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"Secret Serum" Used To Treat Americans With Ebola
mrspoonsi (2955715) writes with news that the two Americans infected with Ebola in Liberia and transported to Atlanta for treatment were given an experimental drug, and their conditions appear to be improving. From the article: While some people do fight off the disease on their own, in the case of the two Americans, an experimental serum may have saved their lives. As Dr. Kent Brantly and missionary Nancy Writebol waited in a Liberian hospital, someone from the National Institutes of Health reached out to Samaritan's Purse, one of the two North Carolina-based Christian relief groups the two were working with, and offered to have vials of an experimental drug called ZMapp sent to Liberia, according to CNN's unnamed source. Although the Food and Drug Administration does allow experimental drugs to occasionally be distributed in life-threatening circumstances without approval under the expanded access or "compassionate use" conditions. It's not yet clear whether that approval was granted in this case or not. ... Brantly, who had been sick for nine days already ... [received] the first dose ... within an hour, he was able to breathe better and a rash on his body started to fade. The next day he was able to shower without help before boarding the air ambulance that flew him to Atlanta.
Their lives were forever changed. One developed incredible muscles, which he used to fight crime. The other's brain was equally enhanced, but her turned to a life of crime.
Given that Ebola is currently confined to Africa, and that a relatively small number of people have caught it (less than 4000)...and these outbreaks seem to only come along once every 20 years, where was the incentive for the drug company to create this drug? Was it good timing that it has something ready to go just now. Will each dose be prohibitively expensive to administer in Africa, or it remains to be seen if WHO will foot the bill to the tune of 10's of millions $$.
secret serum? what is this, scooby doo?
It seems possible that a monoclonal antibody might have a dramatic effect on virus replication. Since Ebola makes one ill by direct cell destruction it might even make one feel better quickly. But the rash comes from bleeding under the skin (it's the same as any big bruise you might have had). It makes no sense that it should fade immediately from the administration of a monoclonal against the virus. I hope this drug is successful in a trial, but at least that part of the article is suspicious.
It's only "secret" in the sense that almost all pharmaceutical research is completely ignored by the media.
If you dig around you'll find some articles about ZMAPP in no-name low-impact journals like PNAS and Science.
"Secret"
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Experts: Ebola Vaccine At Least 50 White People Away
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
This space for rent.
Oh god. I'm laughing so hard I'm crying. Or am I crying so hard I'm laughing?
Granted, it's not mutually assured destruction.
It's only plausibly mutually assured destruction. That should be quite enough.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The same reason the US funds a vast majority of drug research in general (at least as of now): It has the money, universities, companies, the property right protection, and other laws that enable people to spend decades working on something and then eventually getting a payday for it.
And much of the rest of the world piggy-backs on US research money and then demands that they get it at a discount or will just ignore the patents anyway. It is part of the reason drugs are so expensive in the US - the US subsidizes the rest of the world.
It would be great if there were 5 or 6 (or more) areas all working on the problems instead of very few. Europe certainly does some, but even with European contributions, their percentages are still quite small.
There's a lot of hype on this Ebola topic in the media.
Lets have some scale:
The population of Africa: 1 billion
http://worldpopulationreview.c...
Number of people to die of Ebola in the past year: 887
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
The number of deaths in Liberia alone during the last flu outbreak: 5,561
http://www.worldlifeexpectancy...
Science magazine had a good article about the drugs being developed for Ebola. One drug, TKM-Ebola, is in Phase I trials, but the FDA put them on hold because they wanted to change the protocol to protect participants' safety.
One researcher, Erica Ollmann Saphire, said that, because of the high case fatality rate, if she were exposed to Ebola, "I'd run for the freezer and ask for forgiveness instead of permission." But in cases like this, they usually can get FDA permission, under compassionate use. One German researcher got a needlestick, and they rushed the VSV-vaccine to her. But those were individual cases, in western hospitals, and they can't give an untested drug to a population in Africa (although some American pharmaceutical companies have tried that, and it didn't go too well).
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
Science 25 July 2014:
Vol. 345 no. 6195 pp. 364-365
DOI: 10.1126/science.345.6195.364
Infectious Diseases
Ebola drugs still stuck in lab
Martin Enserink
For you suckers who are stuck behind the paywall, it had a good table that summed it all up:
VACCINES
VSV-based vaccines. Profectus BioSciences; Public Health Agency of Canada
Adenovirus-based vaccines. At least three different labs/companies
DRUGS
TKM-Ebola (RNAi-based). Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp. In phase I trials, but the FDA put a hold
Nucleoside analog. U.S.Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
Monoclonal antibodies. Many labs/companies
AVI-7537 (antisense-based). Sarepta Therapeutics.
Everybody who does clinical research knows that most of the drugs that work great in mice, work reasonably well in monkeys, passably well in Phase I trials, poorly in Phase II trials, and not at all in Phase III trials.
There were a few articles in the New England Journal of Medicine on the FDA's fast track approvals. They found that when the FDA started speeding up drug approvals, they started approving more drugs with life-threatening side effects that had to be withdrawn from the market.
Of course, if you're dying of a disease now, the calculus is different.
Mapp Biopharmaceutical have been publishing articles about their ebola research in scientific journals since 2011. They seem to be a very secretive at all.
Maybe CNN thinks it's a secret because it hasn't been covered in the mainstream press - TMZ and Entertainment Weekly have completely ignored the company.
The rest of the world does not "get US drugs at a discount." Rather, American consumers are forced to pay a lot more for each branded medication than anyone else in the world. It is illegal for us to even shop around for a better deal.
Bust those American patents, world. We need to get affordable medications out there for all.
To quote TFA:
"It is important to keep in mind that a large-scale provision of treatments and vaccines that are in very early stages of development has a series of scientific and ethical implications," the organization said in a statement.
Which means, we haven't figured (worked) out yet the costs and payment plans for this drug, so we aren't going to use it to help those people already suffering who otherwise have no chance of survival. Let's just say they are "expendable", in the name of commerce, of course.
If anyone believes that hogwash about ensuring safety and efficacy and yada yada...well the mighty dollar beats all that.
No, what it means is that if they inject somebody with a large therapeutic dose of a drug that has only been tested in mice, they're liable to have life-threatening adverse reactions, like anaphylactic shock from the mouse antibodies, and it's much easier to keep the adverse reactions from killing them in a state-of-the-art western hospital than it is in the field, where they have trouble maintaining refrigeration, and don't have x-ray machines (much less CAT scans), among many other problems.
I can't find the quote, but a researcher told Science that things work great in mice, well in monkeys, passably well in phase I trials, poorly in phase II trials, and not at all in phase III trials.
Actually, it's the pharmaceutical companies that want to speed up drug approvals in order to increase their profits, and the Clinton and Bush administrations gave them their wish. According to a few articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, every time the FDA sped up drug approvals, they wound up approving drugs that had fatal adverse effects and had to be withdrawn from the market, like that Merck COX inhibitor.
You can't make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.
I found the quote:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cont...
Science 18 July 2014:
Vol. 345 no. 6194 pp. 252-257
DOI: 10.1126/science.345.6194.252
The elusive heart fix
Jennifer Couzin-Frankel
“In mouse studies there's always dramatic improvement,” says Joseph Wu, a cardiologist studying stem cells at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. “Once you go to a large animal study, it's moderate improvement, once you go to a phase I trial, it's decent improvement, and once you go to phase II, phase III, there's no improvement. This happens again and again and again. It's the entire field of biological research.”
The FDA also has oversight of exported drugs and devices. They don't have to be approved for sale in the US in order to be exported, but do have to meet some requirements.
On the other end, most countries require an export certificate from the country of origin.
http://www.fda.gov/Internation...
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Flu deaths aren't nearly as sexy as hemmoraghic fever. Someone passing away while sweating and shivering is nothing compared to having your internals turn to goo. This scared the shit out of me, no matter how small of a scale ebola currently is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Apparently there are a number of vaccines being developed. None of them have reached the human trials phase, but several of them have been given to people under in emergency circumstances. The problem is that it requires an official request from the person's government as well as informed consent from the patient. According to the researcher it's hard to get either of these in the area of the current outbreak.
Cut the marketing budget and the executive salary/bonus overhead and set up publicly funded drug trials and the final costs would plummet (even counting the public money... profit and patent monopolies are massive inefficiencies in the drug "market").
Then you can afford to get back on your meds. Win-win!
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
It's a lot more expensive that you think. The development networks for drug research reach into the billions. Keep in mind that when you find a compound, it has a lot of basic tests before you get to single cells, complex organism, invertebrates, vertebrates... by the time you reach mice, you're already talking about $10million+ ... researchers, grants, equipment, poorly paid graduate students. And when you get to monkeys...each monkey is $15k a pop and if any of them die, the compound almost always gets tossed, or at the least, get set back 4 years.
And when a decent drug does come out, the entire management and executive engine of big pharma absorbs all of that. CEOs make billions while grad students still barely make $35k a year. It's a sick cluster-fuck.
But those procedures and equipment needed for a high level of accurate scientific research is still expensive and it's the difference between real replicable research and snake oil
Moreover, the American government refuses to try and negotiate on price or bulk buy bargains. Australia subsidizes the cost of drugs, and negotiates aggressively on price with pharma companies since a drug on the PBS is guaranteed to ship huge quantities.
There is no reason American health programs can not do the same.
Anytime something is "publicly funded" the cost shoot up.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
As a researcher in the pharma industry: You are an idiot.
Where can I find the tens to hundreds of millions in public money needed to fund clinicals for a single drug that will most likely not get approved? That money doesn't exist, and many promising drugs die because companies run out of money. So companies have to have major profits on the few drugs that succeed- you should think about it as if you were playing the lottery, but each ticket cost you 10+ mil. High risk-high reward.
Also, a lot of cost is added by FDA incompetence. Yes, they are needed. Yes, we need to make sure everything is safe to some reasonable statistical level. Unfortunately, old rules and test requirements are never removed, so a company has to do a barrage of tests on everything, of which 90% are redundant outdated tests that nobody uses anymore.
I don't really understand the hatred for drug companies. Why is it a problem to pay a few hundred bucks for a pill that will literally save your life, but not a problem to pay thousands for your car? We need new drugs to replace failing medicines, and cure untreatable diseases. If we want to solve the problem of these diseases, we need to give a reason for people to form companies in this area, and that isn't going to happen without an expectation to get the money spent back.
Because it might have also killed everyone you gave it to? You do get that experimental drugs do that right? There was a case just recently where 4 guys were given an experimental Phase I human trial immunobooster, and within 20 minutes 2 of them were in multiple organ failure. The 2 who were not were given the placebo.
And this was in a trial where we actually had done everything right and the animal models suggested everything should be fine (people have gone over it with a fine tooth comb to figure out what went wrong there).
Right, which is why medical treatment in the UK is so much cheaper (yes, even after you take into account taxes), than in the US.
Because it costs 50 cents to manufacture the pill. A car costs thousands to manufacture and buy. People don't like to think of development costs.
I don't really understand the hatred for drug companies.
Well, since you (sort of) asked... Americans pay an outrageous amount for health care and the largest institutional beneficiaries of that are the drug companies, being the only group with double digit profits (the other beneficiaries are high salaried individuals). Defenders of big pharma's high profits usually try to wave away complaints by saying that it's necessary to fund drug research, never mind that if the money was going to research than it wouldn't qualify as profits, but the largest allotment of drug company money goes to advertising useless drugs to people who don't need them - research averages less than 20% of pharma budgets.
Then there's the lobbying: the Medicare Modernization Act forbade the government from negotiating on the cost of drugs, ensuring that Medicare pays twice as much as other groups for common drugs. This was essentially a $200 billion gift the the pharmaceutical industry passed under the pretense of "avoiding socialism." The United States is the only country in the world which both allows drugs to be patented and does nothing to limit the cost of those drugs. And speaking of patents, we have the drug companies to blame for the death of every attempt to pass patent reform - they need strong and indiscriminate patents for foreign markets since many countries, the poorer ones in particular, need drugs but can't afford the licensing. It's funny, but the reason why we have all the problems with software patents doesn't really have anything to do with software.
Oh, and also there's the whole thing about killing people for profit. Remember Vioxx?
Oh, come on...
The potential of the drug was discovered in January by the US and Canada. There have been months of people dying in Africa but they don't say a word. Then when two westerners get sick all of a sudden they have the exact amount of medicine needed? Because they didn't hold some back, did they?
Did they contact the WHO and told them that they had an experimental drug that might help? After all, it's been named an epidemic so you can be sure they would have listened. African nations tend to have much milder regulation of medical trails, did they contact those nations and tried to work something out? Getting the drug tested early at a reduced cost would increase their ROI so it would make sense, wouldn't it?
It's not like the west haven't done medical research in africa before.
That's the story my friend not the possibly poor condition of medical research on the African continent.
http://www.mappbio.com/ebola.h...
http://www.mappbio.com/zmapinf...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
As another researcher in the pharma industry: reread your post. Your entire post is only highlighting how poor of a job pharmaceutical companies do at effectively bringing drugs to market, all while adding the inefficiency of a 20% profit margin. The emphasis on profit alone also leads to too great of a focus on evergreening and low risk projects.
I've worked in a university lab that brought two (while I was there) drugs from design, synthesis, and screening through animal testing for the cost of an R01 ($250k) each. I realize that the clinicals are more expensive, but even $10M/drug is pretty small change compared to posted phama expenses. It's the bloat above the $10M per drug that makes them so expensive.
Hatred for drug companies comes from the (at least perceived) extortionate nature of the business. People feel as if their health is held ransom for another person's profit. Hospitals share the same ill feelings. It's especially potent because the people who profit the most from the whole scheme are already obscenely wealthy. Buying a car doesn't have the same "life or death" aspect to it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
Horse shit. Pharmaceutical 30% profit margins, patent monopoly, and forced government cash flow in the form of un-negotiated social program requirements are the largest contributors to the expense of health care in the US. It's the same concept behind subsidized student loans and tuition rise. Blaming the FDA is oh so clever though, like they suddenly became more stringent starting in the early 2000's when pharmaceutical profits fucking exploded. Must have been that Bush guy and his love for federal regulation.
You can't make a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.
I'd gladly volunteer to test this hypothesis if the most likely outcome weren't 9 babies in 9 months.
The same people who develop drugs elsewhere in the developed world, that's who. Switzerland, for example, has a research-intensive pharma industry rivaling the US in size, and it prospers just fine without having to screw its citizens with fixed prices and special laws against shopping around.
What I want to see is a pharma industry that operates like that other industry that has a special need to invest such a large percentage of corporate operating budget into research and development - electronics. Somehow Intel manages to keep cranking out new processors at steadily increasing ratios of functionality to price, and yet still reap billions while its customers freely shop the world market for the best bargain. Why can't Pfizer do the same without having to wheedle special legal privileges from Washington?
Not for much longer, after the slimy corporate toady bastard Conservative party wankers we have in power executed laws that absolve the state of their responsibility to provide healthcare and break up our NHS (our public property, bought and paid for by our taxes) for the purchase of their moneyed mates, so they can get some of the crumbs from their table.
It's also shit like taking colchicine, which has been cheap and generic for years, doing a little extra research (which arguably was useful) and then using that status to bump the price up by 15 times.
Those people taking the drug couldn't give a shit about the research - they take the pills, their gout gets better, that's their own personal research right there. What sticks in their craw is that their pills now cost $5 apiece.
That and the systematic hiding of research that is negative or equivocal, the deliberate creation of medicines that are just a couple of atoms different from an existing one, not because they'll be better but because they'll be on patent, etc, etc.
Big pharma does a lot of good, but it's kind of like picking gold coins out of a midden.
Technically, aspirin is a generic name in the USA, plus Australia, France, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Jamaica, Colombia, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, because (no kidding) Germany lost World War 1. In countres where it is still trademarked, the word should be written with a capital A, as Aspirin, the way you used it. The correct way to write the trademarked Johnson and Johnson wound care product is Band-Aid, with the dash.
But surely, even if some of the ACs above are a bit confused, that's not because someone still spends money on marketing brand names like 'Band-Aids". Surely they don't spend anything much on them, Let's see, for 2012, Johnson and Johnson claimed consumer wound care products resulted in sales of about 1 Billion US dollars, even, out of about 67 billion totak. Total advertising was 2.3 billion, so if we assume consumer wound care doesn't get a disproportionate share, that's 'only' approximately 34 million dollars a year. I don't think I'd call that next to zero. I will leave researching the budget Bayer spends for advertising Aspirin to most of the world, and specifically Bayer brand Aspirin (as it's described in the US and some other nations to get around that pesky genericness) as an exercise for the reader, but I have done the math, and it's actually larger than for Band-Aids.
Who is John Cabal?
Most medical patents aren't American. America has more medical research than other single nation, but by capita many European countries does more research and holds more patents especially Switzerland and Denmark. As such those countries are also interested in seeing the patents protected, though they haven't allowed themselves to be nearly as abused as the American healthcare system.
One of the points of classical Capitalist Econ 101 is that, if a particular sector of industry consistently makes more than the average profits of business as a whole, tremendous, inexorable, possibly literally transhuman forces, (sometimes called the invisible hand) will push it back into line with the rest of the economy.
When a sector is making a 20% profit against an average for businesses of only about 3.4%, then classic Capitalism would say the forces trying to steer that sector back into line with the rest are about like a bunch of Mind Reading Giant Anime Robots, piloted by D&D 23rd level wizards and led by the Archangel Gabriel, doublewielding Nuclear Powered Uzis and riding the love child of Samatha Stephens and Hellboy.*
Which makes it really bizarre to see people defending the sector's record profits as though they believe fervently in this free market/invisible hand stuff, but think the problem can be solved by debating with those people on Slashdot who 'just don't understand'. Yeah, shooting straw wrappers at him will stop Godzilla, too. How does it feel when the same theory that tells you it's morally right to defend this enormous profit margin also says the forces acting to take it away are literally more powerful than the combined nuclear arsenals of all the nations?
Of course, you could believe that Adam Smith missed something there, but if that's so, where does this sense of absolute moral rightness, and the resulting tremendous need to fix all the people who disagree, come from?
* to use a metaphor that should be clear to the typical Slashdot reader.
Who is John Cabal?
I'd have thought your UID number too high to know about that one.
Hey! I thought exactly the same thing when I saw someone with a 5 digit UID quoting Shakespeare the other day!
Anytime something is "publicly funded" the cost shoot up.
Which is why the Canadian health care system costs half of that in the US, and gets the same outcomes with high consumer satisfaction.
http://www.openmedicine.ca/art...
Open Medicine, Vol 1, No 1 (2007)
Home > Vol 1, No 1 (2007) > Guyatt
Research
A systematic review of studies comparing health outcomes in Canada and the United States
Costs in commercial labs are actually much higher than costs in university labs.
There was an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about the test for PKU.
It was first developed by some academic researchers, They made some prototype test kits, but they wanted it to be used as widely as possible, so they signed a distribution contract with a commercial company who presumably could do it more efficiently.
The commercial company had startup problems, so the academic researchers started distributing their own kits, in somebody's FDA-certified basement. I'm recalling from memory, so you'll have to check me, but they sold their kit for about $6.
Then the commercial company went into production. They sold their kit for $100. The PKU charities were very annoyed, because they had funded it and now it was unaffordable.
Where can I find the tens to hundreds of millions in public money needed to fund clinicals for a single drug that will most likely not get approved?
One hundred million dollars is the price of 4,000 JDAM bombs. For comparison, US military buys about 10,000 every year.
Sorry, you are going to have to explain how "the rest of the world" buying a branded, 100% genuine, drug for a fraction of the US price drives up the price in the US. You also might give an example where patents are being ignored in those same markets.
Here's a recent example of a man being charged $3,766 for Zovirax cold sore cream in hospital. The same product could be bought in Walmart for $181.66 . UK price $7.
http://www.fosters.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20140728/GJNEWS_01/140729484
Drug prices in the US are entirely down to the insane US health system.
Actually what you see here is very well understood. You are seeing an inelastic market; that is if a drug or procedure will save you life, it does not matter of it costs $5 or $5000, you will find the money to pay for it. The reason why socialized healthcare drives costs down is because the government / the insurance company will bargain on your behalf. Since they are not the one who is going to die, they can not be extorted and can pit different drug makers against each other. Health care is one of the few areas where "the free market" does not work as naively expected.
Wut? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... Look at the number of companies in European countries. Belgium has 14 and is so much smaller than the US. All we hear though is how US companies buy our innovative startups and move them to the US when they are on the brink of creating a new medicine.
Of course, this ignores the reaction of onlookers, who are given a clear message that they're worth nothing to their society, and as such don't owe it anything either. I wonder if a nation facing such a problem might turn to exaggerated forms of patriotism as a desperate attempt to win loyalty where none is deserved, such as making little kids swear their allegiance every morning?
Free market doesn't really seem to work anywhere anymore, seeing how economy is always in a crisis, unemployment has apparently become permanent fixture of it and even employed people can't afford the lifestyle of their parents without getting into debt.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
As yet another researcher in the pharma industry: bullshit. Big companies go after projects that are lower risk with their own money, but I've seen quite a few experimental drugs for smaller issues or for higher risk projects be funded by startup companies, usually by companies founded by researchers out of universities. The base research was done by a university lab, and the final push and trials is done by a company and funded through a combination of VC money, some NIH grants, and funding from large pharma companies. Just this year in San Diego Lumena Pharmaceuticals raised a Series B of $45M to fund trials for several treatments on rare liver diseases. If this company makes it through trials, it'll be bought by a bigger pharma like J&J who will then distribute it.
This is where the higher risk pharma work is being done.
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/lumena-pharmaceuticals-raises-45-million-in-series-b-financing-249420571.html
Why is it a problem to pay a few hundred bucks for a pill that will literally save your life
Probably because most of the world can't afford that. In fact millions in the US can't afford that, especially if they need a long course of treatment. It's basically telling them "we have a cure, but you are too poor, sorry". Rightly or wrongly I can see why they find that upsetting.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
What we really need is a human body simulator, down to the molecules.
That would be nice, but rather un-realistic currently. We are currently working on a worm, and you can see progress at: http://www.openworm.org/ . It's cool, cutting edge, open source, and all that, but 1. the models are really complicated and we don't know all the parameters; and 2. they take a long time to run. In a couple of years, we should (cross fingers) be able to see the effect of chemicals on a nematode, so if it gets sick, we can simulate treating it.
Please note that C. elegans has 959 cells in it. Humans have 100 billion neurons. We're still many, many orders of magnitude off from simulating the effect of drugs on a human body.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Well yes. When your goal is to bring a service to an entire population rather then the highest profit margin, it ends up costing more. Public funding is for cases where private enterprise can not handle the needs, it serves a different goal then corporations.
World's most profitable pharma company: Pfizer
2013 Net Sales: $51.6B
2013 Net Income (profit): $22B
Profit as a percent of sales: 42.7%
R&D as a percent of sales: 13.3%
World's most profitable automaker: Toyota
2013 Net Sales: $168B
2013 Net Income (profit): $16.2B
Profit as a percent of sales: 9.6%
R&D as a percent of sales: 4.1%
World's most profitable tech company: Apple
2013 Net Sales: $170B
2013 Net Income (profit): $37B
Profit as a percent of sales: 22%
R&D as a percent of sales: 2.6%
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
There is no reason American health programs can not do the same.
Actually there is a law against that."The 2003 Medicare law* prohibits Medicare from negotiating drug prices, setting prices or establishing a uniform list of covered drugs, known as a formulary."
*: full title "Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act"
src: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04...
The hatred of the drug companies or any company(corporation) is just the hard liberal/progressive left rally cry. They hate private business, they hate competition. No one should make money
Stop mischaracterizing socialism and go back to fondling your copy of Atlas Shrugged. Socialism is founded on the principle that people should be able to make money; people should be compensated for good work with decent pay. Did you ever notice an abundance of leftist political parties throughout the western world with names like "Party for the Unemployed" or "The Union of Shirkers"? No, most of them have names like "The Labour Party", or "The Worker's Party", because they are founded by and seek to look after the people who do most of the work.