Big Pharma breaks all the rules of capitalism—and still makes the biggest profits, says Bryan Hubbard
Just in case you’ve gotten a little rusty, here’s a quick primer on capitalism. Private enterprise provides services or products for the benefit of society for a profit—and if you’re unsure what that looks like, explore the workings of one of its biggest and most successful exponents, the pharmaceutical industry.
Drug company profits are regularly twice that of other big corporates, and one study discovered that they were achieving gross profit margins of 76.5 percent compared to a meager 37.4 percent of the companies listed on the S&P 500 index. Gross profits are what’s left after all direct costs of making the product have been deducted—which means each drug is super profitable.
Implicit in our definition of capitalism is the idea that the service or product being provided actually works. Even a loaf of bread “works” in the sense that it sates hunger pangs and theoretically doesn’t harm the eater—and the product or service should enhance the life of the purchaser in some way.
Yet, Big Pharma is one of the most profitable industries in the world, and it makes products that don’t work, or not properly, and most certainly can harm. The SSRI antidepressants work hardly better than placebo—that is, than doing nothing at all—as a new study has revealed, and if we dare tread on the sacred ground of vaccinations, several recent reports point out their ineffectiveness.
In the first study, researchers from Stanford University did some number-crunching on the Covid-19 vaccines, which, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), saved 20 million lives over the course of the pandemic.
Not quite, said the Stanford team. The true number was closer to 2.5 million lives—not bad, for sure, but nearly 10 times less than the WHO’s calculations. And remember all the hoopla about getting the young vaccinated? Well, the vaccine saved the lives of just 299 people under age 20—that’s globally, by the way.1
It doesn’t get much better among the 20-to-29-year-olds. Just 1,800 of them can thank one of the vaccines that they’re still around today, and, again, that’s around the world.
The young weren’t vulnerable, of course, but the elderly in care homes were. So how many had their lives saved by being vaccinated? Just 2 percent, it seems, which suggests the vaccines were nowhere near as effective as we had been told by those running Project Fear.
The Stanford team was crunching numbers, just as the WHO researchers didn’t. They also built certain assumptions into their calculations, such as that, er, the vaccines worked, at least to some extent.
But when we look at real-world data, we have to question that assumption. The UK’s Office for National Statistics tracked the death rate among the vaccinated and unvaccinated in England between April 2021 and May 2023—pretty much the time when the pandemic was at its peak and when everyone was rolling up their sleeves to get a life-saving shot—and came up with some surprising findings.
During that period, there were 8,853 deaths among the unvaccinated and 51,975 Covid-related deaths among the vaccinated. You could argue that more vulnerable people had the vaccine, and this would explain the higher death rate—but the Stanford statistics tell us that the vaccines saved less than 2 percent of lives in care homes (about 300,000 out of about 2 million2 residents of nursing homes and residential care facilities around the world).
In truth, the eventual decline of Covid was more to do with the natural life cycle of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, as it attenuated and weakened, than with the vaccines themselves.
The Stanford researchers didn’t look at the harm the vaccines caused, but at least 850,000 serious adverse reactions have been logged with America’s vaccine reporting system, VAERS. That includes life-changing harm to the young, of whom just 2,000 lives were saved by the vaccine.
The seasonal flu jab is hardly more effective, as a new report from the UK’s Health Security Agency makes clear. Influenza in the UK: Annual Epidemiological Report, winter 2024–2025, revealed that around 75 percent of elderly patients listed with doctors had the shot.
Not that it did them much good. Its effectiveness against infection was just 36 percent, the agency estimates, which means about two-thirds of older people who thought they were protected weren’t.
It’s capitalism, Jim, but not as we know it.
References
What do you think? Start a conversation over on the... WDDTY Community
Great news! Discounts are available based on your cart total. Check the details below:
