Basic Trope: A pharmaceutical company creates a cure for a deadly disease, but hides it from the general public for the sake of profits.
- Straight: Tropeon Pharmaceuticals creates a cure for cancer, but keeps it to themselves to sell more treatments.
- Exaggerated: Tropeon Pharmaceuticals has created cures for every known disease, but won't sell them to anyone so they can sell their outrageously high priced medicine.
- Downplayed:
- Tropeon Pharmaceuticals puts more R&D funding into treatments rather than cures, and the cures they do create are kept underwraps for no less than a decade.
- Tropeon only withholds a cure from underprivileged patients they are using as test beds for other studies.
- Tropeon only reluctantly covers up the cure after they stumble upon The Masquerade and are forced to conclude covering up the connection is impossible and are forced to conclude that breaking the masquerade would cause even more harm.
- Justified:
- Tropeon Pharmaceuticals puts their cures through years of rigorous and highly controlled testing to make sure they don't harm the people who take them.
- Tropeon knows that the average Joe would mistake their cure for Tropicitis strain 27 variant B as being for the whole Tropicitis family.
- Inverted: Troperon Pharmaceuticals lies about having a cure to and is concealing that they are really just using existing treatments.
- Subverted: Troperon is hiding its cancer cure because it "works too well" and they "want it to be a viable treatment". This isn't greed but the drugs destroy cancer so rapidly the patient dies trying to clean up the remains of cancer. Furthermore leaking the drug and production methodology would cause desperate people to get themselves killed on both dodgy imitators and authentic reproductions.
- Double Subverted: Except Troperon later conceals a medical device that can allow a patient to survive the excess of dead cells.
- Parodied: Bob accuses Cancer charities of blocking cures because it would make their organizations meaningless.
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: Tropereon is mentioned to keep a small but substantial percentage of their research department on moonshot drugs like near universal cancer cures.
- Enforced: The writers need a reason why the plot-driving illness can’t just be cured with medicine from the established advanced pharmaceutical company.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: Dr. Evulz creates Troperon and withholds the cure just for the sake of damaging future drug development efforts for lack of trust.
- Exploited: The Ivory Mask, upon finding out that his target was withholding the cure, steals the details and releases them to both ruin him and gain admiration as a heroic figure.
- Defied: Tropereon's CEO snaps at the suggestion to withhold it in an extended rant about everything wrong with the idea on a practical, moral, and profitable level. Tropereon goes on to corner the world cancer drug market.
- Implied: In an After the End setting where pre-disaster tech is usually the top tier and very difficult to produce new, the cure for cancer is accessible several tiers lower, albeit requiring experience in every tech tree. It isn't due to requiring something only created by the apocalypse conditions like a mutant plant. But perhaps having to work in so many fields is what allowed it to be discovered post-apocalypse while the precursors specialized too much to spot it.
- Deconstructed: Withholding the cure backfires on Tropereon in one of several big ways.
- By burying it to avoid cannibalizing their existing treatment drug lines it winds up being independently rediscovered by another company meaning they wound up sacrificing profit for nothing and none of their own actions could stop it.
- Scientists in their organization are understandably displeased with their work never getting used. They ensure that it winds up used properly.
- Reconstructed: ???
- Discussed: "Seriously what is with fictional drug companies covering up cures. I mean if they wanted to get into a business to not cure people for the sake of more money why don't they just sell homeopathic medicines?"
- Conversed: ???
- Played for Laughs: Tropereon withholds the cure for baldness to sell more hats.
- Played for Horror: Tropereon discovers the cure to cancer after one of their scientists went beyond the pale to achieve it then felt remorse and committed suicide. The upper management have a legitimate and an unenviable moral dilemma regarding the cure at a serious cost. They can cover up the sordid thing to protect their reputation and themselves. They can release it and let the public decide if it should be banned or produced, but still at the risk of a black market if they chose the previous. Or they can produce it keeping the real methods secret.
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