by Brian Shilhavy
Editor, Health Impact News
For many years now those of us in the alternative health media have been exposing how Big Pharma depends upon sick people to maintain their profitable medical system. To develop pharmaceutical products that actually cure diseases would be to simply put them out of business.
The pharmaceutical industry also needs the U.S. government to protect their economic interest, and they rely on federal agencies such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to outlaw natural cures that cannot be patented, in order to protect their monopoly on healthcare.
So for those who think “capitalism” is the problem, and that socialized medicine in the solution, they are greatly mistaken. Pure capitalism (which we do NOT have in the United States) would allow the market to dictate which products are successful in curing disease, but that is not allowed in the United States.
I learned this myself first hand in the early 2000s when I imported the first “Virgin Coconut Oil” from the Philippines into the U.S. market, daring to publish the truth about fats and oils, and contradicting government nutritional advice that states saturated fats and coconut oil are harmful to one’s health.
The results were far greater than we could have ever predicted. Testimonials started coming in about how people’s lives were changed from switching to virgin coconut oil as their main dietary oil, and the coconut oil revolution had begun.
People were claiming that virgin coconut oil was healing many of their diseases, from diabetes, to antibiotic resistant pathogens, to heart disease, to thyroid diseases, to digestive diseases, to fungal infections like Candida, to neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s: people were reporting tremendous health improvement and even cures to these diseases.
And these claims were not completely without the lack of published research, as we published not only the testimonials, but also the peer-reviewed research as well.
But the FDA came after us with warning letters, accusing us of selling an “unapproved drug” because of all the positive health claims our customers were reporting. We were threatened with being put out of business and having all of our inventory seized if we did not remove the published research and testimonials from our website where we were selling coconut oil.
Rather than go out of business and lose everything, we hired a Washington D.C. regulatory attorney to help us comply with the FDA, by removing all health claims from our website. Our sales tumbled, as a result.
We had to put up the information on a different website where no coconut products were sold, and that research is now cataloged at CoconutOil.com. My desire to publish uncensored health information not published in the corporate “mainstream” media, where some have said 70% of the advertisers are from the pharmaceutical industry, later led to the beginning of Health Impact News.
While this obviously hurt our sales, the American public benefited, as the years of published research along with millions of dollar we spent in getting the information about coconut oil out to the public since the corporate media would not touch it, now benefited anyone who chose to sell coconut oil, with the result that today one can walk into any store selling groceries and purchase some form of dietary coconut oil.
Even so, coconut oil is still under attack today due to the FDA and USDA positions on saturated fats and coconut oil, which prohibit anyone selling it to label it as “healthy.” (See: War on Coconut Oil: California Companies Attacked to try and Prevent the Sale of Coconut Oil.)
Goldman Sachs Tells Drug Companies that Cures are Not Profitable
A report that made its way through the corporate sponsored “mainstream” media last week, therefore, was not news to those of us in the alternative health media.
Not only are natural cures that cannot be patented censored from the public, pharmaceutical products that actually cure people are not invested in, simply because it is not a sustainable market when people are cured and no longer need pharmaceutical products. Investors cannot afford to invest in such products.
Originally reported on CNBC.com, an April 10 report by Goldman Sachs analysts entitled “The Genome Revolution” addressed the question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”
From CNBC.com:
“The potential to deliver ‘one shot cures’ is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing.
However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies,” analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. “While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow.”
Richter cited Gilead Sciences’ treatments for hepatitis C, which achieved cure rates of more than 90 percent. The company’s U.S. sales for these hepatitis C treatments peaked at $12.5 billion in 2015, but have been falling ever since. Goldman estimates the U.S. sales for these treatments will be less than $4 billion this year, according to a table in the report.
“GILD is a case in point, where the success of its hepatitis C franchise has gradually exhausted the available pool of treatable patients,” the analyst wrote. “In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”
Gizmodo.com reported a couple of days later that pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline was dumping some of its gene therapy products that had become too successful and would provide little in the way of profits:
The MIT Tech Review points out that that this may have been the impetus behind GlaxoSmithKline’s announcement today that it will sell off its pipeline of gene therapies for rare disease to London gene-therapy upstart Orchard Therapeutics for a 20 percent stake in the company. One of those therapies is Strimvelis, a cure for a rare immune deficiency often called “bubble boy” disease. But even with the hefty price of $665,000, the small patient population means that the cure didn’t look like it would amount to much of a business.
It’s a callous calculation, and it shows that bringing to fruition the promises of the gene-editing revolution will take a lot more than mere scientific breakthroughs. (Source.)
Again, it would be unfair to blame “capitalism” here for pharmaceutical companies’ lack of desire to develop products that actually cure, and call for socialized medicine in its place.
It is the revolving door policy between government and Big Pharma that causes this, and their squashing out the products that a truly free market would choose based on the ability to cure disease. Many of these natural products, such as foods like coconut oil, have an ongoing market to not only cure disease, but prevent disease from happening in the first place.
Investment firm Goldman Sachs, it may be recalled, would not even exist today in a truly free market. They were bailed out by the U.S. government with tax payers’ funds in 2008 as a financial institution deemed “too big to fail.”
Henry M. Paulson Jr. left Goldman Sachs as the chairman and chief executive officer in 2006 to become President George W. Bush’s Treasury secretary, so there was no way the government was going to allow Goldman Sachs to fail in 2008.
Government is the problem, not capitalism, in allowing the public to have access to freedom of information about REAL cures. Turning all “healthcare” over the government would solve nothing, since it would effectively put the “fox in charge of the henhouse.”
So the next time someone comes around soliciting donations from you to “develop a cure” for some specific disease, like cancer, just remember that your money will go to the pharmaceutical industry which simply cannot afford to produce cures. So consider putting your charitable contributions elsewhere.
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