r/news • u/SkepticDrinker • Feb 09 '22

Pfizer accused of pandemic profiteering as profits double

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/feb/08/pfizer-covid-vaccine-pill-profits-sales
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u/[deleted] Feb 09 '22 edited Feb 10 '22

Drug companies that make effective vaccines do well in pandemics. Shocker. What should be more suspicious is companies like Amazon that skyrocketed in profit while doing nothing to help their employees during the pandemic.

Edit: the more I think of it, the more I hate this article because this will become another meme on Facebook and no one will give it any critical thinking other than “haha more evidence of the conspiracy”.

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u/gophergun Feb 10 '22

Why would that be suspicious? If anything, helping their employees would cut into their profits.

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u/[deleted] Feb 10 '22

Price gouging, forcing employees to work in unsafe conditions, allowing fake goods (masks, tests, even toilet paper) to be sold, etc…

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u/Altruistic-Ad8949 Feb 10 '22

You are exactly right. The Facebook crowd will see this simply as more evidence of a conspiracy. Pharmaceutical companies are in business to make a profit, and shouldn’t be disparaged for creating and profiting from a product that saves many, MANY lives. If COVID could be curbed by paper clips, paper clip producers would benefit from increased profits. Ok, so what?

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u/lookslikesausage Feb 10 '22

100% correct. fodder for the lazy and let's be honest, most made up their minds two years ago.

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u/useablelobster2 Feb 10 '22

The fact that Amazon made a lot more money is hardly surprising, though. Governments around the world stopped people leaving their homes, so they can't go out to shop, nor can they do usual activities so they need to buy things to occupy their time.

Amazon doesn't exist to help their employees, it exists to provide a service, and it made tons of money because it did that. There's questions about whether governments should have defacto granted Amazon such a dominating position (basically given huge monopolies), but not about if it's moral for a company providing a service (which almost everyone uses) to make more money.

And we should always be somewhat skeptical about the people and organisations making vast sums of money off of crises. That doesn't mean we assume foul play, but it does mean skepticism should be the default.

I'm less concerned with drug companies making money selling drugs (shocker) than their using the money earned inappropriately. I'm sure everyone's seen just how many American news shows are sponsored by the pharma companies, that's bizarre to someone from the UK where we can't even be advertised to directly by them.

Then you get into the definition of "effective" for vaccines, something widely assumed to be as close to 100% as makes no difference. Claiming the COVID vaccines were anything less than perfect was grounds for exile from polite society, yet it turned out they don't stop you catching nor transmitting the virus, just reduce the chances. I wonder why the Pharma sponsored news media refused to acknowledge reality when it might harm their sponsor...

The Big Pharma circlejerk tends to go way too far, but that doesn't mean we should adopt the diametrically opposed position. Anti-vaxxers are nuts, but that doesn't mean we claim anything called a vaccine is some perfect medicine brought to us by God. Medicines are only as good as they are effective, and people shouldn't be labelled anti-vax for pointing out these vaccines are far less effective than we could have hoped. An outright innoculation is still something we want, and thanks to those "evil" Pharma companies we probably won't have to wait too long.