‘Big Pharma!’ has been the constant refrain of many online, tin-hat wearing conspiracy theorists for decades now, as they claim that the pharmaceutical industry conceals cures for cancer with one hand and pushes poisonous vaccines we supposedly don’t need, with the other.
But there is a more serious, well documented side to these fears about ‘Big Pharma’ and the idea that the industry is more interested in profit than health. This was made clear as governments rushed to produce vaccines during the Covid pandemic.
But there is a more serious, well documented side to these fears about ‘Big Pharma’ and the idea that the industry is more interested in profit than health. This was made clear as governments rushed to produce vaccines during the Covid pandemic.
Behind the much-trumpeted scientific breakthroughs, major companies found new ways of gouging billions from governments in the West while abandoning the Global South. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of the financialization of medicine - from Purdue's rapacious marketing of highly addictive OxyContin through Martin Shkreli's hiking the price of a lifesaving drug to the 4.5 million South Africans needlessly deprived of HIV/AIDS medication.
Since the 1990s, Big Pharma has gone out of its way to protect its property through the patent system. As a result, the business has focused not on researching new medicines but on building monopolies. This system has helped restructure our economy away from invention and production in order to benefit financial markets.
Join Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, as he shows how the current system has reshaped the relationship between richer and poorer countries, as the access to new medicines and the permission to manufacture them is policed - and offers a pathway to a fairer, safer system for all, with justice at its core.
N ICK DEARDEN
Nick has been the director of Global Justice Now since 2013, a UK-based campaigning organisation for social and environmental justice. He has been a campaigner against corporate globalisation and for global economic justice for over 20 years. He was a leading voice in the UK and European movement against the now‑abandoned EU‑US trade deal (TTIP), and subsequently against the US-UK trade deal.
He regularly contributes political analysis to publications including The Guardian, Al Jazeera, Open Democracy, Red Pepper and Soundings journal. Nick started his career at War on Want, and went on to be corporate campaign manager at Amnesty International UK, and then director of Jubilee Debt Campaign (now Debt Justice), where he built strong relationships with campaigners in the global south. His book Pharmanomics: How Big Pharma Destroys Global Health was published by Verso in October 2023.
DOORS OPEN: 7pm (£5 on the door)
TALK STARTS: 7:30pm
AUDIENCE Q&A: 8:45pm
Brighthink is a non-profit organisation, none of our invited speakers charge for their time and all proceeds go towards running costs that allow us to put on these events for the public.