> I'm curious what evidence there is on either side of this claim
Looking at the list of the most deadly non-tropical infectious diseases [1], most can be vaccinated against and/or cured. The standouts remain lower respiratory infections, e.g. influenza, and HIV/AIDS.
When confronted with a novel coronavirus, it took a few months for the world's medical systems to devise various treatments and a vaccine. Neither of those are recurring revenue streams.
Most damning to this conspiracy theory is the recent Hep C cure. That's a real disease. It was profitable to treat. But it's more profitable to cure. Those incentives remain elsewhere. A cure for HIV is worth billions.
Dealing with mortality and sickness is difficult. It's more comforting to some to imagine an evil cabal holding back medicine, and I don't need to take that from them. But if you're entertaining these thoughts as anything more than a coping mechanism, the last half century--or even decade--of progress in curing, not treating, curing a variety of medical issues has been under-reported (lots of niche illnesses) and breathtaking.
The Hep C cure wasn't all that profitable, from what I understand. On paper it was a clear win-win - the cure would save the various healthcare services lots of money compared with treatment, whilst still raking in boatloads of money. The trouble is that healthcare services everywhere balked at buying it regardless of their structure and despite the fact that not doing so would cost them money in the long term, and even at those rejected prices it wouldn't have been nearly as profitable as a long-term ongoing treatment because it eliminates its own customer base.
I came here to post about the Hep C cure. You did a great job.
Only thing I would embellish on is that, much like software - when something is wrong its easier to treat the symptoms than to fix the problem a lot of the times. So it's really no wonder alot of treatments are amelioration rather than cures.
I recently did a major refactor at work to fix database and caching problems in our backend. It took months but only yielded 50% scaling improvements. Past teams just kept stacking shit and adding hardware and we can all understand why.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Looking at the list of the most deadly non-tropical infectious diseases [1], most can be vaccinated against and/or cured. The standouts remain lower respiratory infections, e.g. influenza, and HIV/AIDS.
When confronted with a novel coronavirus, it took a few months for the world's medical systems to devise various treatments and a vaccine. Neither of those are recurring revenue streams.
Most damning to this conspiracy theory is the recent Hep C cure. That's a real disease. It was profitable to treat. But it's more profitable to cure. Those incentives remain elsewhere. A cure for HIV is worth billions.
Dealing with mortality and sickness is difficult. It's more comforting to some to imagine an evil cabal holding back medicine, and I don't need to take that from them. But if you're entertaining these thoughts as anything more than a coping mechanism, the last half century--or even decade--of progress in curing, not treating, curing a variety of medical issues has been under-reported (lots of niche illnesses) and breathtaking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection