> Private industry has been very effective indeed at hooking millions of people on opiates.
Opiate addiction is a direct result of government policy regarding drugs going back over a century. You can't put the blame for that on pharmaceutical companies.
> Meanwhile, where are all those new antibiotics?
We're literally commenting on an article about curing Hepatitis C. Not too long ago, chronic Hepatitis C was a long and slow death sentence. There was a time during which having HCV was considered worse than being diagnosed with HIV, because the prognosis and treatment was so bad. Now, it's completely curable in just a few months. The cure for Hepatitis C was funded and developed in the US off by private industry, using funds obtained from pharmaceutical sales.
Incidentally, there have been discoveries recently about developing new lines of antibiotics, though that's not really the issue. The point is that you're missing the forest for the trees, if you ignore all of the unbelievable advances that have been made in pharmaceutical development in the last 25 years alone. Almost all of that - including pharmaceuticals developed by European companies - was funded from US pharmaceutical sales.
Opiate addiction is a direct result of government policy regarding drugs going back over a century. You can't put the blame for that on pharmaceutical companies.
> Meanwhile, where are all those new antibiotics?
We're literally commenting on an article about curing Hepatitis C. Not too long ago, chronic Hepatitis C was a long and slow death sentence. There was a time during which having HCV was considered worse than being diagnosed with HIV, because the prognosis and treatment was so bad. Now, it's completely curable in just a few months. The cure for Hepatitis C was funded and developed in the US off by private industry, using funds obtained from pharmaceutical sales.
Incidentally, there have been discoveries recently about developing new lines of antibiotics, though that's not really the issue. The point is that you're missing the forest for the trees, if you ignore all of the unbelievable advances that have been made in pharmaceutical development in the last 25 years alone. Almost all of that - including pharmaceuticals developed by European companies - was funded from US pharmaceutical sales.