Today, the area of HIV/AIDS has evolved into the largest single disease-oriented component of the bloated conventional medical Establishment.
It is simply incredible – that the biggest part of the $2 trillion-a-year business of American medicine (in terms of government-funded research and public and private infrastructure) is HIV/AIDS-related, particularly when one considers that AIDS, according to government figures, currently accounts for about 15,000 deaths a year in the U.S. (versus over 500,000 from cancer and almost 700,000 from heart disease). In fact, AIDS isn't even on the list of the top ten causes of death in the United States. Yet, federal spending on HIV/AIDS dwarfs the amounts of money spent on cancer and heart disease – not to mention lower profile diseases like diabetes, which kills at least five times as many Americans every year as AIDS.
When the apocalyptic predictions in the late 1980s that AIDS would spread into the general population and kill millions of Americans by the 1990s never materialized, AIDS Inc. shifted much of its focus abroad, to Africa and the Third World. The health problems afflicting millions of people in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere in the underdeveloped world, were no longer to be associated with poverty and malnutrition or a lack of sanitation, clean water, or infrastructure, but instead with HIV and AIDS. Millions of Africans, clearly living lives of suboptimal health, didn't need to have their environments attended to or their overall health care improved; rather, they required guaranteed access to antiretroviral drugs, considered by orthodoxy to be the best treatments for HIV and AIDS.
Used in various combinations, these same drugs, highly toxic and immunosuppressive, and exorbitantly priced at $10,000 or more per patient per drug per year in the developed countries, had been credited with cutting the death toll from AIDS in the West. Now, with the potential of a new, exponentially larger market for the drugs emerging in the countries of the Third World, the pharmaceutical companies could be convinced to lower their prices for people in poor countries (from $10,000 to, say, around $600 per patient/per drug/per year). This change made sense to Big Pharma in light of the fact that the market for HIV/AIDS drugs would go overnight from a few hundred thousand people (mostly homosexuals) in the West to potentially scores of millions of customers, primarily heterosexuals, abroad. Meanwhile, AIDS drug prices in the West would remain high.
It is simply incredible – that the biggest part of the $2 trillion-a-year business of American medicine (in terms of government-funded research and public and private infrastructure) is HIV/AIDS-related, particularly when one considers that AIDS, according to government figures, currently accounts for about 15,000 deaths a year in the U.S. (versus over 500,000 from cancer and almost 700,000 from heart disease). In fact, AIDS isn't even on the list of the top ten causes of death in the United States. Yet, federal spending on HIV/AIDS dwarfs the amounts of money spent on cancer and heart disease – not to mention lower profile diseases like diabetes, which kills at least five times as many Americans every year as AIDS.
When the apocalyptic predictions in the late 1980s that AIDS would spread into the general population and kill millions of Americans by the 1990s never materialized, AIDS Inc. shifted much of its focus abroad, to Africa and the Third World. The health problems afflicting millions of people in Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, and elsewhere in the underdeveloped world, were no longer to be associated with poverty and malnutrition or a lack of sanitation, clean water, or infrastructure, but instead with HIV and AIDS. Millions of Africans, clearly living lives of suboptimal health, didn't need to have their environments attended to or their overall health care improved; rather, they required guaranteed access to antiretroviral drugs, considered by orthodoxy to be the best treatments for HIV and AIDS.
Used in various combinations, these same drugs, highly toxic and immunosuppressive, and exorbitantly priced at $10,000 or more per patient per drug per year in the developed countries, had been credited with cutting the death toll from AIDS in the West. Now, with the potential of a new, exponentially larger market for the drugs emerging in the countries of the Third World, the pharmaceutical companies could be convinced to lower their prices for people in poor countries (from $10,000 to, say, around $600 per patient/per drug/per year). This change made sense to Big Pharma in light of the fact that the market for HIV/AIDS drugs would go overnight from a few hundred thousand people (mostly homosexuals) in the West to potentially scores of millions of customers, primarily heterosexuals, abroad. Meanwhile, AIDS drug prices in the West would remain high.
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