Much of what passes for journalism or commentary about the biotechnology/pharmaceutical industry is click driven hate mongering. Want to write about drug companies. Start with this theme: Everything drug companies do is disgusting. Nothing they do is beyond reproach. Use h one example of unseemly behavior and claim every company does the same thing. Add some anger and sarcasm.
Pharma sucks. Ha-ha.
Press send or post.
Here’s some recent examples in order (mostly) of idiotic magnitude:
Here’s what White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said in the wake of a Super Bowl commercial to raise awareness of opioid-induced constipation run two companies marketing a drug to treat it: “Next year, how about fewer ads that fuel opioid addiction and more on access to treatment.” commercialized and misused pharmaceutical knowledge,” he told a United Nations agency.
Apparently McDonough never got the memo that people – including millions of cancer patients and individuals with digestive tract paralysis who safely use opioid based drugs to control searing pain – should have the same right to poop as White House staffers.
Bill Maher tweeted (and this is evidence of why humor should be left to humorists) “Was that really an ad for junkies who can't shit? America, I luv ya but I just can't keep up.”
In between the harsh sarcasm of the White House and Maher’s tweet is the much needed gap created by Samantha Allen of the Daily Beast:
Martin Shkreli Is Just One of Many Pharma A-Holes
Nancy Retzlaff is not Martin Shkreli. She won’t inspire hundreds of news articles nor will she become the subject of any Internet memes. She won’t threaten Ghostface Killah and it seems unlikely that she will ever flirt with a minor on a YouTube livestream.
But the chief commercial officer for Turing Pharma is just as responsible for keeping the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim 5,000 percent higher than it used to be. And as long as the public eye is still trained on the Shkreli sideshow, she’ll get away with it.
….There are more Martin Shkrelis out there, and not all of them are acting like assholes on Twitter. And if the Shkreli Show overshadows the people who still need easy access to a once-affordable treatment, everyone loses. The Pharma Bro started out as a poster child for a pressing problem. He may end up being a red herring.”
Samantha Allen seems eminently qualified to cover the relationship between being an asshole and drug pricing. She has a PhD in Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Emory University. She In 2013, she received the John Money Fellowship for Scholars of Sexology from the Kinsey Institute. She used the money to “research a wide range of media (books, photos, videos, graphic art, tabloids, etc.) on several different sexual fetishes (shoe, foot, nylon, pantyhose, breast, spanking, hair, etc.) dating from across the 20th and 21st centuries.”
Is this a great country or what?
But Dr. Allen is also an asshole expert because she is a misandrist. In case you are wondering, that means she hates men:
“i hate men because it’s not my job to fix masculinity; it’s my job to heal from it and to be together with my sisters as we try to make it through a hostile world. and yet i am expected to patiently educate men on how not to be an asshole. here’s my only tip: stop spending so much time around men. they’re assholes.”
Finally, here’s someone attacking drug companies for changing all human and cultural concepts in the world so widely that treatment is completely considered as a business in the world today..We should revive our traditional medicine which is in harmony with our culture and is naturally cheaper and more useful.”
That last statement is from former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who blamed “Zionist medicine” for polluting our planet with profitable but useless medicines.
You knew it had to come down to the Jews controlling Big Pharma this:
“Martin Shkreli (pictured) is a Jewish businessman (he has relatives living in Albania, and is often referred to as an Albanian). Though his Wikipedia page says he is Albanian and Croatian, he was born and raised in Brooklyn, went to Baruch College, worked for uber-Jewish hedge fund manager Jim Cramer in his teens — and had his own hedge fund by the time he was 21.
When the Jews want to profit more from selling a drug needed to treat sick people, who otherwise would die, they don’t just raise the price by a factor of five or ten. They send someone to raise it by a factor of fifty, wait for the reaction to hit the press, then they pretend to back down… yessir, all the way down to where they had planned to put the price from the beginning.
… This is a Jewish business strategy. Whenever they want to do something that they know will antagonize the public, they have one of their own, or someone under their control, do something even worse, and then they pretend to “correct” their own agent by telling him to stop doing it, and start doing something that isn’t quite so bad instead.”
Or as Dr. Allen put it:
Martin Shkreli became the public face of price gouging because he was so transparent. But Retzlaff’s cool, calm, and collected attempt to spin the same exorbitant price increase for an HIV drug as a net good is arguably more dangerous because it is less obvious.”
There’s no underlying similarity binding these anti-pharma and anti-Semitic rants except varying degrees of paranoia and this observation by George Orwell: “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
