When people talk about the major pharmaceutical companies of the world they use the phrase ‘Big Pharma’, and these entities certainly are ‘Big’. Last year their total revenue was about 1.5 Trillion euros... €1,500,000,000,000! That is a huge number, and it was boosted by the hundreds of billions that our governments paid to them for the covid vaccines. Pfizer’s revenue of €86 Billion in 2021 was twice as much as the previous year. Given the size of Big Pharma and its presence in our lives, it is important to ask two questions: 1) is it right for an industry to make so much money from people’s illnesses, and 2) are these companies really dedicated to keeping people healthy?

Before we get too deeply into this discussion, it is important to note that many pharmaceutical drugs have been extremely beneficial in saving and improving people’s lives. The discovery of antibiotics is perhaps the prime example. But there is also a cancer eating away at the very heart of this industry, and that is why Big Pharma has come under scrutiny. The pharmaceutical companies are corporations, and by definition their only goal is to make money to enrich their executives and stockholders. The way that a corporation makes money is by having a steady stream of customers who pay for their goods or services. The ‘customers’ of Big Pharma are people who are ill and need to pay for pills and injections. So the goal of these companies is not to promote health and wellness. It is to make as much money as possible by keeping us perpetually sick or scared, so that we keep using their drugs. With regard to covid, that means taking endless booster shots, even though it has been proven that these vaccines do not prevent either infection or transmission of the virus.

So how do they implement this business plan? The first step is to get most of the doctors on their side. The vast majority of people do what their doctor tells them, so if Big Pharma controls the doctors then they control the patients (their ‘customers’). This starts in medical schools where the companies donate millions in order to influence how doctors are trained. As a result, the average doctor comes out of school knowing a lot about what drugs to prescribe, but very little if anything about nutrition and other ways of staying healthy. Remember, Big Pharma does not want a healthy population, so the medical professionals are trained to manage sickness - not to promote health. This influence continues after medical school as doctors and hospitals are regularly sent information about the latest drugs and what conditions to prescribe them for.

All of this gets the doctors on their side, but how do they keep people perpetually sick enough to continue asking for help? First of all, most of the drugs that they give us do not treat the causes of illness, they merely cover up the symptoms. The patients (customers) may feel a bit better for a short while, but the illness is still there, so they always need another pill or shot. On top of that, many drugs carry with them a long list of potential side effects that are actually new illnesses. It’s a vicious cycle: the drug gives you temporary relief from the symptoms of your first sickness, but taking that drug for a while may give you other sicknesses. What does the doctor do about these new illnesses? He prescribes more drugs, with more side effects and more potential problems. No wonder grandma takes ten different pills every day! 

Another aspect of Big Pharma’s business plan is using their money to influence the medical establishment and the media. One example of this is a class of drugs called statins. It was once thought that high cholesterol was a major cause of heart disease, so statins were invented to reduce the level in your blood. Big Pharma used their influence to continually expand the number of people who were told that they needed to lower their cholesterol. As a result, statins have become the biggest money-making drug in the history of pharmaceuticals. Millions of people are hooked on this drug for life, but for most of them it does more harm than good. Numerous studies have proven that cholesterol is not a major cause of heart disease, and that statin drugs can have serious side effects when used long term. Yet doctors are still prescribing them, because they have been misled by Big Pharma’s ability to suppress any information that hurts their bottom line. This same power was used to repress inexpensive (unprofitable) treatments for covid. These are glaring examples of the lengths to which these corporations will go to protect their profits, with no regard for the lives of their ‘customers’.

Big Pharma also misleads us through deceptive testing and advertising. They only publicize studies that support their drugs, but even research that appears to look good is often deceptive. One way that they do this is by confusing “Relative Risk” with “Actual Risk”. Here is a simple example of testing 2,000 people with an illness: 1,000 were given the test drug and 1,000 were given a fake pill (placebo). Two of the people taking the drug died, while three of the people taking the placebo died. The “Actual Risk” for both groups is almost zero: 99.8% survival with the drug and 99.7% with the placebo. But the drug company focuses exclusively on the meaningless “Relative Risk” which says that three deaths are relatively 50% more than two deaths. So the drug is advertised as being “50% more effective at saving lives!”. This kind of false advertising is sent to busy doctors who do not have time to read the details of the studies, so they accept the headline: “50% more effective!” This is the same misleading method that was used to claim that the covid vaccines were “95% effective”.

It all comes down to the fact that caring for our health should not be based on how much profit can be made. Every day millions of competent, well-intentioned people go to work as doctors, nurses, researchers, hospital staff, etc.. The vast majority of them are dedicated to making life better for those who are ill, but unfortunately they are pawns in a corrupt system. Big Pharma wants us to be perpetually ill so that we buy their drugs every day for the rest of our lives. Curing people is the exact opposite of their business model. This is the insanity at the core of our health care system. It’s time for us to do away with a system designed to manage sickness for profit, and move toward one that is dedicated to keeping us as healthy as possible, whilst healing those who become ill.