SAMA HOOLE: Big Pharma has not cured a common chronic disease in fifty years . . . Insulin, 1922. Injected daily, for life. Not a cure. Levothyroxine, 1927. Swallowed every morning, for life. Not a cure.

Big Pharma has not cured a common chronic disease in fifty years, and its own analysts have put the reason in writing.

Insulin, 1922. Injected daily, for life. Not a cure.

Levothyroxine, 1927. Swallowed every morning, for life. Not a cure.

Metformin, 1958. Still the opening… pic.twitter.com/bDVtfCbuoi

— Sama Hoole (@SamaHoole) August 20, 2026

Big Pharma has not cured a common chronic disease in fifty years, and its own analysts have put the reason in writing. Insulin, 1922. Injected daily, for life. Not a cure. Levothyroxine, 1927. Swallowed every morning, for life. Not a cure. Metformin, 1958. Still the opening prescription for type 2 diabetes. Not a cure. Salbutamol, 1969. Still the blue inhaler in every schoolbag in Britain. Not a cure. Statins, 1987. Stop taking them and the number is back inside a month. Not a cure. SSRIs, 1987. Now around eight million people in England, climbing every year. Not a cure. Omeprazole, 1988. Handed out for reflux with no end date attached. Not a cure. The appetite injection, 2021. Works while you inject. Stops when you stop. Not a cure. Against that, the cures. Scurvy: two sailors and some citrus, 1747. Cured. Smallpox: a milkmaid's arm, 1796. Gone from the earth by 1980. Beriberi: barley put back into the naval ration, 1884. Cured. Pellagra: meat, milk and eggs, 1915. Cured. Rickets: cod liver oil and sunlight, 1922. Cured. Penicillin: a mould on a windowsill, 1928. Cured. Every cure on that list came out of food, dirt, sunlight or an accident, and not one of them made a shareholder rich. Then in 2015 somebody did it properly. Gilead released a hepatitis C treatment that cured over ninety per cent of patients, and American sales hit 12.5 billion dollars. By 2018 those sales were under four billion, because the patients had been cured and had stopped being patients. On the tenth of April that year a Goldman Sachs analyst put a note out to biotech clients asking "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?" The note answered itself in the detail. Gilead had exhausted its pool of treatable people. Nobody leaked that. It went out to paying clients as ordinary arithmetic. Gilead cured people and the market treated it as a cautionary tale, and every board in the industry was reading over its shoulder.

Nobody has ever been discharged from a statin.