[kwlug-disc] [OT] Ivermectin

[John Van Ostrand]

On Sun, Nov 20, 2022 at 2:07 PM Steve Izma <sizma at golden.net> wrote:

>
> They could not have made any profit off of it because ivermectin
> is off-patent and produced for pennies a shot in many different
> parts of the world. Their reason for this statement, given their
> need for profits, is to discredit a drug in wide use in order to
> make room for the replacement drug they were working on
> (monupiravir), for which patents and profits apply in spades.
>

You've admitted that "follow the money" is a "rule of thumb" but then you
seem to lean on it quite heavily. It's more like Occam's razor, useful in
certain situations only.  If you are investigating fraud, you follow the
money. If you're investigating a crime of passion you don't.  Money is only
one of many reasons people do things.

The idea that Big Pharma is evil and heartless and only interested in money
is a common conspiracy theory. Yes, it's capitalism so money is why "big
pharma' does what it does, but to be evil and heartless would mean
literally caring only about their customer's wallets and not their health.
Presumably you make money in your job or business, does that mean you can't
be trusted because it's about the money? How do I decide that Big Pharma is
evil because of the money but you aren't even though you do it for money as
well?

People are social animals and have genetic and indoctrinated behaviours.
Even sociopaths and psychopaths have many of those behaviours. The board
members, CEOs, researchers, workers, salespeople all have those social
behaviours.  Profit is balanced between those two. And even if it wasn't
they have regulatory restraints, legal risks and market risks to acting
without care. Pointing to an example like thalidomide is cherry-picking.
Yes, companies do sometimes make mistakes. Do you really think that company
knew about those effects on pregnancy and still marketed it that way? I
really doubt it. The industry will continue to make mistakes and because of
thalidomide we are far less likely to make ones like it again. But use that
mistake as a reason to denounce all that the pharmaceutical industry does
would itself be a mistake. Comparing COVID-19 vaccines to thalidomide seems
baseless. Will mRNA vaccines have problems. Sure they will, just like
everything you put into your body has problems. Just like all vaccines have
problems. Just like you can overdose easily on acetaminophen daily without
knowing it until your liver is dead. And yet a lot of  people aren't aware
of that.  Will mRNA cause big problems, probably not because we do a lot of
testing on things like that to make sure. Are we testing for every
potential problem? Absolutely not and we never will be.  Stopping progress
because we don't know what we don't know would leave us without so many
advances that help us today. It's the wrong move to simply stop progress
because we can't be sure. The bar is set quite high for drugs, higher than
most industries.

Here's a "follow the money" moment for you. There are many nations with
socialized health care, these are huge customers of drugs that care for
people from womb to tomb. Healthier people means lower expenses, lower
taxes, etc. These are the ones who fund studies in cheaper ways to do
things. There is more money in socialized health care than in big pharma.
In Canada, the pharma market is $30B and the socialized health care
expenditures are over $300B, ten times the revenue of Big Pharma in Canada.
If I follow the money, then socialized health care is the one dictating
what's happening.


> --
John Van Ostrand
At large on sabbatical
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