Film Analysis: Fire In The Blood

Through watching the documentary Fire in the Blood, we are fully submerged into the senseless struggle of Third World nations to obtain low-cost antiretroviral therapy (ARV) for the treatment of HIV/AIDS. The antagonists of the film are pharmaceutical firms (collectively referred to as Big Pharma) who, through the utilization of false advertising, patents, and international treaties, barr citizens of developing nations from receiving the quality treatment they rightly deserve. As someone who was severely disturbed by the excessive self-interest of Big Pharma, I struggle to create an acceptable explanation as to why it should be pardoned for its direct involvement in the unnecessary deaths of millions. However, as a budding anthropologist, I believe that it is my responsibility to play devil’s advocate and explore, as objectively as I can, the reasoning which supports the actions of Big Pharma through employing the anthropological concept of the political body. To successfully fulfill the purpose of this short paper, I plan on first giving a brief overview of the …show more content…
Some well-known examples of pharmaceutical powerhouses which the documentary places a heavy emphasis on include the Western enterprises of Pfizer, Roche, and GlaxoSmithKline. Since demand for short-term and long-term pharmaceuticals is consistently great, Big Pharma generates a substantial deal of profits: in the year 2013 alone, the industry received an average profit margin of 18% (the amount by which revenue from sales exceeds costs in a business), outdoing the gross margins of “carmakers, oil and gas companies...media companies…[and] banks” (www.andruswagstaff.com). Additionally, in the year 2016, the “worldwide pharmaceutical market” produced over 1 trillion US dollars in earnings