Comment by tptacek
4 hours ago
We get threads about this on HN a couple times a year, and I feel like people have never thought this through. The company that cures T1D or MS will make approximately eleventy jillion dollars. The mustache-twirlers engineering MS into a chronic manageable disease rather than curing it would simply be outcompeted and put out of business by the straight-mustached cure owners. If you believe the mustache-twirlers are capable of suppressing knowledge of a viable cure, I'm going to have fun selling you on a lot of more-plausible conspiracy theories; for instance, the faked moon landing, which would have required less collusion and been less impactful to the world.
In a strict sense, curing a single disease isn't a long term "sustainable business", because you'll eventually push the population of affected patients below a threshold of profitability. The premise of a major pharma company is that they keep finding other treatments.
I don't buy that the moon landing is easier to fake than the existence of a cure.
Scientists are routinely independently re-discovering each others discoveries. The effort to discover cures to important disease is intense. The conspiracy to suppress a cure would have to be vast.
Also like, ~everyone who works in pharma, from the grunts up to the C suite, is genuinely interested in making people's lives better and improving health. Profit is a strong motive, but it is not the only motivating force.