"Our cancer-killing pill is like a snowstorm that closes a key airline hub, shutting down all flights in and out only in planes carrying cancer cells," says the professor who has been developing the new drug over the past 20 years.
Not only that, it’s also important to consider just how vast pharmaceuticals as a branch of industry and research and medicine is, overall.
Sure, some exec at the top might be a money-grubbing arsehole who couldn’t care any less if 8 billion people died so long as they made 2% more profits.
But there’s a giant apparatus of often very serious and very altruistic researchers, doctors, nurses, workers and helpers underneath that, too. Lots of bad apples, lots of shining examples. Just like, well, any other industry.
And sure, one can easily argue “but you’re playing with people’s lives here, it’s not okay for it to be like this”. And of course I agree. But it’s utopian to think we can fix this with reductive, as you say, “pharma bad”-arguments. And it’s not like the transport industry, the power industry, the the military-industrial complex (intentionally) or the tourism industry don’t habiutally play with people’s lives. We just tend to not notice it as directly.
And sure, I get that for americans in particular this is a sore topic of particular import because they’re so vulnerable to exploitation due to a lack of social support structure and regulated and standardized insurances.
But anything can be reduced to a simple “is bad” if we want it to. It’s important to not think in such simplistic us-vs-them terms, otherwise nothing can ever be improved.
Not only that, it’s also important to consider just how vast pharmaceuticals as a branch of industry and research and medicine is, overall.
Sure, some exec at the top might be a money-grubbing arsehole who couldn’t care any less if 8 billion people died so long as they made 2% more profits.
But there’s a giant apparatus of often very serious and very altruistic researchers, doctors, nurses, workers and helpers underneath that, too. Lots of bad apples, lots of shining examples. Just like, well, any other industry.
And sure, one can easily argue “but you’re playing with people’s lives here, it’s not okay for it to be like this”. And of course I agree. But it’s utopian to think we can fix this with reductive, as you say, “pharma bad”-arguments. And it’s not like the transport industry, the power industry, the the military-industrial complex (intentionally) or the tourism industry don’t habiutally play with people’s lives. We just tend to not notice it as directly.
And sure, I get that for americans in particular this is a sore topic of particular import because they’re so vulnerable to exploitation due to a lack of social support structure and regulated and standardized insurances.
But anything can be reduced to a simple “is bad” if we want it to. It’s important to not think in such simplistic us-vs-them terms, otherwise nothing can ever be improved.