Online book event – Pharmanomics by Nick Dearden
When: 6:00 pm, December 7, 2023
Campaigns: Pharma
The Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at Nottingham University is very pleased to be welcoming Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, as part of its Annual Lecture Series for 2023.
This online talk will be held live on Zoom and all who register to attend the event in advance will be able to access the talk using Zoom through your Eventbrite ticket registration. Zoom details will be sent to your email two hours prior to the event itself starting.
The event will consist of an approximately 40-minute talk, followed by a 40-minute Q&A.
CSSGJ’s website can be found at www.CSSGJ.org, which also facilitates access to video recordings of past events via our YouTube Channel.
About the talk:
In Pharmanomics, Nick Dearden digs down into the way we produce our medicines and finds that Big Pharma is failing us, with catastrophic consequences.
Big Pharma 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 financialising 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. It has fundamentally reshaped the relationship between richer and poorer countries, as the access to new medicines and the permission to manufacture them is ruthlessly policed. In response, Dearden offers a pathway to a fairer, safer system for all.
