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Dr Mike Yeadon's avatar

Pharmaceutical companies were very small businesses compared with what they later became, well into the 1960s. Regulation was late to the party, too & formed more from regulating food and cosmetics than drugs initially. I place the modern era as commencing in the mid-1960s at the earliest. There was a frenetic period of consolidation from the 1980s to the late 2000s and “big pharma” really got sizeable from the early 1990s. It’s still a surprisingly fragmented industry compared with any other. In many sectors it’s common for the largest player to hold 20% or more of a market.

https://www.drugdiscoverytrends.com/pharma-50-the-50-largest-pharmaceutical-companies-in-the-world-for-2025/

The top ten by sales are not so greatly different.

On use of animals in drug discovery, I was converted during my career by realising that the so-called models of disease were nothing of the kind. Sometimes they model a process important in a human disease. They do have narrow utility in drug discovery in relation to such a process, in which it ought to be possible to modulate the process that the medical hypothesis indicates is important to an aspect of the disease that matters to the patient. If you cannot, you should not expect success in clinic.

Where it comes to human safety, assuming you are in principle interested in identifying new & worthwhile drugs, the choice is between using animals preclinically to establish that there aren’t obvious adverse effects, or not using them. Though again, animals aren’t people, mechanisms of toxicity tend to be conserved. Drugs lacking any effect on heart rate and cardiac function (for example) at multiples of anticipated efficacious concentrations is probably not going to show cardiovascular toxicity in early human studies. Reproductive toxicology testing is rightly set up in a very conservative way.

If you decline the use of lab animals for toxicology testing, the risks of adverse events in humans will be very much higher.

It’s not unreasonable to say we don’t think that it’s likely that worthwhile advances will be made, in which case the entire question is moot.

Combining the propensity of pharma to commit crimes and the very unencouraging R&D landscape, I believe that the best course of action is to legislate the abolition of pharmaceutical companies and to focus entirely on a small number of off patent (generic) drugs. If we don’t stop them, they will commit crimes for profit if they can’t find more honest ways to succeed.

(Edit: obviously, ALL vaccines to be withdrawn, removing a major scourge on humanity, being arguably the single, most harmful category of things inflicted on us).

Vivisectionists as described early on in this piece were conducting evil experiments on sentient beings. I’m not defending pharma (see immediately above) but I don’t see that activity even being claimed as necessary let alone having been so. They sound deranged to me.

Alan Jurek's avatar

Thanks for writing this, I knew some of this but only a very small bit.

I literally wanted to vomit at the unbelievable torture and murder of these innocent living creatures.

If I had my way the evil perpetrators would have the same done to them.

May they rot in hell.

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