Indeed! I was in the pharma biz for almost 40 years. Started so young I got to retire at 60!
Only the horror stories get told. Pills are big biz, plus pain relief.
What you don’t hear about are the BILLIONS of vials and IV bags of medications that are made every year without a hitch.
Drug development takes 10 years or more costing hundreds of millions.
Equipment to make medical products cost millions alone, not to mention the cost of the buildings and utilities that must be built.
I’ve run production lines that filled 400,000 liters of saline at 80 cents a liter, to filling 1mL vials with $1,000 of somethingamab.
Quality was drilled into us from day one, just remember they said, the next person to get these meds might be your family!
Not long ago, I did some math to try and estimate how many units of life saving therapeutics I had made over the years.
My estimate was 1.2Trillion units...vials, syringes, ampules and IV bags and bottles. Nothing made on my watch killed anyone because my teams or I screwed up!
Oh...my point...ahem,
The PEOPLE that do the actual work, from the production line to purchasing dept and everyone in between get pretty pissed when media blames BigPharma for every ill in the medical world.
The crap comes from greedy cheaters in the biz, execs $$$...China...
It’s not accurate or fair.
The issues with health care originate with Ted Kennedy’s HMO legislation in 1980.