They then had sales of $10.4B in the first year on the market. That’s one year and one drug (they’ve developed newer drugs and launched those too).
Only thing I would embellish on is that, much like software - when something is wrong its easier to treat the symptoms than to fix the problem a lot of the times. So it's really no wonder alot of treatments are amelioration rather than cures.
I recently did a major refactor at work to fix database and caching problems in our backend. It took months but only yielded 50% scaling improvements. Past teams just kept stacking shit and adding hardware and we can all understand why.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Looking at the list of the most deadly non-tropical infectious diseases [1], most can be vaccinated against and/or cured. The standouts remain lower respiratory infections, e.g. influenza, and HIV/AIDS.
When confronted with a novel coronavirus, it took a few months for the world's medical systems to devise various treatments and a vaccine. Neither of those are recurring revenue streams.
Most damning to this conspiracy theory is the recent Hep C cure. That's a real disease. It was profitable to treat. But it's more profitable to cure. Those incentives remain elsewhere. A cure for HIV is worth billions.
Dealing with mortality and sickness is difficult. It's more comforting to some to imagine an evil cabal holding back medicine, and I don't need to take that from them. But if you're entertaining these thoughts as anything more than a coping mechanism, the last half century--or even decade--of progress in curing, not treating, curing a variety of medical issues has been under-reported (lots of niche illnesses) and breathtaking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection