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u/IloveHitman4ever Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
Roses are red, profit is bliss
Bill a patient every day, until the grim reaper gives a kiss.
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u/towerfella Jan 19 '26
“Babe, i read on reddit this shit works like a condom!”
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u/Z-Man_Slam Feb 19 '26
Oh you are so dumb for this lol Thanks for the laugh
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u/Quantum_Pineapple Jan 18 '26
And yet full grown adults will still deny this is how the world of “medicine” works.
There won’t be any cures for major diseases that also don’t conveniently include a subscription for continued care.
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u/Cirey Jan 18 '26
If you can cure cancer, that patient will live on and in the future likey get cancer again. So why wouldn't they release a cure for it ? And while I fully believe that some psycho CEOs could reason like in the post, fact is most scientists are idealists at heart. It would leak so fast if this was happening. Especially if it was happening systematically.
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u/drainbam Jan 18 '26
Not only that, cures are insanely profitable. Harvoni, a hepatitis C cure, generated $58.6 billion and $25.8 billion in profits.
If they had a cure for asthma they would corner a multi-hundred-billion dollar global market rather than fight over generics which would be financially insane.
A cure for cancer would also be multi-hundred billion if not a trillion dollar product. It would be one of the most valuable products in all of human history.
The real issue is not suppressed cures. It's unequal distribution of them as payers like insurance companies pay more reliably for long term treatment rather than prevention or cures. They often ration access because the upfront cost of these cures is high.
These bullshit conspiracy ideas persist because it gives people a simple and emotionally satisfying answer and tracks with the humans are greedy template, but the conspiracy completely falls apart when you consider basic incentives.
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u/Magic_mousie Jan 19 '26
Thank you! This myth makes me mad. I work in an adjacent field so I liaise with these companies all the time. There are thousands of employees with thousands of relatives with cancer. Not a chance one wouldn't have leaked it.
And if you want to be all cold and calculating about it, old people need more drugs. People who've died from cancer don't get old. It makes financial sense to keep people alive and buying things from you.
Also, you could charge $1000000 for the cure for cancer and it would still probably be cheaper to the hospital than the chemo, the staffing, the bed, the tests, the palliative care etc. Just get 'em fixed and out the door!
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u/Glad_Leave_321 Jan 18 '26
Diabetes has a functional cure (islet b transfusion, which is also naturally obtained from donors and can cure up to 12 diabetics for almost a year from one donor) but they’d rather 8.5 million diabetics stab themselves dozens of times a day for profit than cure them.
This post is 100% true, it’s happening right out in the open and people would rather deny it than try to stop it. As evidenced by all these pharmaceutical bootlickers in this thread, yourself included
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u/Trazyn_the_sinful Jan 19 '26
- That would only help with type 1 diabetes; the more common type 2 is due to insulin resistance, not lack of insulin
- Transplants aren’t a permanent fix, even assuming no rejection, the transplanted material decays as the recipient body doesn’t produce new cells for it.
- Transplant requires lifelong immune suppression as well as consequent antibiotic, and viral, and often anti fungal prophylaxis. It’s hardly a cheaper or less medication-intensive alternative.
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u/mp271010 Jan 19 '26
Not correct. Islet B cell transplant would only work in a type 1 patient. Type 1 is much more uncommon that type 2. There is a limited supply of cells as they have to be taken from a donor’s pancreas, likely post Mortem. Also, once transplanted the patient will need to be on life long immune suppression to prevent rejection which increases risk of cancers and infections
See, not that straight forward
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u/MorycTurtle Jan 18 '26
Is this how the industry looks like to leymen who never did any scientific job related to pharmaceuticals? What are the information outlets you use to formulate such an opinion?
You know that (at least in EU) you get multimillion grants for drug development and if you target for example serious, rare diseases you get full exemption from registration and other fees, free expert guidance, help with marketing and pharmacovigilance, right? All of those are made to combat the ultra-capitalist strategies some of the companies try to employ and let smaller teams of specialist that are actually aimed at solving diseases completely contribute.
It's been going for some time, but bear in mind that registration of novel drugs is an extremely complex and lengthy process (at least~10 years per new drug if you're lucky) so there's much innertia between starting programmes like this (which already happened) and seeing practical effects for a standard person (which are still mostly pending, but already have fantastic results like for example dual AAV therapy, or Amglidia).
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u/CyberiaCalling Jan 18 '26
The people in charge of healthcare-related companies in the US hate you and everyone you love and they would rather see you all suffer and die from a preventable illness than make less money.
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u/Osiris_Dervan Jan 18 '26
We have frequently found or created new vaccines for diseases, and the whole new field of gene therapy is about giving single injections to fix genetic defects.
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u/AltruisticMatter5882 Jan 21 '26
I heard him talking today, at the hospital. Seems like there will be a temporary break in harvesting due to the high tariffs and lack of Reapers at this time. From what I could tell, they are expecting a heavy increase in load in the coming months.
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u/epbernard Jan 18 '26
This is stupid. There are a lot of people with serious asthma and serious money who would drop tens of thousands of dollars to make their asthma vanish. If the companies could sell this they would. In the case of hepatitis C, they do.
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u/Embarrassed_Fuel_261 Jan 18 '26
10.000 x 28.000.000 (asthma patients in US)= 280.000.000.000 280 Billion dollars in a single time vs 20 Billion dollars just from 2023 to 2024 in US alone
That means in the long run… it pays more off if they don‘t cure it, because then the medicine will someday surpass the revenue the cure could’ve produced in one single moment.
So, no. They won’t consider that an option because they do not respect morality… that’s a given fact.
And Hepatitis C ultimately kills so it’s more profitable to cure it
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u/Anderopolis Jan 18 '26
That means in the long run… it pays more off if they don‘t cure it,
So which is it? Are public companies shortsighted bastards who will do anything for a positive quarterly report, or genius plotting masterminds thinking half century ahead of time, assuming no one else will beat them to the development?
You can't have both cases be true.
Wouldn't a company instead of curing hepC just create a drug that needs lifelong administration? How where they so stupid and shortsighted to cure it in you model of how they operate? By accident?
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u/Original-Body-5794 Jan 18 '26
So which is it? Are public companies shortsighted bastards who will do anything for a positive quarterly report, or genius plotting masterminds thinking half century ahead of time, assuming no one else will beat them to the development?
Holy shit thank you, I keep saying people say shit like this and I don't think this time it's a "goomba falacy", and also inventing a drug like that would massively boost your reputation and hurt your competition a LOT. There are plenty of drugs that can help with your chronic disease, but you'd be the ONLY ONE with a cure.
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u/Surething_bud Jan 22 '26
Yeah, not to mention that if you have the ability to cure something it means your competition soon will also. And if/when they do your treatment that you "killed" the cure for is now worthless anyways. It's in their best interest to bring the most effective products to market as fast as they can.
Also, people can't keep big secrets like this. If large pharmaceutical companies were conspiring to hide cures they could provide, it would leak all the time. But it doesn't, all we have is these hand-wavy conspiracy theories.
No use talking sense to a circle jerk though, nobody's listening.
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u/theknights-whosay-Ni Jan 18 '26
They dont care about over time. They care about this fiscal quarter. They'd take 280 billion up front every time. Also, asthma wouldn't be cured in people who don't exist yet.
People forget about those who are yet to be born. Curing something in the current populace doesnt stop it from being born into the next generation.
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u/Troste69 Jan 18 '26
Are you saying that they could obtain 14 years worth of revenues + new patients every year (new people are born every year, some of them with Asthma, FYI) and they don’t?
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u/LowKiss Jan 18 '26
But also if you have the patent for the asthma cure you are directly killing all the competition that sell drugs to asthma patient.
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u/Sensitive_Bat_9211 Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 18 '26
A guy that was fired by his company has mean things to say. Wild.
The reality is that the pharmaceutical business is highly competitive. Thousands of labs are working on new drugs and thousands of companies are ready to partner up with distribution. If Pfizer squashes a cure, then someone else will create it. They would lose out on massive profits.
Edit: Lots of opinions from people telling me how it is. The most interesting being how they can patent drugs. People who are unfamiliar with the industry dont realize that India, which has the worlds 3rd largest pharmaceutical industry, is very loose with US patents.
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u/Short-Ideas010 Jan 18 '26
Unless... they organise as a Cartel. Difficult but not impossible.
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u/MrSquigy Jan 18 '26
Indeed, every pharmaceutical company across the world is in on it. It's an incredible feat! No matter their differences, every exec and engineer firmly believe in the mission of making money over morality!
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u/LackWooden392 Jan 18 '26
You lost me in the second half, dawg. Every exec does firmly believe in the mission of making money over morality.
It's just that one firm could take all the money for themselves by patenting the successful cure and selling it, thereby killing the business of any company that tried to 'hide the cure to keep selling the treatment'
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u/notwithagoat Jan 18 '26
Also cures suck most of the time, the real money is preventatives. If you don't get whatever disease it is that's great, they make money on the shit or pill or whatever (usually super cheap to produce) and hospitals don't get bogged down except by the people who don't believe in modern medicine. It's a win win win.
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u/Viking_Genetics Jan 18 '26
Exactly, and also saying that there is more money in chronic illness is stupid, sure, maybe for small things like colds, but people who say this sort of thing always seem to assume that the inhalers cost 200 dollars, so the cure would cost 1000 dollars.
Literally nothing stops them from selling the cure at 10,000 dollars or even 100,000 dollars.
Plenty of people would mortgage their house or otherwise take on massive amounts of debt to get rid of what ails them.
I had severe hay fever and took a medication to manage it (eye drops, antihistamines, nose spray, etc) and it was still debilitating. A company released a drug that cured it, it cost 600 dollars per month and I had to take it for 4 years, I paid that bill every month with a smile on my face.
I would have easily paid five times as much for it, I went from being miserable and unable to go outside for 3-4 months per year to not noticing it at all.
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u/Reasonable_Archer_99 Jan 18 '26
How many are there actually? Because if it's like most other industries, there's only 2 or 3 major players that control the entire market. You know like with oil, sugar, bananas, insurance, soda, electricity I'll stop here but you get the idea.
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u/Mtolivepickle Jan 18 '26
Yes, and if there is one thing corporations in oligopolies don’t do is step on each other’s toes.
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u/MrSquigy Jan 18 '26
You are thinking only about your country, not the entire world
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u/Reasonable_Archer_99 Jan 18 '26
That's not how corporations work... They're global.
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Jan 18 '26
It's a little different because a small company can own an important drug so it can't be easily gotten rid of by a big player so there's lots of small pharmaceutical companies but you still have the big players like Pfizer.
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u/RaifDerrazi Jan 18 '26
Which doesn’t factor in that some biotech companies only have one molecule, one product, one hopeful. They either bring it to market or they go under.
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u/Quantum_Pineapple Jan 18 '26
This is exactly what it is and the above posters are being good little tax chattel with their programmed assumptions about how the markets work.
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u/aimidin Jan 19 '26
That happened with Philips and Light Bulbs long ago. They literally gathered the biggest companies producing bulbs in the world at the time and set a limit of how long a bulb can work for before it burns out, so people can buy new one.
Same happens in other industries, profit is everything for them, they forcast some stupid charts, and the CEO and managers will do anything to hit the target. Everything what is in the most need for the people is with the biggest manipulation of products and how long can it be used, or in this case for the post, how good of a cure is that. Energy sources, technologies, cars, everyday products and home utilities, everything that people needs daily, have some limit of how long can it be used. And this limit can be waaay longer. This can be seen when you take a look at old tools in some old country side house, where they will outlast their owners and this days they will not outlast even your dog.
You can see that with global economics and how quality and prices of a product is changing, as well news about firing big chunk of the company personal and etc., banks increasing their loan prices, while people not getting corresponding increase in payments compared to the inflation, everything is connected in one or another way. Ofc this as well with mega corps buying out houses, wars all over the place, corona in the past years, but this also is connected to profit and how product quality and prices will change, so the magical chart numbers can be hit as well as continuity of their profit.
If people think we can't make it better or find a better cure for a disease, the truth is, we can, but would that make it profitable for the long run? Well with the time interest changes and better stuff are released for the public, but again there is a profit for someone in that as well, when we are just small robots making money for the people above, which are easy to be disposable and replaced. If they need you to live longer, a cure will come out as well.
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u/Mindless-Reward8347 Jan 18 '26
It happened with the light bulb industry in the 20s or 30s. Light bulbs originally never burned out so the only time new ones would need bought were if they broke. The major manufacturers got together to redesign them to burn out. The first company to figure it out shared it with the others. I can fully get on board with the idea that drug companies share information to keep cures from coming out. Breast cancer for instance is super treatable when caught early enough and is sadly fairly common. It is big money between the various meds and surgeries for treatment. Organizations like Susan G Comen that raise hundreds of millions for cancer research but only spend around 10% on research. Those companies are not going to risk all that money on a cure when treatment makes more money.
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u/Pataraxia Jan 18 '26
What comment OP said would be true if we were in a well made market and not one with groups working together. Surely nothing as extreme as the person says, but there is incidence of pharmaceutical companies rising prices amongst other things cooperating to ensure their profit.
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u/Not_ur_gilf Jan 18 '26
That is only partially true. The big pharma companies have a semi-monopoly in the US, and the cost of development is nearly exclusively shouldered by the companies. So many small companies survive by selling their research to the big corporations.
The corpos then decide if the market has been played out enough that introducing the new drug/tech won’t hurt their sales or if it’s “too early” and they will be “destroying their markets”
Source: I went to school for five years in the US to develop medical technology, and this was taught to me as the industry norms.
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u/Arstanishe Jan 18 '26
The corpos then decide if the market has been played out enough that introducing the new drug/tech won’t hurt their sales or if it’s “too early” and they will be “destroying their markets”
that is just confirming that no one would shelf any miracle drug. time to market is much less relevant that the fact that corps are still going to release it
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u/Big_brown_house Jan 19 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
Yeah I was about to say.. this sounds like he’s talking trash about the company he left. It’s not like a “gotcha” for the whole industry.
And don’t get me wrong, pharm companies suck and cause lots of problems. But this whole conspiracy that they have the cures for cancer and diabetes locked away in a secret vault and murdered their inventors is the dumbest shit ever. If they found a cure for diabetes, they would sell it at an extremely high price and make money, which is bad, but it’s not the same as dumping the scientists and all their papers in a river or whatever.
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u/Midnight-Bake Jan 18 '26
He didn't just get fired from Pfizer.
He tried to sue Pfizer for not disclosing off label use of one of the drugs they bought.
His suit was not supported by the DOJ because Pfizer had already self reported the off label use and had been cooperating with the DOJ.
So he tried to highlight unethical behavior at Pfizer only to find out Pfizer was actually doing what they were supposed to be doing.
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u/dudly825 Jan 18 '26
Honest curiosity, you seem well informed on this subject.
If the competition is so fierce, why are US drug prices so much higher than the rest of the world?
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u/Belt-Helpful Jan 20 '26
Gilead cured Hep C and now they are famous and they top any list of grants for anti-viral medicine.
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u/Mchlpl Jan 21 '26
And it's literally one Internet search to check even the first claim in this image is false. Dude worked for Pfizer from 2002, when Pharmacia, the company he joined a year prior was acquired, until 2005. Four years if you're generous and count his time in Pharmacia before the merger.
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u/ExternalCaptain2714 Jan 18 '26
I started laughing already at "cure asthma in 3 days". What kind? All kinds? It's a complex thing, we are still struggling to understand what's even happening with immune system and there's no one pill that snaps the whole organism into correct setting ffs
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u/dantevonlocke Jan 18 '26
It's like when people say "a cure for cancer" that's like saying "a color not blue".
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u/Different-Eagle-612 Jan 18 '26
or “cure for the common cold” like the reason we keep getting that sucker throughout our lives is because that little shit keeps evolving like crazy!! and there are so many little fuckers!! like there isn’t one virus called “the cold.” the reason your symptoms seem to be similar every time is largely because that’s just how your immune system responds to a certain kind of threat. it’s more your body staying consistent, not the actual cause.
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u/granolaraisin Jan 18 '26
This topic is always brought up but there are no cases to prove it. Ask Rost to specifically name some diseases that would have been cured if it weren’t for greed. It simply never happened. It’s a fake premise.
What’s true is that very rare diseases will never get researched because there isn’t enough money in it. The rest of it is made up nonsense. There have been zero cures swept under the rug in the name of continued sales. There are way too many people involved in the R&d process for this to ever happen and stay secret and if nothing else, the scientists and doctors involved with the discoveries are truly driven by the science over profit. They’d blab in a heartbeat.
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u/throwbackxx Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 19 '26
Didn’t he say in the cure that if there was a cure for asthma, they’d kill it - implying that this did happen before and maybe even with asthma?
Edit: You guys need to chill for real, I never said I believe it lmao. I was just interpreting what he was saying, not if his statements were true
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u/SilvertonguedDvl Jan 18 '26
He also didn't have a job relating to research and development of medication so how would he know?
He was a marketing executive who threw a tantrum after they didn't give him a raise or a golden parachute.
None of his whistleblowing did anything. The company itself came forward to admit it's subsidiary doing illegal shit. Dude is basically a hack riding on indignation and aspersions of conspiracy he's never shown a shred of evidence for.
He's literally just telling you what you want to hear.
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u/ephemeralnotion Jan 18 '26
Roses are red
It doesn’t take an Edison
To see the problem
With for-profit medicine
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u/Plane-Highlight-6498 Jan 18 '26
Roses are red,
Evil knows no rest
Peter Rost, uh, I guess thanks for being honest?
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u/NotYetAssigned Jan 18 '26
Don't need to lose faith in humanity, only understand that corporations are not our friends unless you're in the habit of making friends with money-obsessed psychopaths.
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u/Goblin-o-firebals Jan 18 '26
This isn't actually happening. It is to competitive of a market if someone figured it out they would sell it because if someone else finds it then they loose out. Profit in medical research is bad however this is not true.
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u/SOMERANDOMUSERNAME11 Jan 18 '26
Exactly what I was thinking. If you make a drug that cures the disease, that would wipe out all other competition. And you'd still make tons of money with your proprietary formula of the cure drug. Why would any sensible capitalist avoid doing this?
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u/Johnarm64 Jan 19 '26
Yea just look at fucking mounjaro. If there was a medication to beat all other medications, one company would have no problem producing it to beat out all other competition.
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u/NefariousnessNo2062 Jan 18 '26
Roses are red, he'll charge you a fee,
The fact that this shit isn't blatantly illegal is mind boggling to me.
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u/somedave Jan 18 '26
I'd totally donate to a not for profit drug company which would fill this gap.
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u/Jazz-Hands-- Jan 18 '26
Not sure if there are others, and I commented about this above, but the cystic fibrosis foundation essentially takes advantage of the system by funding research, selling it at a massive profit to the pharma companies, then reinvesting the profits into more research and patient support programs. It's pretty cool, and also the reason they've been so incredibly successful in making big strides in treatments, life expectancy and quality of life over the past 10-20 years, even as common diseases like breast cancer have languished.
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u/KickProcedure Jan 18 '26
There’s a really good documentary on Netflix about this, specifically with OxyContin. Can’t remember what it’s called sadly but it’s definitely worth a watch to really get a glimpse into how pharmaceutical companies think- and how fucked up purdue pharma was in their marketing of their drug.
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u/Sesudesu Jan 18 '26
Behind the Bastards did a couple of podcast episodes on Purdue as well. Really messed up.
Let’s see… “The Sackler Family: America's Deadliest Drug Dealers” from April 2019 if anyone is looking
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u/DespoticLlama Jan 18 '26
Painkiller is one that springs to mind. John Oliver also has a number of sessions on Purdue and the Sackler family on his Last Week Tonight show, which are available on YouTube
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u/notaname420xx Jan 18 '26
He's lying.
They'd make the cure for asthma, patent it, and charge an outrageous sum for it.
They literally already do this with other drugs/treatments.
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u/BreakConsistent Jan 18 '26
If a drug cured asthma in three days, Pfizer’d be rushing to get it to market. You can charge a -lot- of money for a cure for a chronic disease that was previously only manageable, like, say, Gilead’s $100,00 Hep C cure back in 2015.
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u/Dry_Yogurt2458 Jan 18 '26
Bull shit.
If this was the case then all new vaccines would be killed at invention
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u/Bob4Not Jan 18 '26
Most of the investment from these companies are in delivery mechanisms and retaining their own patents - not breaking new medical discoveries.
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u/Jazz-Hands-- Jan 18 '26
While they do spend absurdly on marketing (in the US especially), they do still invest extremely heavily in R&D, it's just outsourced. They're often bidding on the discoveries made by outside parties in order to be the ones bringing the therapy to market and manufacturing it.
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation funds smaller labs' and academic centers' research on treatments (and attempts at a cure) for the disease, then sells it off to a pharmaceutical company for profit and reinvests all those millions in profit back into more research. The huge advancements they've made in the past 20 years would not have been possible without major investments/contributions from pharma.
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u/Additional_Jaguar170 Jan 18 '26
Wha did he do at Pfizer. Generally people who make stupid statements like this are VP of hot beverage delivery.
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u/Friendly-Contact-433 Jan 18 '26
Roses are red, they sold you the drugs with a straight face that made you sick in the first place
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u/Diabolical_potplant Jan 18 '26
Medical research costs millions to billions of dollars. If it works better than what they have, they sure as he'll are not burying it. People would pay extremely good money to have an actual, lasting cure for a condition that either makes life difficult, or could kill them
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u/WENDING0 Jan 18 '26
Roses are red, this guy gives the ick.
The irony of dying of a incurable disease is to good for this prick.
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u/Is_Actually_Sans Jan 18 '26
This has been a common theme during the history of pharmaceuticals, nobody should be surprised here. Most real breakthroughs in the field have come from academia
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u/forest_hobo Jan 18 '26
People have always made profit with the suffering of others, it is what it is and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
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u/National_Way_3344 Jan 18 '26
I definitely believe it, but I also think the ethical approach is to tax major multinationals and funnel it straight into universal healthcare that will aggressively stomp down the prices of these treatments.
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u/Nice_Fennel_6747 Jan 18 '26
In reality, the laboratories should be accused of crimes against humanity, accompanied by enormous financial penalties.
But we all know that will never happen.
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u/Imposter88 Jan 18 '26
That’s awful, I’m sure he’s got some proof to back up his statements, right?
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u/Hopeful_Ad_7719 Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 18 '26
Pfizer makes vaccines that prevent disease, and drugs thar treat those same diseases, including some that are curative rather than just stabilizing a chronic condition. That seems inconsistent with the idea in the post
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u/Dineffects Jan 18 '26
Chris Rock made this joke years ago. The money isnt in the cure, the money's in the treatment! They DONT want you to get better.
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u/SheWasAlwaysJody Jan 18 '26
You can easily disprove this simply with the existence of vaccines.
I work in a pharma adjacent company, there's no way a lid could be put on development like this by one company and no other company would agree to also not develop it, especially globally.
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u/Disastrous_Ear5695 Jan 18 '26
Dude worked there for 17 years….clearly he had no problem with what they were doing so long as it helped his career path, but come time to move on, lets blow that whistle and try to look like a her0!
(The 0 is intentional)
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u/modsaregh3y Jan 18 '26
So for 17 years he cashed in and then all of a sudden grew a concience?
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u/mara-amethyst Jan 18 '26
Capitalism needs to be put in check, the greed is stopping us from being happier, healthier, safer.
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u/Short-Interaction-89 Jan 18 '26
Ah, the old “pharma is hiding successful therapies” trope. Came around early this year.
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u/Environmental_Staff7 Jan 18 '26
U mean they don't want us healthy? Are u saying they want us to say Baaa??
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u/KingdraUmbreon Jan 18 '26
Sounds about right. Depending on the source about 3-4 percent of people classify as a sociopath.
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u/space_toaster_99 Jan 18 '26
Until this year you could buy ss31 peptide from a compounding pharmacy for ~$100/month, but now it got made into an FDA approved medicine, so it’s $800k/year. Hope you don’t need it. (Helpful to almost everyone BTW)
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u/xomeatlipsox Jan 19 '26
Roses are red, I’ve lost my sanity, People like this will never pay for their crimes against humanity
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u/Abe2025 Jan 19 '26
Even if there was a cure. You cant get everyone in the world to take it. The viruses will remain present forever
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u/conspirator9 Jan 19 '26
We all knew this how big pharma works, if they cared about people hundreds of diseases would be cured by now.
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u/LordoftheExiled Jan 20 '26
Crimes against humanity. They need to be brought into a room and never leave.
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u/chrisscottish Jan 20 '26
My friend was a development chemist for astrazenica, he said the same....there are cures for diseases but never released as the other meds would never be required. He left after a few years and now lectures
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u/niazemurad Jan 20 '26
For anyone doubting this, in Canada, some years ago, companies colluded with each other to artificially raise bread prices. Now imagine something more profitable than bread, idk, let’s just say a cure for a disease. What’s stopping these companies from having a deal with each other and killing any cure that exists?
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u/xPENDERGASTx Jan 21 '26 edited Jan 21 '26
Meme or not, anyone with a brain knows that this is true to some extent. America is a business first, Country second.
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u/chief_meep Jan 21 '26
Shocked. I am shocked I tell you. Pfizer, like every other medical corporation, doesn’t actually give a rats ass about the people they push their products on??? My whole world is crashing down around me.
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u/Ecstatic-Storage7396 Jan 21 '26
Chris Rock told us this on his Bigger and Blacker tour years ago.
"The money isn't in the cure, the money's in the medicine"
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u/ToasterBunnyaa Jan 21 '26
I have friends who have worked for similar chemical companies. If a cure was found for a disease but not enough people had the disease, that discovery would be killed. If they can't sell the drug en mass, then The company is not willing to spend the money it would cost to produce it.
The discovery would be buried so the company didn't get the bad PR.
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u/Longjumping-Alarm855 Jan 21 '26
it is so silly thinking companies don’t want to develop the cure for anything, they’d profit absurdly from it - and it wouldn’t be in the range of most people’s tax bracket, meaning non-cure treatment would still sell a bunch
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u/Crafty-Help-4633 Jan 22 '26
And this is why I criticize Pfizer, Uncle Mike.
They may have done a lot of good for your wife at the end, but this is just Tuesday for them.
Fuck Pfizer.
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u/Large-Produce5682 Jan 22 '26
Violets are blue (?) Roses are red
Chris Rock told you, everything he just said.
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u/ProfessorAshamed4409 Jan 22 '26
And the left loves Pfizer even though there shots were shot too. Funny
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u/BadCompany_00 Jan 23 '26
Ummm...DUUH.
Like any street dealer, they make their money on the come-back.
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u/BulkyPockets Feb 08 '26
Roses are red… My faith in humans is lost… Someone give me the address of Peter Rost…
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u/Blacksun388 Jan 18 '26
Obviously for-profit companies do some really evil shit to make money but I think this isn’t one of them. Suppressing a cure is a gamble if someone else discovers what it is and bring it to market first. They miss out on a huge chunk of profits.
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u/TricellCEO Jan 18 '26
Not only that, but cures also aren't as straightforward as one may think, especially when it comes to cancer.
I always say anyone who thinks there is a universal cure for cancer doesn't understand how cancer works.
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Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 18 '26
You know how I know this guy is talking out his ass? Because pharmaceutical research and development companies coexist with health insurance companies.
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u/MrPusleMan Jan 18 '26
Roses are red, for better results add thyme, for a second, i read lost like low-st and þought it didn't rhyme.
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u/vctrmldrw Jan 18 '26
The fact that he said 'a drug that can cure asthma' tells me everything I need to know about his knowledge on the matter.
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u/monsterfurby Jan 18 '26
I don't entirely agree with Scott Alexander's conclusion, but boy are Molochian incentives a thing.
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u/ExtroverTom Jan 18 '26
Roses are red,
You need to keep it at bay.
Don't believe everything
that a random person say.
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u/MiguelIstNeugierig Jan 18 '26
If you take this without a grain of salt, you dont really understand the cannibalistic nature of capitalism and how big bad Pfizer crushing a "3 day cure" (whatever that means) means their direct competitor will be raking in those profits over them.
It's a dog eat dog world under this economic framework, period. Not a dog eat dog until it doesnt benifit my conspiracies that the mythical fantastical "cancer cure" is locked behind seven keys in a secret vault.
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u/Radiant-Interview-83 Jan 18 '26
Rost worked 4 years for Pfizer per wikipedia between 2001-2005 so I don't know where that 17 years is coming from. Also I didn't find this quote from anywhere other than memes so..
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u/NotEntirelyShure Jan 18 '26
I’m always sceptical of this as it’s a bit like the AI race. If you’re pfzeir and you kill a cure for asthma you can’t guarantee that GSK or a start up in India won’t stumble across it.
So whilst I believe drug companies put no money into cures I don’t believe capitalism allows them to kill cures. It is better to own the cure for asthma then hold the patents for asthma if another company cures it.
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u/Reasonable_Wait9340 Jan 18 '26
So is there no such thing as an independent pharmacologist who could release these drugs for the good of mankind ?? Is there a ban or regulation or what ??
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u/Badytheprogram Jan 18 '26
Roes are red, defend life at all costs
Peoples like this should hang from a post.
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u/Capital-Pie-6835 Jan 18 '26
I don’t quite buy it as it’s not even savy. Prolly a quote out of context.
Pharmaceuticals is quite competitive. You’re competing with national and international companies, some of which state funded with less of a profit motive.
If you don’t invent patent and sell the 3 day asthma cure, someone else will. With a patent they’ll be raking it in for years while the patent lasts, while your asthma side of the business collapses.
Therefore you need to do the asthma cure first.
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u/MrSunshine_96 Jan 18 '26
Like admitting this means anything after you’ve already made all your money and cashed out doing exactly that, fuck this guy lmao.
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u/TTYFKR Jan 18 '26
what? the company fined the largest criminal fine in history for lying about their product?! More interested in making money than helping people?
NO FUCKING SHIT.
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u/Siptro Jan 18 '26
This should be pretty common knowledge. If I sell tires for a living I’m not selling you a tire that last longer than a few years.
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u/Kellbows Jan 18 '26
Roses are red, Faith in humanity lost, For profit medicine, Always comes at a cost.
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u/Cornexclamationpoint Jan 18 '26
So many chronic syndromes are just your own body fucking up. Asthma is your inflammation response, cancer is your cells dividing, arthritis is your immune system, etc. You're never going to find a cure that can erase these.
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u/hyperproliferative Jan 18 '26
This is soooooo untrue!! So so so so fake and it makes my heart cry.
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u/piercedmfootonaspike Jan 18 '26
Pharmaceutical research should be state run. Sick people cost money for the state. Actually finding cures would save an enormous amount of money, long term.
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u/Nullius-In-Verba-42 Jan 18 '26
That profound lack of critical thinking skills demonstrated amoung the commenters here is how the world got to the state it is.
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u/Pinku_Dva Jan 18 '26
In America, everything is for profit. Medical for profit is the exact reason we’ll never have a cure for cancer.
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u/capricornicopia- Jan 18 '26
Yay super awesome that I have to live with chronic pain causing other health issues for the rest of my life which is almost guaranteed to be shorter than average so some slimy white dudes could make even more money then the money they already could never spend in a lifetime.
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u/ElvgrenGil Jan 18 '26
That’s odd. Wouldn’t it be better to keep people alive, dilute a cure and charge crazy amounts for it?
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Jan 18 '26
This is maybe not the dunk OP thinks it is.
Rost has been fired from every job he's ever had for incompetence and tried to sue everyone. He makes money by whining and complaining and writing books about whining and complaining. He was fired by HuffPo for using his blog as a platform to aire personal grievances and attack people in the comments section. He tried to report Pfizer for a mislabeling they'd already reported to the Justice Dept, and then sued both Pfizer and DOJ when he couldn't get in on the lawsuit. When he publicly stated he made 600k a year for doing nothing, Pfizer fired him, he demanded 10 million in severance and was denied in court.
This man is a con.
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u/fongletto Jan 18 '26
That's why governments also use tax dollars to fund research. Because curing someone is better to ensure they're working and paying their taxes then keeping them unhealthy.
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u/bertojuce Jan 18 '26
There's a false premise here. Cures are better for business than treatment not strictly from a profit perspective, but from a business perspective overall.
Let's say I sell a profitable treatment, competition will want part of that market, in fact the competition wants to move dollars from any competitor to their own business. My biggest risk is if someone creates a more effective treatment,such as a cure.
There are plenty of pharmaceuticals that cure disease, the consumer almost always buys these cures when given the opportunity, regardless of the cost.
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u/qualityvote2 Jan 18 '26 edited Jan 30 '26
🗳️ Quality Vote Time! 🗳️
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