Big Pharmaceutical companies, like Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Roche, GlaxoSmithKline and the like are often known to receive a lot of negative criticism.
Incidents like what happened in Northern Nigeria not long ago involving Pfizer and their 'copyrighted drugs' ensuring that no other company or manufacturer is able to produce the required drugs for the outbreak of Bacterial Meningitis. The other problem with Pfizer's actions in this situation was that they did not provide all of the necessary information to the potential patients/patients' parents in getting consent to use these experimental drugs. The patients and their parents were unaware of the lack of previous testing of the drugs before they were used. Unfortunately, these experimental drugs were not quite satisfactory.
Big Pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer are always patenting, or copyrighting their products. In Thailand, a certain company attempted to prevent WHO (world health organisation) from manufacturing well needed drugs. The Big Pharma drugs are usually far too expensive for people in third world countries to afford, that is, when they are available at all.
Big Pharmaceutical companies are also under scrutiny for other sorts of things, like the invention of diseases in order to sell more drugs. Recently, in the US, companies have been manufacturing drugs for the most normal and small everyday things, and advertising them as serious, treatable problems.
Relating to the issue of companies inventing diseases, again, in the US, on company in particular made a drug for "back to school stress" and targeted it at children. "Back to school stress" is actually fairly uncommon around children, and is better known by its more common name of "I don't want to go back to school. It's boring and I don't like it" The advertisement for this product was (allegedly) a TV ad, like an ad for lollies or a cool new toy, targeted at kids, making them want to go out and buy drugs.
These companies that are receiving this criticism almost certainly deserve their attacks for the way their businesses are run. Making products too expensive or patented just to earn a little extra dollar is unfair on the little people. Inventing diagnosable diseases just for the sake of selling a new drug is cheating and unfair on the "sufferer" or consumer. Big Pharma is selfish - not unlike most other large cooperations.
- Darcy Power
