[icegreentea2]

The claim logically holds together. There is even evidence on its side.

But one reason for the downvotes may be that it might be too narrow-minded. For one thing, it completely neglects to consider the relative difficulty of treating symptoms versus being fully curative. Secondly, it half undermines itself by lumping vaccines into the same bucket as symptomatic treatment. Clearly the economic incentives for vaccine, versus symptom management, versus cure depends on the disease being treated.

Finally, while it carefully uses the word "incentive" instead of talking in black and whites, it doesn't explain why "big pharma" makes cures at all. A lot of the the supporting material for "pharma makes more money on symptom treatment" references Gilead's experience with Hep C. But the economics of how that drug would have worked was clear as day before Gilead spent resources of it. So why would Gilead have gone to market with a cure at all?

[TimPC]

The claim doesn't logically hold together: it assumes a monopoly in medicine. It might not be profitable for the company with a treatment regimen to develop a cure. But for the company without the treatment regiment to develop a cure and take away all of a competitor's business and capture a significant part of it as their own? That's extremely profitable. You can charge far more for a cure than for a regular preventative treatment (per dose) so margins are far higher even if volume over time is lower. Suffice it to say cures are sufficiently profitable to enough of the actors in the system that they are worth exploring. And there is evidence of cures being researched successfully as referenced in the comment above. Also, I don't think all pharma companies are perfectly 'rational' actors in this sense. They are composed of people who got into medicine with the interest to help people, and those people know both cures and vaccines help more than just symptom mitigation. The motivation of the actors in the system to do good leads to even more research of cures and vaccines than the non-zero amount that is sufficiently incentivized (even if cures are less profitable than symptom mitigations).