: how big pharma threatens global health Dearden, Nick creator author. text bibliography enk 2023 monographic eng

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315 p. ; 24 cm In Pharmanomics, investigative journalist Nick Dearden digs down into the way we produce our medicines and finds that Big Pharma is failing us, with catastrophic consequences. Big Pharma is more interested in profit than health. This was made clear as governments rushed to produce vaccines during the Covid pandemic. Behind the much-trumpeted scientific breakthroughs, major companies found new ways of gouging billions from governments in the West while abandoning the Global South. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of financialising medicine – from Purdue's rapacious marketing of highly addictive OxyContin through Martin Shkreli's hiking the price of a lifesaving drug to the 4.5 million South Africans needlessly deprived of HIV/AIDS medication. Since the 1990s, Big Pharma has gone out of its way to protect its property through the patent system. As a result, the business has focused not on researching new medicines but on building monopolies. This system has helped restructure our economy away from invention and production in order to benefit financial markets. It has fundamentally reshaped the relationship between richer and poorer countries, as the access to new medicines and the permission to manufacture them is ruthlessly policed. In response, Dearden offers a pathway to a fairer, safer system for all. A History of Scandal — A Hedge Fund with a Pharmaceutical Firm Attached — It Was Greed, My Friends — The Pandemic Begins — Recolonising the Global Economy — The Hospital That Became a Trading Floor — A New Hope — Reach for the Moon. / Nick Dearden. Includes bibliographical references and index. Pharmaceutical industry Moral and ethical aspects HD9665.5 .D396 2023 9781804291450 2023013755 DLC 230512 20250616124159.0 23126166 eng