Reuters reports: Companies reap the swine flu windfall

If you think there’s no profit in swine flu or other vaccines, I’ve got news from you just in from Reuters:

Companies reap the swine flu windfall



Some excerpts:

“Pretty much everyone who does something in influenza in has gained from it,” said Hedwig Kresse, an infectious diseases analyst at Datamonitor in London.

“From a sales perspective, the big players certainly will see a very significant windfall of this pandemic this year,” Kresse said in a telephone interview.”

“Swiss drugmaker Novartis AG said this week it expects the H1N1 flu vaccine to contribute about $400 million to $700 million of sales in the fourth quarter.”

“David Kagi, a healthcare analyst at Swiss-based Bank Sarasin & Co estimates pandemic vaccine sales will be worth a total of $7.6 billion, even with a mild pandemic. A severe pandemic would result in total vaccine sales of $18 billion.”

If the spread of H1N1 goes from mild to severe, the sales of vaccines will more than double the gross income of suppliers. In billions.

Talk about perverse incentives.

Drug companies only make money if they sell drugs, and they only sell drugs if people are sick.

With this as a fact, you can see why we have rising medical care costs as well as institutional resistance to principles like paleodiet.

If everyone ate a paleodiet, the pharmaceutical industry would collapse.

So would the processed food industry.

And that would cause the GDP to decline. So "the economy" would suffer.

Can't have that happen.

Got to keep those profits growing and keep the economy humming.

At all costs.