Comment by motohagiography

If more people learned what "managing," really means, the idea of the business of managing disease instead of curing it would be more intuitive.

It seems simple, but only if you know it. Managing means you have at least two factors that form a 'dynamic,' so that there is a differential between them that you can extract variable levels of value out of. Managing a team means you have different people whose work is like cylinders of an engine firing at different times to create continuous motion. Some people have a knack for maintaining the equillibrium that produces power. Managing a product is a dynamic of market demand and feature cadence that produces sales.

From this perspective, a disease is a dynamic, however dubiously ethical it may to treat it as one, whether as a business making money or a government effecting policy.

However, curing patients is only a business model insomuch as you can produce cures dynamically to create a cure-machine to rent out. From a business perspective, curing diseases is zero-sum and destroys long term value. If you cured covid, the ~$100bn+ of value you created would be a one-off, and it would remove a powerful dynamic from both government and industry, and just be another relatively small capital management problem instead of a long term growth disease mangement problem, like say, periodic booster shots.

Solving problems collapses uncertainty and in-effect, destroys opportunity for people who use the dynamic to manage the world. Viewed this way, disease management is not a conspiracy, it's just a lot of people with a certain skill set who respond to the same incentives. It's truly a banal sort of evil.

(edited to remove digression)