R.I.P. Chadwick Boseman

Chadwick Boseman, the actor most of us will know as the one portraying Marvel hero Black Panther, has passed away a few days ago after battling cancer for more than 4 years. The news of his passing came as a shock, as he told no one but his friends and family that he was suffering from that terrible disease...

Black Panther was released in 2018, and knowing now that Boseman was fighting cancer all through the filming of that movie, as well as the other Marvel movies where T'Chala made an appearance, makes him not only a comic-book hero, but a hero in real life as well. Black Panther's release received mixed reactions; on the one hand it was praised as the first major Hollywood production with a majority of black actors, and on the other hand there were of course the reactions from right and far right dimwits who despised the film because of its obvious "wokeness". These are the people on the right who see Marxist conspiracies behind developments that can be easily explained by the capitalist incentive to want to broaden the audience as much as possible; it's not Marxism, it's ticket-sales. And it works too; Black Panther was a huge success at the box-office...

When Hollywood casts ever more culturally and racially diverse actors and actresses, throws in an LGBT person here and there, that's not the result of some shady Cultural Marxist conspiracy, but the result of the capitalist incentive to sell tickets to as broad an audience as possible, and to do so in as many countries as possible. The inclusion of an Asian actress in the latest Star Wars movie was clearly a move to sell as much tickets as possible in China, the largest and fastest growing foreign market. It's amazing to me how right wing ideologues recognize the manipulation done by their elite ruling class, but then make all the wrong conclusions, just because of them being stuck in a bubble that hates and blames "the left", no matter what. Yes, there's a lot of pandering to marginalized groups going on, but no, that's not because leftists want to smother your free speech by way of political correctness; it's the (capitalist) economy, stupid!

What's also economy, is my personal opinion on the disease that took away Chadwick Boseman, as well as my own mother. And what I'm going to say right now is not a conspiracy theory, but a logical conclusion from the way capital works. Cancer will never be cured as long as there's billions of dollars made by treating it. There, I said it. I'll give one example where this has happened before. Decades ago now there was a Dutch fellow who invented something for gasoline engines, a device that would reduce fuel-consumption a lot; this would reduce not only pollution, but gasoline sales as well. Big oil wouldn't have that of course, so Royal Dutch Shell bought the invention, patented it, stored it away and it was never heard of again. When I try to find information about it now on the internet, I can't find anything. The invention was made in the pre-internet era and knowledge about it only survives in the memories of the few people who knew about it, and maybe some obscure book or two. And besides that example, we all know how Big Oil fights the introduction of green energy...

Well, Big Pharma is as powerful as Big Oil, only the military industrial complex is more powerful than those two. I repeat that these are not conspiracy theories; they are the realities from a world ruled by capitalists and capitalism. So what do you think? Do you believe that if there was ever a cure for cancer, that it would become readily available? Before answering that question, keep this report from 2018 in mind:

Last year, the cancer industry was valued at $100 billion, and is predicted to reach $147 billion in sales by 2018, according to data released by the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that the average monthly costs for cancer patients now exceed $10,000.

Though exorbitant, the amount of money being made off cancer is not surprising, as the price of cancer drugs has reached an all time high. The world’s fourth largest pharma company, Sanofi, may soon acquire San Francisco-based drug-maker Medivation, Inc. for its lucrative prostrate-cancer drug, which costs patients about $129K per year.
_{source: Urology of Virginia}

And this more recent report about the growing cancer industry:

The National Institutes of Health estimates direct medical costs for cancer will be at least $158 billion in 2020. One industry analyst put the size of the global chemotherapy market at $97 billion in 2017. The analysis group EvaluatePharma estimated total oncology sales in 2018 is $123.8 billion (out of a total prescription medicine market of $864 billion). Deloitte projects global sales of pharmaceuticals to excess $900 billion in 2020. [...]

Why is the chemotherapy industry so secretive? Why is it so hard to find information on usage of chemo agents?

It’s easy to find how many people take arthritis or heartburn or anti-anxiety pills. A search of the web tells you how many patients take cholesterol medicines and blood pressure medicines. You can find breakdowns by drug class and estimates of the numbers of prescriptions for each medicine.

Not so with chemotherapy. It is still enshrouded in secrecy the way other industries were before the internet. Who benefits from this secrecy? The drug companies and the oncology industry.

We hear much hype about the new drugs, the ones still under patent protection. We don’t hear so much about the older drugs that pharmaceutical companies don’t make as much money on.
_{source: Chemoth.com}

Or is there already a cure for cancer, or some types of cancer? We can't be sure, but I bet that if there was, it would be suppressed by the capitalists who make billions with the treatments and therapies... I'll close with this video on Chadwick Boseman's passing, and will add that there are millions of heroes just like him that we will never hear from...

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