I have worked for government funded establishments so I happen know something about the way that they work, or fail to work. I am thinking about staff moonlighting to do private work during the time that they were paid to be officially employed. I am thinking of whole afternoons and days absent because nobody was bothering to check, with near zero accountability apart from some BS exercise once every few months to keep up appearances. I am thinking about corner cutting and book fiddling of the sort to make the hair stand on end.
I was young then and turned a blind eye the same as everybody else around; found other things to do and got on with that, but it stayed with me and it plays on the mind, enough to put a word in every now and then about it if not to hope to change the World.
It sickens and scares me to see this poo pooing of those who might hope to keep an eye open.
The statistics alone tells you that obviously antihiv drugs help if you have an increase in number of infected people and decrease of mortality. And if antihiv drugs help, then even to the greatest sceptics the cause of AIDS should be clear.
The morbiditiy statistics serve well to tell me what the current fashion is, the state of opinion, but I have seen nothing yet to validate them as much more than that.
Science would require a rigorous definition of AIDS, of the sort that I have not yet seen anywhere. It doesn't matter how careful the count, if what they're counting is fog, then that is the result, foggy. Health workers supposed to be at risk themselves are not even routinely tested for HIV. It is a sad farce. The study samples are small. They've barely scratched the surface.
Let's not get lost - if the only thing that is helping to the patients is the placebo effect, why toxic drugs? Do you really believe the reserchers in big pharma are not able to interpret their own test results correctly at least for themselves?
I believe that the very question is disingenuous. If they're to be trusted so much, lets abandon any attempt to regulate governmentally, lets abandon the pretence of peer review, lets just let them get on with it and tell us whatever they like. Is that what you want?
The ethics of the big pharma is clear - they want profit. If they create a dangerous drug, they loose a lot of money,
Not so long as you allow them to blame it on something else.
They're paid for the sale of the product and BS, and not even by the patients themselves.
The tobacco companies poisoned their clients for years on end and did they go broke because of it?
Not yet.
... so if all there is to antihiv drugs that work is placebo effect, then why don't make one without the side effects?
Nobody would believe in something so easy. The effect is derived from the ritual, the contagion of belief and the art of that. The most effctive con man must first know how to fool himself.
If you want big pharma to do substantial things faster, you should change a bit their environment - shorten the period of patent protection and cancel the possibility to patent the same substance for more then one patent period.
I don't believe in any of it.
Big pharma disempowers the patient.
Good health is rather the result of an individual's own empowerment to look after himself.