BIG PHARMA GOLIATH—MEET NOT SO DIDDY DAVID!
Goliath was a sitting duck, ready to be plucked. So it is with Big Pharma.
SMALL DON’T MEAN POWERLESS?
Goliath was a giant, covered from head to toe in armour, armed to the teeth.
David was diddy (little, for our non-UK friends). He was a lowly shepherd, without a scrap of armour, and only a sling and stone to defend himself with.
How on earth did David slay Goliath? Such an apparent total mis-match…
…or so it seemed—but looks can be deceiving. The quote below from Malcolm Gladwell's excellent book, David and Goliath, explains:
"Goliath had as much chance against David, (the historian Robert Dohrenwend writes), "as any Bronze Age warrior with a sword would have had against an [opponent] armed with a .45 automatic pistol""
So, David was in fact a highly-skilled slinger. In his experienced hands, and quoting from the same book, we learn:
“Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defense Forces, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-size stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of 35-meters would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of 34 meters-per-seconds—more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him unconscious or dead…in little more than one-second.”
Well there’s a thing!!!
Gladwell's book goes on to unearth an enlightening fact about Goliath. Aside from all the heavy armour and weaponry weighing him down, medical experts believed he had a serious health problem—acromegaly—a benign tumor on his pituitary gland.
The condition severely affects sight and can cause double vision. Several aspects of Goliath’s behaviour suggests he was seeing double.
So, what’s all this got to do with Big Pharma, I hear you think?
Big pharma is equally suffering from a debilitating medical condition, which I dubbed SICCI in the final chapter of Supply Chain Management in the Drug Industry: Delivering Patient Value for Pharmaceuticals and Biologics.
SICCI (notice the pun? :-)) stands for Serendipity Induced-disconnectedness, accompanied by Change Inertia.
In effect, Big Pharma disconnected itself from the physical activities involved in bringing drugs to market, in favour of lucky wins and power marketing. Who needs to change that formula, they thought?!
Recent events suggest that is a total delusion.
HOW DID SICCI COME ABOUT FOR BIG PHARMA?
In the early 1980s, the top pharmaceutical companies (Big Pharma) began casting off their assets, including:
Manufacturing facilities, making the people working in them redundant.
Distribution warehouses, making the people working in them redundant.
Testing laboratories, making the people working in them redundant.
Clinical trials units, making the people working in them redundant.
Products that patients were dependent on (once the patent ran out).
Early stage drug development, for small companies to take the risks.
Today, Big Pharma companies merely patent molecular compounds, hand them over to third party contractors, and market the bones out of the paltry few that are approved for sale.
Those companies now present with symptoms of social anxiety, confusion, and delusional episodes that lead to strange, unexplained behaviours.
Here we see a classic case of SICCI:
Not pretty to watch, is it?!
WHERE DOES DAVID AND GOLIATH COME IN?
The first message from the analogy is this. Big Pharma is in a bad way.
This self-inflicted addiction to easy money earned in the good-old-days, has left investors really unhappy with any whiff of diminishing returns. With so few new, better drugs getting to market due to the above, desperation has stepped.
Who would have thought the world would need annual, mutiple doses of gene therapy products, administered by injection, for the foreseeable future?
Me neither.
The second message is that there is a solution, but it will require the slinging skills of David to slay the old to let in the new—an end-user (healthcare professional and patient) focussed way to develop drugs!!!
Go David!
More on that soon. Hope it’s all making sense :->)
..."Big pharma is equally suffering from a debilitating medical condition"... I suggest we inject it with an mRNA poison once a month until it is rendered harmless. Better drugs? Your natural body needs no drugs. You were not born with drugs in your system (unless these clowns injected the mother or baby with something) and therefore they are not required for healthy living.
As I am not taking any drugs or vaccines, I have to check on what the medical monsters are prescribing for my wife with her debilitating back pain. Every one of these pain meds comes with a long list of similar risks and reactions. It's quite the shyt show with little positive results.
Great post Hedley! Some added thoughts come to mind. What are the odds the government will continue to protect Pharma’s interests as they did in 2020 with Covid? It’s unlikely they will use the same tactics as in lockdowns and mandates but they could further loosen up regulations and accelerate timelines to make sure revenues continue to flow to this sector of the economy. You’ve discussed several large companies including GSK, Sanofi and Moderna have a long list of mRNA products in their pipelines. I suppose people will have to become knowledgeable enough to refuse. In certain states like CA parents can’t opt out and there are vaccine mandates in order for children to attend school. I don’t see much in the way of movement on eliminating the childhood vaccine liability shield or the Prep Act. You would have thought Prep for Covid would have been withdrawn by now???