Synogenes.com

This morning on Radio 4 there was coverage of the attempt to fast-track the past pope (John Paul 2) to sainthood. There seems to be just one supernatural requirements which apparently is easily met: the need for "evidence" of a miracle. It has been dutifully supplied by a devout catholic who claims her Parkinson's disease was cured by thinking of JP2.

It's clear that part of the process of gaining sainthood is being able to show evidence of being a role model on which others should base their lives: that too seems to have been easily met. "JP2, we love you" was the chorus line for a mass chant in Manilla, orchestrated by chorus girls when two million people apparently heeded the call.

So here we have the appeal to supernatural powers, orchestrated with a mass media campaign to establish as some holy role model, someone who amongst other things argued against the use of condoms in the battle against AIDS (truly humanitarian!) including suggesting (utterly without evidence) that they provided no barrier to AIDS, and also had a truly neanderthal attitude to women. He had a record of supporting dictators in South America including Argentina's Videla, and criticised what he called the "Popular Church" in Nicaragua made up of ordinary working class people who tended to support the Sandinistas because the Sandinistas fought for them.

He supported and approved Opus Dei, the secret organisation that pulls the strings of states with its fifth column approach to public morality.

But of course, to the pious, these things don't matter. Religion is other-wordly. But the brute fact is that as the head of a socially massive organisation, he exerted huge political influence with truly dreadful consequences. He might be considered a suitable candidate for becoming a saint in the eyes of catholics, but in the real world he was a reactionary, archaic, authoritarian who believed in medieval notions.

By any real-world criteria of ethics and humanitarian principles, he stands a long long way down the list of progressive role models. The discussion of sanctification of JP2 shows up with stark contrast the difference between the medieval ethics based on imaginary beings and self-certifying miracles, and the actual consequences of the prejudices that spring from those beliefs.

Religious ethics might have more appeal if it credited the humanitarian and compassionate work of those who tried to treat and comfort the AIDS sufferers rather than the reactionary bigot who tried to encourage practices which condemned hundreds of thousands to certain death. It's hard to think of a more poignant display of moral bankruptcy than the haste to sanctify a representative of medieval prejudice and superstition. Hopefully many religious people will pause and think about the irrationality of this kind of superstitious social movement and its serious consequences.

Probably many people were as sickened as I was to hear of the massacre in Virginia Tech and not all that surprised to discover that the killer was mentally ill.

On the one hand, the US makes it ludicrously easy for anyone with the money to buy powerful weapons and ammunition, and on the other pours out the sanctimonious sympathy and mourning whenever such events occur. By appealing to some almighty, and of course mysterious, guiding hand, the government passes the issue back to the relatives and friends of the victims. They have to try to make sense of the killings in the context of some supernatural, omniscient being, apparently in charge of everyone's destiny.

The old philosophical problem of causality and free will comes to them with a vengeance. By using Christian faith as some kind of palliative, the government deflects attention away from their lack of volition, instead appealing to the mysterious ways of some mythical being.

In the real world, the events in Virginia Tech are tragic but caused. A mental patient had inadequate treatment and in his derranged state of mind, was able to arm himself sufficiently to commit mass murder in a matter of minutes. That didn't have anything to do with any supernatural power - it was down to the mental health treatment given to that disturbed young man, and the ludicrously easy access to deadly weaponry.

Churches will be calling on people to forgive the killer. It would be far more productive to focus attention on the rational causes of the events, and take action to stop it happening again.

But the US is a pseudo-democracy based on one dollar, one vote. And lobbying money is very powerful. There will be the usual hand-wringing, and then it will slip from the news, again, until the next time.

Anyone reading the Ben Goldacre column in the Guardian (badscience.net) will have been appalled at the exploitation of the AIDS market by Abbott who, it is reported, is selling Kaletra at £1100 pounds per year to HIV sufferers in Thailand. In typical drug company behaviour, Abbott is trying to recover the costs of its investment but in Thailand the gross per capita income is... you guessed, around £1100.

Understandably then, the Thai government wanted to produce a cheap version which could be used to treat the population suffering from HIV. The Thais were only using it to treat the poor within their country so the only affect on Abbott would be the profits which they couldn't have had anyway.

Abbott it seems, retaliated by withdrawing various drugs from the Thai market. It's not as if the Thai government is breaking any international law - in fact the international law supports them. But ethical principles and drug company profits don't coexist very well.

Like most drug companies, Abbott spends a lot more on marketing and advertising than on R&D so those massive investments are not in finding cures, nor even the lucrative palliatives for chronic illness - it's investment in securing profits from lucrative new markets.

The whole idea of intellectual property rights in cures and treatments for such devastating illnesses as HIV and AIDS is offensive. How can it be justified to put profits before such massive suffering?

There's always the refrain that any other economic alternative is unthinkable. That used to be said about pollution, waste management, alternative energy sources - let's think the unthinkable.

Why is it so preposterous that drug companies should share their research for the public good? Why should they be able to control the fate of so many millions based on calculations on a spreadsheet? By what moral principles can they justify restricting production rights in third world countries of drugs that could save millions? Profit seems a very very flimsy principle faced with such human suffering.

It's more and more evident that private drug companies cannot and should not be trusted with public health. Health should not a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded.