The 'Big Pharma has cured cancer' and 'Vaccines cause Autism' conspiracies

[AussieNeil]

I expect most of us have come across people who are adamant that one or both of the above are true, with those that espouse alternative cancer treatments more likely to believe that "Big Pharma has cured cancer". Personally, I would expect that if the Big Pharma conspiracy theory was true, we'd well and truly know about it by now, since with cancer being so common, someone in the know would have either developed cancer or had a loved one develop cancer and spilled the beans.

An Oxford mathematician, Dr. David Grimes has just published research in PLOS One establishing a formula for determining the likelihood of a failed conspiracy — in other words, how likely some of its participants are to spill the beans. There are three main factors:

1) the number of conspirators - with it becoming increasingly difficult to keep the secret the more people 'in the know'

2) the amount of time passed since it started and

3) how often we can expect conspiracies to intrinsically fail (a value he derived by studying actual conspiracies that were exposed).

He then applied his equation to four famous conspiracy theories; the belief that:

1) the Moon landing was faked

2) climate change is a fraud

3) vaccines cause autism, and

4) Pharmaceutical companies have suppressed a cure for cancer.

Dr. Grimes's analysis suggests that if these four conspiracies were real, most are very likely to have been revealed as such by now. Specifically:

1) Moon landing 'hoax' would have been revealed in 3.7 years

2) the climate change 'fraud' in 3.7 to 26.8 years

3) the vaccine-autism 'conspiracy' in 3.2 to 34.8 years and

4 the cancer 'conspiracy' in 3.2 years.

Full article On the Viability of Conspiratorial Beliefs by David Robert Grimes:

journals.plos.org/plosone/a...

Neil

[Hidden]

The pharmafia are all about the money! Money spinning drug Statin, is touted as a panacea. There have been no significant antibiotics for years' because they don't make enough money, so there is not much done to develope new one's.

[AussieNeil Administrator in reply to Hidden]

Surely the same can be said for any 'for profit' business? The reality is that companies that aren't profitable, don't survive and those that are barely profitable have a much greater challenge raising capital from investors than those with a good profit record.

Society has very good reasons for wanting pharmaceutical companies to invest in antibiotics, but as you quite rightly point out, there's far greater profit opportunity in developing and marketing a maintenance drug like statins than there is for antibiotics. If an antibiotic works as claimed, the patient is only on it for a short period - not much of an opportunity for long term profit compared to a maintenance drug, so governments need to offer incentives for new antibiotic development to make that worth while. There are certainly questions being asked about the benefits of statins which hopefully can be resolved by unbiased research.

Neil

[Hidden in reply to AussieNeil]

Statins? They ruined my muscle's and joints! Avoid! The point I was trying to make was that these pharmaceutical companies are as bad as gangsters, in some of their dealings!

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