end up being spent on drugs that do very little to help people or contribute to the quality of their existence at the end of life. For example:

And then there is the financial issue. Tarceva, a drug that extends the survival of pancreatic cancer patients by twelve days, costs $26,000. An eighteen-week course of cetuximab for lung cancer costs $80,000. Among the 9.5 million new cancer cases diagnosed during a fourteen-year period in America, almost half (42.4 percent) had lost all their life savings within two-plus years. Overall, cancer care cost $125 billion in 2010 and is likely to be $156 billion by 2020.

Why? Well, the cynical answer would be that there’s not a lot of money in catching and curing diseases early, but there’s an enormous amount to be made by selling them to sick people. If you’ve read Culturcidal, you’ll note we don’t generally have a cynical perspective. However, when it comes to the pharmaceutical industry, the cynical perspective is the rational one. If you want to talk about people who deserve to be viewed cynically, how about this?

There’s an even bigger medical money interest surrounding the trans movement that I haven’t seen discussed very much. It involves a sad reality: the transgender HIV epidemic. A CDC survey of seven major US cities—Atlanta, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Seattle—finds that 42.2 percent of transgender people who are men living life as women are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The rate is even higher among transgender blacks: most of them—61.9 percent—are HIV-positive. And the HIV rates are even higher among transgender prostitutes. That adds up to a fantastically lucrative market for the makers of HIV medicine, like Gilead Sciences. Gilead has developed eleven HIV medications now on the market earning over $1.5 billion a month. Pulling the thread further, I learn that Gilead happens to be the single biggest known funder of trans activist groups, providing $6.1 million in 2017 and 2018. … Gilead is also listed as a “Silver Tier” supporter of The Trevor Project in 2020. And on the project’s website in February 2024, Gilead is listed as a $250,000–$500,000 supporter.

You might want to just write that off simply because you can’t believe anyone would do something so horrible, but if so, what do you say about this?

Internal e-mails and other documents from Merck & Co. show the company fought for years to keep safety concerns from undermining the drug's commercial prospects, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. Vioxx, a drug known as a COX-2 inhibitor, was withdrawn from the market after it was shown to double the risk of heart attack and stroke in patients who had been taking it for at least 18 months. Vioxx generated some $2.5 billion in annual sales, and its withdrawal pummeled Merck's shares.

How much damage did Merck intentionally do to the customers that trusted the company with their lives?

“An estimated 88 000-140 000 excess cases of serious coronary heart disease probably occurred in the United States over the market life of rofecoxib (Vioxx). The US national estimate of the case-fatality rate (fatal acute myocardial infarction plus sudden cardiac death) was 44%, which suggests that many of the excess cases attributable to rofecoxib use were fatal.”

There are a lot of stories like this. Too many to even cover in this article. They all feature Big Pharma lying or covering up data, hurting or even killing a lot of people on their way to making a big profit, and then paying a large fine that was still small enough to ensure they made a tidy sum. These are not exceptions; this sort of unethical behavior is the RULE in Big Pharma and there are some great ways to start addressing it.

The first is taking a cue from how we handled smoking and banning advertisements for drugs. This is actually standard practice in most countries that, not coincidentally, have longer life expectancies than we do in America:

The other thing we should do is codify Donald Trump’s brilliant idea about how to handle drug prices. Basically, drug companies could charge whatever they wanted for a drug, but they couldn’t charge more in the United States than they do anywhere else. Drug costs are 2.78 times more in the United States than anywhere else.

Last but not least, we need to put some ethical codes in place at public universities and with any sort of government-funded science that eliminates conflicts of interest and demand that all information from trials is fully available. If the FDA can’t see all the data or the researchers doing the studies have conflicts, then there should be no approval of any drugs based on those studies.

People can shout, “Make America Healthy Again!” all they want, but until the stranglehold Big Pharma has on our medical system, media, and scientific research is broken, it won’t do any good.

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