Perhaps they’re behaving entirely rationally. Infectious diseases do not kill that many people compared to cancer in America.
We may have a bad “flu” year this year, with a spike of elderly deaths, but we have a bad cancer year every year.
We may have a bad “flu” year this year, with a spike of elderly deaths, but we have a bad cancer year every year.
It's not fair to say we don't develop cancer drugs because some, very difficult to treat cancers, haven't seen as much progress as others.
It covered the last 30 years. Each new therapy improved survival by only 6-12 months, but each new drug was more effective than the last. Over those 30 years, the median survival went from 6 months to over 5 years.
People shouldn't discount incremental improvements because that's often how medicine progresses.
Here's another recent success : https://hcp.lutathera.com/ --- https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1607427 At the data-cutoff date for the primary analysis, the estimated rate of progression-free survival at month 20 was 65.2% (95% confidence interval [CI], 50.0 to 76.8) in the 177Lu-Dotatate group and 10.8% (95% CI, 3.5 to 23.0) in the control group.
Lutathera delivers a radioactive molecule to the tumor.
That's what capitalism does to generics.
Daraprim wasn't generic until literally 5 days ago: https://www.biospace.com/article/fda-approves-first-generic-...
There is a lot of significant work happening in infectious diseases. However, curing cancer is the holy grail and a pursuit of that is on the same level as pursuing manned space flight. Flying people into space seemed frivolous at the time as well. After all, think of all of the hungry kids would could feed if we redirected Apollo money! However, space flight gave society countless advances that we didn’t foresee at the time. Perhaps we should argue that studying quantum physics is a waste of resources. Or studying astronomy. Or any number of fields where societally-useful breakthroughs are few and far between.
It’s ridiculous to imply that developing cancer drugs should be ditched in favor of developing more infectious disease drugs. We can walk and chew gum at the same time: this isn’t guns or butter.
If we want to apply pure rationality to drugs: let’s stop cancer drug expenditures so we can save more people from malaria, then we could apply that logic to social programs as well: why bother helping the mentally disabled when instead we could direct those funds towards something that provides more economic value to society? A kid with cerebral palsy isn’t going to contribute as much to society as a healthy kid — so why waste resources on that research? Of course it isn’t a waste when it’s your kid. Following that line of reasoning and we ultimately end up with eugenics and society would become a very nasty place indeed.
But cancer itself is... complicated. There are many different types with many different causes that are complicated by many different things. Breast cancer is not the same as skin cancer, and neither of these are lung cancer.
But we do, to an extent, know how to treat things to a point. Sometimes, our best efforts have only resulted in giving folks 3-6 months.
And we do cure or prevent some infectious disease. The plague and leprosy, for example, is curable. We have taken leaps and bounds with HIV/Aids - while we can't really cure it, we can give drugs to folks to stop it from being so infectious. But like cancer, "infectious disease" comes in many forms, some being vastly more complicated to "cure" than others. This is why some things, like the common cold and common influenza do not have cures. These are hard problems. And for lack of better words, we've simply not "unlocked" the secret in ways that would be good year after year.
And you can construct a "rational" argument for it: the slaves are living under an oppressive government anyway and apparently nobody is going to intervene, so if they're stuck in internment camps, may as well give them something to do with their time. Sure, they don't have freedom, but they weren't going to have it anyway, so it's still rational. Right?
In seriousness - if you don't take into account the economic reliance on slavery that jurisdictions with legal slavery (e.g., the US South in the 1800s) had, and you claim it's solely that irrational slaveholders saw certain people as less than human in the abstract, you've missed a good part of the explanation and risk inaccurately understanding how to prevent it from happening again. People had a strong economic incentive to come up with justifications for their objectively immoral actions.