this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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How a Big Pharma Company Stalled a Potentially Lifesaving Vaccine in Pursuit of Bigger Profits (www.propublica.org)
submitted 1 year ago by MicroWave@lemmy.world to c/news@lemmy.world
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A vaccine against tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease, has never been closer to reality, with the potential to save millions of lives. But its development slowed after its corporate owner focused on more profitable vaccines.

Ever since he was a medical student, Dr. Neil Martinson has confronted the horrors of tuberculosis, the world’s oldest and deadliest pandemic. For more than 30 years, patients have streamed into the South African clinics where he has worked — migrant workers, malnourished children and pregnant women with HIV — coughing up blood. Some were so emaciated, he could see their ribs. They’d breathed in the contagious bacteria from a cough on a crowded bus or in the homes of loved ones who didn’t know they had TB. Once infected, their best option was to spend months swallowing pills that often carried terrible side effects. Many died.

So, when Martinson joined a call in April 2018, he was anxious for the verdict about a tuberculosis vaccine he’d helped test on hundreds of people.

The results blew him away: The shot prevented over half of those infected from getting sick; it was the biggest TB vaccine breakthrough in a century. He hung up, excited, and waited for the next step, a trial that would determine whether the shot was safe and effective enough to sell.

Weeks passed. Then months.

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[–] agent_flounder@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting and very helpful framing. I suppose it's been at the back of my mind but to call out power explicitly and analyze through that lens does indeed clear up quite a lot.

[–] Aceticon@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I only started thinking about it from this point of view maybe a year ago.

It's both interesting and scary how almost nobody in modern politics seems to talk about politics as the pursuit of power, as if Democracy has transcended such things and yet governing, in Democracy or not, is nothing more than the exercising of Power.

It's also an explanation for most people's pursuit of Money: even the most basic objective of getting enough money to be able to live as you want is about Freedom, or in other words Power over ones' own destiny.

Food for thought.