A Current Mindset: Terrifying

It is always interesting to read comments on the Web, especially those in prominent sites. In a Science article discussing President Carter's illness a commentator writes:

You are wrong. The meaning of existence of private/public company/corporation is to serve critical needs of society at large and that's why it is allowed by the society to make reasonable, limited, profits for future investments and not for opulent spending. If company cease to serve the public interest is must be dismantled. And because of that monopolistic Big Pharma must be dismantled for the good of patients. But those principles have been corrupted and now so-called US company serves their management and also foreign oligarch ownership, not public.

The English is atrocious but the thought is terrifying. This goes beyond socialism, communism, into some communitarian extreme. 

What drive this person to write in such a highly regarded journal. Well it was this paragraph:

Still, researchers have a lot to learn about pembrolizumab and other PD-1 therapies in development. Keytruda is also extremely expensive, at about $150,000 a year. In clinical trials, PD-1 blockers generally work in less than half the participants. Research published earlier this year suggested PD-1 inhibitors may work best on tumors with lots of mutations, and a small clinical trial of pembrolizumab backed this up.  It found that people with advanced cancer were far more likely to respond if they had so-called mismatch repair mutations in their tumors. This could also help explain why, so far, PD-1 inhibitors have produced the best outcomes in people with lung cancer and melanoma—both are often mutation-heavy tumors.

 PD-1 inhibitors are the next step in immune therapy with MABs. There has been decades of R&D and hundreds of billions spent, not to mention trials which have exposed many patients to false hopes. But as we have written before this is now one of several paths to treaing cancers.

But that is no excuse for the vitriolic comments by some of these readers. This same commenter states:

There is some other aspect of it however. President J. Carter recently stated that US is run by Oligarchic cabal and that democracy is no more. An that includes Big Pharma that grows like a cancer within the bodies of cancer patients and that's the problem in America. The Big Pharma is offering nothing but more pain, suffering, household financial collapse and plenty of false hopes. Mr. President I suggests you look seriously into massive, up to million mg intravenously a day dose of ascorbic acid aka Vitamin C in appropriate form, that has shown good results in clinical therapy but is dismissed by Big Pharma brainwashed medical professionals.

Perhaps this individual is some hidden genius we have just missed as a society. Perhaps not!