"It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is not, by any stretch of the imagination, doing enough to ensure that the poor have access to adequate medical care"
About this Quote
Farmer’s sentence is built like a diagnosis: blunt, unemotional, and devastating. “It is clear” doesn’t invite debate so much as it names a reality he believes has already been proven in the bodies of the sick. The phrase “by any stretch of the imagination” is doing moral work. It pre-empts the industry’s familiar defenses - charity programs, tiered pricing, pilot initiatives - and treats them as rhetorical decorations on an unchanged system. He’s not asking for better PR; he’s calling out structural neglect.
The specific intent is pressure, not persuasion. Farmer isn’t addressing the poor as an audience; he’s addressing the institutions that make poverty lethal, insisting they be judged by outcomes rather than intentions. “Ensure” is key: access isn’t framed as a nice downstream benefit of innovation, but as an obligation that must be designed into the business model.
The subtext is sharper than the surface. “Pharmaceutical industry” stands in for a whole political economy where patents, pricing power, and market logic decide who gets to live. “Adequate medical care” is a carefully chosen floor, not a utopian ceiling; if even adequacy is being withheld, the moral failure is basic.
Context matters: Farmer’s career in Haiti, Rwanda, and the broader fight for AIDS and TB treatment made him allergic to narratives that treat scarcity as natural. He watched medicines exist while people died for lack of delivery, affordability, and political will. The quote is a refusal to let innovation be celebrated if its benefits stop at the border of purchasing power.
The specific intent is pressure, not persuasion. Farmer isn’t addressing the poor as an audience; he’s addressing the institutions that make poverty lethal, insisting they be judged by outcomes rather than intentions. “Ensure” is key: access isn’t framed as a nice downstream benefit of innovation, but as an obligation that must be designed into the business model.
The subtext is sharper than the surface. “Pharmaceutical industry” stands in for a whole political economy where patents, pricing power, and market logic decide who gets to live. “Adequate medical care” is a carefully chosen floor, not a utopian ceiling; if even adequacy is being withheld, the moral failure is basic.
Context matters: Farmer’s career in Haiti, Rwanda, and the broader fight for AIDS and TB treatment made him allergic to narratives that treat scarcity as natural. He watched medicines exist while people died for lack of delivery, affordability, and political will. The quote is a refusal to let innovation be celebrated if its benefits stop at the border of purchasing power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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