@Insomnia said:
I saw this little video on how to tell if a conspiracy was wackadoo or not recently. Now it doesn't work for everything, but it's pretty good:
"Does X affect the really rich?"
So "Do really rich people die of diseases that they could have been cured of if only Big Pharma had released some super secret cure, but didn't want to because they want to keep the population down?" Yes, yes they do. There is no secret cure.
When it comes to Big Pharma and Big Oil, the conspiracy theorists tend to be half right. In most cases the big companies are not preventing any new development (Every now and then there is a case where they deliberately sit on a patent with no intent on using it, but it's fairly rare and usually not something super groundbreaking) however for obvious reasons they don't spend any of their R&D resources on things that they think would lower their own profitability and they do spend quite a lot of their money on advertising their own products over whatever new developments may come by.
However as especially in energy and medicine, there is a gigantic publicly funded research industry, there is nothing they could actually do to prevent something from being discovered and these companies do spend a lot of R&D resources on improving their own products in various ways.
@Sunny said:
People using the phrase "big pharma". I'm hearing a lot of it right now due to current events, and it drives me nuts. "Big Pharma" is the reason I'm fucking alive right now, thanks.
The silly thing is that the current events don't even involve "Big Pharma", it involves "Small Pharma bought by Hedge Funds and leveraged by complete soulless ass-holes"