Editor’s note: This article was first published in May 2011. The tuberculosis figure it cites (“has once again killed more than a million people”) reflects reporting from around 2011 and is not tied to a specific period or source.
We summarize the interview that Nobel Prize in Medicine winner Richard J. Roberts gave to the press on the subject of drug companies and governments blocking a cure for cancer. Nobody is hiding anymore, and we have to accept that millions of people around the world die because business is business, and some people leave their conscience on the bedside table before going to sleep. Several media outlets picked up the interview, including La Vanguardia, though not all the ones that should have, which also shows that we are witnessing the death of good journalism and the rise of manipulated information.
Here are Roberts’s answers to the most relevant questions:
Which research model do you find more effective, the American or the European one?
Obviously the American research model, in which private capital takes an active part, and that makes it much more efficient. Private funding is, of course, what invests in basic research, but when it comes to the health industry… let’s say that research on human health, in both Europe and the United States, is tied to financial return. Since these are private investments, what is good for the companies’ shareholders is not always good for the rest of humanity.
Well, in that respect it’s like any other industry, isn’t it?
It isn’t just another industry. We’re talking about our health, our children’s health and the health of millions of people.
What exactly do you mean?
I have seen how researchers who depend on private funding could have brought out drugs that would have wiped out a disease completely, and that didn’t happen.
A drug company doesn’t really want to cure you. It wants to turn you into a chronic patient who improves at some point but whose illness comes back as soon as you stop taking the medication. That way, just as with the tobacco industry, you become dependent on the drug and they increase their present and future profits, and it’s these drugs that keep illnesses chronic that send a company’s shares soaring.
If a drug cured you completely, they would never invest in it.
Don’t you think that’s a very serious accusation?
You only have to follow the financial analysis of the pharmaceutical industry to see what I’m telling you. They are after profit, and if finding profit means leaving a cure aside, that’s what they’ll do.
Can you give me an example of this kind of abuse that you’re certain happened?
Yes. Research on antibiotics has been dropped because they were too effective and “cured completely”. Since no new antibiotics have been developed, infectious microorganisms have become resistant, and today tuberculosis, which had been defeated when I was a child, is making a comeback and has once again killed more than a million people.
Surely you’re talking about the developing world?
(Laughs.) In the developing world they don’t even bother researching cures for certain diseases, because the cure lies in medicines that are barely profitable, and in other cases governments can’t pay for them. I’m talking about the developed world, where a medicine that cures completely, I repeat, is not a profitable business.
And don’t politicians step in?
Don’t get your hopes up. In our system, politicians are mere employees of big capital. They intervene just enough to get their people elected, and if their people don’t win, they buy the ones who did. And I know what I’m talking about, because politicians depend shamelessly on certain pharmaceutical companies that fund their campaigns.
There’s not much more to say about this interview. If you think about it, though, it’s nothing new: most of us know these things happen, but they’ve become part of everyday life, so they hardly surprise us. I admire Richard’s courage. If this interview went viral across the media, he could in a way be getting himself into trouble by taking direct aim at what we might call the biggest case of government-backed corruption since the tobacco industry came along.
Further reading
Featured image: paloma.cl, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
.jpg){kind=link}