I just read the book World War Z. It’s an apocalyptic “best seller” about the futuristic war between humans and zombies by Max Brooks. I picked it up on my way back from Australia, read half of it on the plane, and then took another week to read the rest of it because like most “best sellers”, it was just a story for the masses, not a literary masterpiece that changed the way I view the world. Also, Max Brooks seems to be a total racist towards East Germans, which pisses me off since I live in what was East Germany and all my German friends and family are East German (my husband was 17 when the wall came down).
Anyway, there’s a character in the book who profits off the zombie outbreak by developing a placebo drug and selling it to the scared masses. He creates a marketing campaign that convinces people the drug will prevent them from becoming zombies, even if bitten. And then this morning, I read that ads for “anti-radiation” potassium iodide are popping up all over the internet in response to Japan’s nuclear scare. People are trying (and succeeding) in profiting off the nuclear scare with a bullshit drug by selling it to the masses.
I am not naive. I’m a pretty cynical and pissed off person. So why the fuck am I surprised by this? After all, we as human beings have succeeded in being irresponsible, malicious fuckwads since the beginning of humanity. We’re destroying everything around us, including space. Space junk! No wonder aliens aren’t visiting us, they can’t find the driveway.
But the fact that people are using the disaster in Japan to sell anti radiation placebo pills really kind of shocks me. Whoever is marketing these pills has at least the intelligence to create a placebo…wait a minute, the FDA claims the pills are scams, they’ve green lighted three other anti radiation pills.
If the FDA is approving three specific anti radiation pills, and calling other potassium iodide tablets a scam, could it be that the FDA is in the pocket of the pharmaceutical industry, which is trying to profit off the nuclear scare in Japan? Could it be that the ads popping up all over the Internet are, yes ridiculous and unnecessary, but actually just trying to cash in the same way that the pharmaceutical industry is trying to cash in? Or could it be that the masses are, as per usual, so devastatingly misinformed about the possibility of the western seaboard being hit by any nuclear radiation from Japan due to misleading media headlines, that neither the pharmaceutical industry nor the FDA are to blame?
Could it be that we are all very truly and seriously fucked no matter which way you look at it and not just from scammy anti radiation pills but from the structure of society and the doucheiness of so, so many fuckwads that are classified as human beings?
Related articles
- US anti-radiation pill sales soar in nuclear scare (rt.com)
- Scared Americans Stock Up on Anti-Radiation Pills (newser.com)
- Anti-Radiation Pills Bought as U.S. Fears Rise (abcnews.go.com)
- Anti-radiation tablet sales soar in US amid Japan nuclear crisis (guardian.co.uk)
- Arizonans buying anti-radiation pills – Arizona Republic (news.google.com)
