The big pharmaceutical companies must be rubbing their hands in glee at the prospect of supplying tens of millions of stocks of drugs to countries all over the world. Roche, the company that produces Tamiflu, the only drug that has shown any sign of fighting the virus is slowly being rendered obsolete as the H5N1 strain is mutating and showing resistance to the drug. This is the same company that paid a $500 mil fine in the US in 1999. If these companies cheat when they are competing for relatively small markets, then what’s going to happen with the bird flu?
Companies will be coming out saying their drugs will work and when you have a world wide pandemic, with millions of people at risk, few people are going to ask questions. There have been many anti viral drugs that have been produced and forgotten about because of their failure. I’m sure these drugs will be making a real comeback soon, when they “suddenly” become effective again. There have been so many drugs that have come on the market and caused more severe side effects than the disease it’s trying to cure. The pharmaceutical industry is the most tightly regulated with companies having to prove their products work over many years of clinical testing. Everything that happens in the lab and all the results have to be documented and checked by the various regulatory bodies before products can hit the market. Yet with all this we see companies churning out useless drugs that simply don’t work.
Doctors that have used Tamiflu say it’s useless and Roche says it works as long as it’s administered within the first 48 hours. Most of the countries in the world have made the large stockpiling of Tamiflu as their only plan to combat a possible pandemic. Roche isn’t going to admit it doesn’t work, having already met 40 million orders of the drug.
There is so much distrust in corporations nowadays for the simple fact that all they care about is profit and will do anything to make as much of it as possible. I remember all the fuss made over the millennium bug, that was just scare mongering that resulted in hundreds of companies making a killing. So how can you trust a corporation? The answer is simple, you don’t. Corporations don’t have any ethics or morals and will break the law whenever they feel they can get away with it. If Islam was the dominant ideology in the world today, billions of pounds and precious time would be saved in designing contingency plans that actually have a chance of working.
December 22nd, 2005 at 11:34 pm
“Corporations don’t have any ethics or morals and will break the law whenever they feel they can get away with it. If Islam was the dominant ideology in the world today, billions of pounds and precious time would be saved in designing contingency plans that actually have a chance of working.”
If islam were the dominant idealogy, modern medicine wouldn’t exist. Islam, as Muslims love to point out to us, is not really a religion but ‘a whole way of life’ from the state apparatus down to the individual defecating at home.
Islam as a ‘whole way of life’, as a political, social and economic ideology has proven time and again that it is an utter failure, producing corrupt dictatorial regimes, grinding poverty, illiteracy and intellectual backwardness, misogyny, hatred of the Other, debilitating fatalism, dysfunctional individuals, institutionalized hypocrisy and nihilistic terrorists.
One shudders at the possibilty this death-cult will ever be “dominant”…
December 23rd, 2005 at 12:16 am
You really need to brush up on your history.
The Muslim world is backward now because of the dictators installed by the western governments. Before the Islamic state was destroyed it produced some of the greatest astronomy, scientists and mathematicians the world has ever seen. Every historian will tell you that, the Islamic state dominated the world for centuries rescuing people from the oppression and darkness of the other secular empires. You need to understand that these dictators ARE secular like the west and that’s why they are corrupt.
You are really letting down your fellow secularists with your blind ignorance, before you make another comment try doing some reading up, it helps!
December 23rd, 2005 at 2:15 am
I always laugh when muslims claim that it is civilizations fault that the islamic world is the hell-hole that it is. Since the conception of islam, it has ben a barbaric, repressive death cult. Like communism, it does not work, it has never worked.
If you want to live in this appalling world, you’re welcome to it - just as long as you don’t infect civilization with this petilence.
December 23rd, 2005 at 3:21 pm
Be Humble:
Excellent post!
I went to a seminar given by an English doctor at UCL. One interesting point he made is that he is often instructed to prescribe less effective drugs simply due to corporate pressure, even though he knows there are better drugs!
He also mentioned that there are many alternative medicines that have been recently discovered that the Prophet (pbuh) taught us 1400 years ago. Again, these medicines are not advertised because they are so cheap and won’t fill the pockets of big pharmaceutical companies.
I don’t have anything against big companies making money - however, when this is done within a Capitalist system where individuality and selfishness is the norm, it can lead to horrible situations where money becomes the only criteria in whether a drug should be promoted or not.
The Prophet (pbuh) said: “For every disease, there is a cure - so seek the cure”. It was this statement that led the Muslims to discover cures for thousands of diseases and illnesses. Alas, today, Islam does not exist anywhere on this earth - rather we see pseudo-Islamic dictatorships, which give many non-Muslims a false image of Islam.
December 23rd, 2005 at 9:04 pm
Dearest Flanstein
You have the ability to waltz with words yet your dance has no substance. Your seething anger and disbelief are more than apparent but you fail to leave room for any discourse. For one to be so forceful in attack suggests there is something to be protected. However, you do not endorse communism, there is no mention of capitalism, religion clearly repulses you; it leaves one wondering what exactly it is you DO believe in?
Without proposing the alternative, your comments are nothing but an articulation of incoherent, poorly justified and contorted thoughts which have more likely than not, been spoon fed to your pliable mind through the secular societal voice (your blog is evidence of this where you merely reduplicate and use excerpts from media articles and reports).
As be humble said, you are desperately lacking historical facts. Seeing as the Islamic state was destroyed in 1924, the social, political and economical failures you witness today, are failures of the current system, not Islam.
You speak of ‘corrupt dictatorial regimes’ (perhaps Tony Blair and his foreign policy?), ‘grinding poverty’ (caused by the likes of the IMF?), ‘illiteracy and intellectual backwardness’ (due to marginalisation of ethnic groups?), misogyny (manifesting itself in the workplace through unequal pay scales) etc etc. It seems to me that you’re breeding a ‘death-cult’ of your own. Enough to make more than one shudder, no?
And as far as petulance goes…you ooze it.
Do continue to comment on the blog however. If you have an ounce of backing to your arguments, if you can denote the smallest amount of credibility to your thought, if you can articulate more than just raw emotion, I believe we can all have a meaningful discussion.
December 24th, 2005 at 8:19 pm
Great comment Slave of Allah, couldn’t have said it better myself. I also hope Flanstein continues to comment, it is always good to hear such diverse opinions even though I may not agree with them. A verse from the Qur’an always springs to mind when I hear people like Flanstein. Allah says When it is said to them make not mischief on this world they will say we are but peacemakers, of a surety they are the mischief makers but they perceive not”. Sorry mate but that’s you.
December 25th, 2005 at 8:54 am
MAY BE UPON YOUR SOULS, HEARTS, MINDS, AND BODIES…AMEN.
December 25th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
Baghdad: Assalamu ‘alaikum sister.
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