Big pharma's decades suffering from the patent cliff and how it led to the COVID scam
Gene therapy was last chance saloon for big pharma, and it failed miserably...
What follows is the opening of my UK Column article dated March 1st 2023, titled How Bill Gates hijacked a failing pharma system and smashed it: A tale of incompetence, deceit, greed, and an unmitigated thirst for power:
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practise to deceive!
— Marmion (1808) by Sir Walter Scott
The Pharmaceutical Supply Chain is Broken
It began with strategic incompetence. Prior to the early 1980s, there was no such thing as Big Pharma. Pharmaceutical companies were all big in those days, because that’s what it took to develop a safe, effective, fit-for-purpose medicinal product. In the same way, there is no Big Aerospace, Big Automotive, or Big Electronics sector of those industries; small fry can't make it. A company supplying highly complex products to consumer markets must be big to get all the research and design, manufacturing, and product distribution work done.
So, where did the boutique pharmaceutical trend that gave rise to Big Pharma come from?
In the early 1980s, pharmaceutical companies that had hitherto been highly vertically integrated began casting off their physical assets, including:
Manufacturing facilities, making the people working in them redundant
Distribution warehouses, making the people working in them redundant
Quality control laboratories, making the people working in them redundant
Clinical trials units, making the people working in them redundant
Products that patients were dependent on (out-of-patent products that weren't making them cash any more)
Today, what are referred to as Big Pharma companies merely patent molecular compounds, hand them over to third-party contractors, and market the life out of the paltry few that are approved for sale. Those same Big Pharma companies have also outsourced drug development, to small companies that are no bigger than your local supermarket in terms of employee numbers—all in the name of reducing the risk of failure.
The small companies developing medicinal products (known as drugs in the US) will have never brought any kind of drug to market. How’s that for broken?