Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health

(Hardback)

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Big Pharma is more interest in profit than health. This was made clear during the rush for vaccine during the Pandemic in 2020-1. Despite PR triumphs companies like Pfizer and Moderna found new ways of gouging billions from governments in the west, while abandoning the global south to their own efforts. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of financialisation and putting profit before health. This includes the stories of Purdue's rapacious marketing of Oxycontin despite the fears of addiction. Martin Shrekli's devious use of the patent system. How the same system was used to deprive 4.5 million poor South Africans for receiving lifesaving HIV/AIDS medication. Since the 1990s Big Pharma has gone out if its way to protect it's property through the patent system. Thus the business has become focussed not on finding new medicines but building monopolies that can then be exploited. This system of monopoly power has not only helped restructure our wider economy away from invention or production and towards financial markets. It has also fundamentally reshaped the relationship between richer and poorer countries, formerly the colonisers and the colonised. In Pharmanomics, campaigner and investigative journalist Nick Dearden reveals the truth behind the good news stories, and show s us what we can do about it.

Reviews

Nick Dearden's book is about the structural foundations of a global market in life-saving medicines. A market dependent on taxpayer subsidies, but designed to strip both rich and poor governments of the power to improve health. An essential read for those that care about saving lives, and that want the system changed. -- Ann Pettifor, author of A Case for the Green New Deal
brings together detailed investigative research with lessons from the frontlines of the fight for access to medicines. It exposes a global apartheid in which a few mostly white male Pharma bosses make billions while billions of people are left without essential medicines. It exposes how the problem of medical monopolies is not a few rule-breakers but the rules themselves. Most crucially, it shows how the system which put profits over people's lives was man-made, and how through collective action people can unmake it, for everyone's health. -- Winnie Byanyima, UNAIDS Executive Director and United Nations Under-Secretary-General

Author Bio

Nick Dearden is the director of Global Justice Now. He has been a campaigner against corporate globalisation and for global economic justice for over 20 years, including with War on Want, Amnesty International and Jubilee Debt Campaign. He has been a leading voice in the campaign for a Peoples Vaccine and a key organiser against neoliberal trade deals including the now abandoned EU/US trade deal (TTIP). He regularly contributes political analysis to publications including The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Open Democracy, Red Pepper and Soundings journal.