Someone Will Actually Die While You Read This

You may need to take a chill pill after reading this little story about Big Pharma.

Honestly I never thought I'd be writing about pharmaceutical companies in this blog - doesn't everybody already hate them? What could I possibly add to the subject?

Their public image is already drowning in enough angry bile to flood a mass grave and nobody expects them to behave with any more civility, altruism or far-sightedness than a rabid goat which is being stung by wasps and has only a flamethrower to defend itself with (I tried to find an illustration but this was the best I could do - sorry, the goat in the picture is not actually rabid)

So I expected to steer clear of the whole pharma-cabal area. But then I read about this, and I kept reading, and finally something in my innards was inspired to secrete just a bit more bile - not my liver, that's long since dried up... I think maybe it was my Islets of Langerhans or something?


Hepatitis C is a deadly disease afflicting an estimated 170 to 200 million people in the world - and not just funny-looking types in loser countries you've never heard of, millions of them are Americans! (almost 1% of us, in fact)

It kills, depending on whose estimate you read, between 300,000 and 340,000 people per year (more Americans die of this than of HIV)  In other words, a person is likely to die from it in the time it takes you to read this page.

Conventional treatment involves weekly injections - for up to a year - with a cocktail of drugs including interferon, which causes flulike symptoms if you're lucky; worse side effects are common.

But you only get that if you know you have it (and if you have health coverage...); a lot of people don't even find out until it's nearly destroyed their liver already and they need a transplant.

So when a stage 2 clinical trial in real human beings reports a 100% success rate curing the most common form of Hep C in weeks, using a combination of two pills - no injections - you'd think it'd be cause for celebration!

There's just one problem: each drug belongs to a different company.

Bristol-Myers Squibb owns daclatasvir, and Gilead owns GS-7977 (credit where it's due, these two firms are obviously major-league when it comes to naming things)

So the celebrations are being put on hold while each company goes back to the drawing board to come up with alternatives to the other's drug, to pair with their own and form a financially acceptable treatment.

Why? As Gilead's executive vice-president for R&D explains, simple common-sense prudence: "We told them it’s too early to jump wildly into this collaboration" - by 'them' he means Bristol-Myers Squibb executives, of course, not Hep-C patients or their families.

Presumably the victims will have to wait until his marketing guys come up with a more hilariously brutal way of phrasing it, and then the executive can dance on a pile of yachts while breaking the news to them, because that would be more fulfilling.

Bear in mind, this is a field worth billions - so much, there's actually enough profit to go around. In fact, these new drugs are likely to cost tens of thousands of dollars per course of treatment, and that's still better than what we have available now.

Several other major companies are in the process of testing new therapies, and in 5-10 more years, there may be a number of competing treatments on the market for physicians to choose from.

But right now, roughly every two minutes, of every hour and every day, someone dies of this disease. And there's something that may well turn out to be a full-fledged cure, with dramatically lower costs and side effects, just sitting in a researcher's filing cabinet right now.

I could go on with paragraphs of enraged invective, but... well, this kind of thing is just what we've come to expect from these colossal [too many words competing for this spot], isn't it?

Every new outrage from pharmaceutical manufacturers just re-sets the bar a bit higher, and you find yourself thinking "well, at least they're not actually battering down my door brandishing a rusty icepick yet, bless 'em...."

Back in the day, supervillains like Pol Pot would tell you to your face that they wanted you dead. They were evil, but they were honest. Those were simpler times.

Now we get glossy brochures in our doctor's waiting room, showing smiling elderly people holding hands on a bench by a lake, and the earth-toned logo in the corner is the only clue that Beelzebub himself would probably recoil in horror from what these subhuman sacks of sick call a business plan.