Even if companies could, they won't, for reasons I just explained. But mostly because pharmaceutical advertising budgets aren't really very big. People who think that there is a gigantic pool of capital that could be sucked out of the pharmaceutical advertising budget are being misled by accounting terminology. People who rail against the pharmaceutical industry are fond of noting that about 20% of industry revenues go to marketing, with the implication that this is all wasted on advertising baldness cures during Golden Girls reruns. But just the top ten firms in the pharmaceutical industry took in about $350 billion in revenue in 2007, 20% of which is $70 billion. The entire US expenditure on advertising by all companies in all media forms totaled something like $150 billion in 2007. I know it seems like every other commercial you see is for Botox, but most advertising is not done by pharmaceutical firms.
In fact, advertising is only a small fraction of that marketing expense. Over half of it expense consists of free samples, the offering of which seems to me like an unalloyed public good.
>Over half of it expense consists of free samples
How exactly do they quantify that value, considering the marginal cost of each pill is almost nil?
The value for the cost could be considered the manufacturing cost, manufacturing costs + an estimate for a small loss of sales, the average selling price, the official full retail price, or perhaps something else.
The actual cost is either just the manufacturing costs, or maybe the manufacturing costs plus a bit for lost sales, but I believe the estimates where 20% of revenue goes to promotions use a figure much higher than manufacturing costs, perhaps assuming that every free pill, means the reduction of one full price sale, or something like that.
It seems to me that your numbers are actually refuting your interpretation of them. If TOTAL expenditures by EVERYONE in EVERY way possible is $150 billion, and ONE industry (the pharmaceutical industry) spends $70 billion then, by my math, pharma is contributing 47% of ALL advertising expenditures. In which case, it may be that every other commercial is for Botox...
I could be missing something here though.
The point is, the pharma industry is not, in fact, spending $70 billion on advertising.
Gerry -
She's saying that since half of all advertising is not pharma, then most of the $70 billion in pharma marketing expenses is not spending on advertising.
Not all marketing expenses are advertising.
I had to read it a few times to parse it. (But I'm pretty slow on the uptake).
I think I must be misreading this post, but it reads like pharmaceutical advertising ($70B)spent on non-free sample advertisements (0.5x$70B = $35B) must amount to roughly a quarter of US expenditures on advertising ($35B/$150B = 23%)?
You're main point may still hold, but that hardly seems like a trivial portion of the market. I'm not an accountant so I've likely misunderstood. Could someone clarify the computation?
Thanks, Tim F. I also suspect that it's very easy for the drug firms to inflate their generosity via loose accounting conventions. Is 'opportunity cost' a line on the balance sheet? To whom is it paid?
America was the leader in pharmaceutical inovation long before drug companies spent large ammounts on R&D. We did it by properly funding our universities and other institutions. Now we let the private sector fund the university research and patent the results. We could fund the research and then make the drugs generic from day one and reduce the cost of health care.
This would also fix some of our current problems with the missalocation of research dollars. Very little is spent on new antibiotics because they would save lives with out generating large profits. Drug companies do not want to make a drug that you take for a few days to get better they want to make the next drug that treats a common chronic condition. It is much more profitable to invent the next drug that people will take daily for the rest of their lives.
The HPV vacine costs no more to make than the flu vaccine that you get for $20.00. It wholesales for more than five times that retail cost of flu vacine because the manufatuer needs to recoup its investment. If we had funded the research publicly like we did for the polio vacine we could vaccinate the entire population instead of simply vaccinating the insured.
There are many things that the private sector does much better than the public one but this is not amongst them.
Larry_Geater: We could fund the research and then make the drugs generic from day one and reduce the cost of health care.
No, we couldn't. If it were so easy to take "basic" university-level research and convert it into a usable medicine, universities today would do it all themselves and hoard the superprofits.
They don't, because they (by and large) can't. And they can't because that latter stage is not a trivial part of the process.
Megan-
Fair enough, and I kind of figured that was a point you were making. But I didn't think you're numbers were backing up the assertion.
RobB-
I'm slower than you at this point, because I have your explanation to help and I still can't resolve it. I can buy your statement that "not all marketing expenses are advertising" but I'm just not able to gather that from Megan's post.
I may need some economics lessons.
Hypothetically, if 90% of the money was spent on junkets for MDs so that they'd recommend the expensive patented drug over the equally effective generic, that would be worse right?
It's one thing to bet that marketing works on TV viewers, but if they believe that they're getting a decent return on investment with huge spending on gifts to influence professionals behaviour, that'd worry me more.
Marketing is a lot more than advertising. It also consists of little things like doing research to figure out what drugs people want and/or need. Things like patient and doctor education are also part of marketing. I know that a lot of drugs have educational pamphlets, websites, and CDs available. While they obviously are trying to sell the drug, the information they make available is actually useful to patients and doctors.
Marketing is what keeps you from trying to make a new drug that cures being tall... and other drugs nobody would want. In a sense, some marketing costs up front can save you a lot of wasted research money later on.
Nevermind- walked away, came back, read again, the lights are on.
Amazingly...
Companies are not losing money on marketing. They will not spend $2 on advertising to make $1 in sales profit. Therefore, they must by definition be increasing their profits from the ad money they are spending. This makes MORE money available for R&D investment, not less. If they stopped marketing, they would lose customers and make LESS money, and have LESS incentive to invest in future drugs (which would be less profitable because they couldn't advertise them.) Marketing may have other negative effects (like mis-matching patients to drugs), but making less money available for R&D isn't one of them.
America was the leader in pharmaceutical inovation long before drug companies spent large ammounts on R&D. We did it by properly funding our universities and other institutions. Now we let the private sector fund the university research and patent the results.
Wow, none of these three sentences are true.
1) While America has always done well in pharmaceutical innovation, Europe has also traditionally had a very strong drug industry, and in 1986 spent more on R&D than the US drug industry. The share of drugs developed in the US has steadily increased over the last two decades with stronger price controls in Europe. This is an important paper on the topic.
2) Perhaps, but NIH funding to universities and other institutions has gone up far past the rate of inflation for the over thirty years, including doubling between 1998 and 2003. (Funding increases have indeed slowed since 2003.)
3) That third sentence does not remotely begin to describe the drug discovery process. The idea that universities "do all the research and the companies then just patent them" is ridiculous. There are enormous steps between a method shown in a basic lab and actually producing a drug that will work on humans. Most very promising ideas shown in academic labs have resulted in tremendous amounts of time, effort, and money expended in producing no drugs.
Very little is spent on new antibiotics because they would save lives with out generating large profits.
And very little is spent on them because the government would seize them or set price controls if necessary, too. The "safe" research project is always the drug for "lifestyle" condition.
Over half of it expense consists of free samples, the offering of which seems to me like an unalloyed public good.
Not entirely unalloyed. Much of it is designed to get doctors to prescribe particular drugs. One can at least argue the benefits of the latest drugs versus the now off patent generics, so I don't think it's unalloyed.
It's not surprising that most drug marketing is aimed at doctors. After all, thanks partially but not entirely to the insurance structure in the US, it's doctors who are responsible for what drugs their patients take. Many people face similar co-pays no matter what the drug, and don't care all that much between. Most direct to consumer advertising is about "lifestyle" conditions where people might just decide to live with it as part of getting older, or might not know that they have a condition that they can "ask their doctor about" and get treated.
In any case, it's simply illogical to pretend that one could simply shift money from marketing to research. Marketing is intended, fundamentally, to make a profit by increasing sales. Increasing the profitability of drugs increases R&D, not decreases it. One has to make a more sophisticated argument against it. For example, one can argue that marketing is about deciding how to slice up a fixed pie for "me too" drugs. OTOH, that would indicate a form of vigorous competition between those drugs rather than large monopoly profits, so that has other issues. One can accuse marketing of encouraging people to avoid just as well generics and 10 years old medicine, also.
"but if they believe that they're getting a decent return on investment with huge spending on gifts to influence professionals behaviour"
I've spent quite a bit of time at conferences that big pharma companies also frequent. Judging by the sales force they hire (young, good looking and female), the dinners they take doctors out to (only the best restaurants), the parties they throw and the things they give away there is certainly a lot of money being spent on marketing that isn't a TV ad. Why spend all this money if it doesn't improve the bottom line?
Very little is spent on new antibiotics because they would save lives with out generating large profits. Drug companies do not want to make a drug that you take for a few days to get better they want to make the next drug that treats a common chronic condition. It is much more profitable to invent the next drug that people will take daily for the rest of their lives.
This makes for a fun talking point after the second drink at a dinner party, but it's not as though people need an antibiotic treatment once, and then they're cured for life. The more likely reason why comparatively little research goes into this area is because the field is already saturated with wide range of very effective drugs, while there are plenty of other treatment areas where a wide range of drugs do not yet exist, or else exist but leave a lot of room for improvement in terms of increasing the efficacy and reducing side effects.
if they believe that they're getting a decent return on investment with huge spending on gifts to influence professionals behaviour, that'd worry me more.
This one is also faulty because it assumes that after doctors self-select out of a very exclusive portion of the population on terms of intellgience, humanitarian concern, and perseverence, complete 7+ years of school followed by residency, and then go through the travails of setting up or assimilating into a practice...they then somehow become mindless sheep who accept whatever they're fed by pharmaceutical marketing.
I say, balderdash. The more likely reason is that by courting the doctors' attention, they give them a lot of useful information regarding available products and applications, then dump a load of free samples on them besides so that the doctor can actually give them to patients, rather than just recommend them out of thin air.
Once you have both information and practical experience to prove that drug X really does work for condition Y, then of course you're going to recommend it again.
I've spent quite a bit of time at conferences that big pharma companies also frequent. Judging by the sales force they hire (young, good looking and female), the dinners they take doctors out to (only the best restaurants), the parties they throw and the things they give away there is certainly a lot of money being spent on marketing that isn't a TV ad. Why spend all this money if it doesn't improve the bottom line?
First, pharma is hardly the first industry to discover that attractive young women sell more effectively, on average, than any other demographic group.
Second, if you had spent most of your youthful years pursuing a difficult and expensive education and residency, and now had anywhere up to a half-million dollars in student and business loans to pay off...what would it take to convince YOU to pull two hours out of your productive day and/or family life in order to hear a powerpoint spiel about complex chemistry and the benefits and detriments of ingesting it?
Over half of it expense consists of free samples
Hey Megan, can you provide a source for this? I have worked in large pharma, and have never seen a marketing budget for a drug where 50% was samples. Rather, the costs are a) the allocated cost of the sales force, b) DTC c) medical marketing.
On the larger point, of course, you are correct. MedAd News reports Nielsen tracking of total Pharma DTC spend at $5.6B (across all media) in 2006. Even if that's off by a factor of 3, that's nowhere near a majority of marketing spend.
"First, pharma is hardly the first industry to discover that attractive young women sell more effectively, on average, than any other demographic group."
I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with this, just that dollars spent on advertising is done to increase the bottom line. If you move money out of advertising and into R&D it may be worse overall for profits because new drugs don't sell very well. This means it's not just a simple matter to cut the advertising budget as a way of reducing costs.
It was also to illustrate that just because big pharma isn't spending 70 billion on TV ads, doesn't mean they aren't spending 70 billion on other expensive items like the young and attractive sales force.
I say, balderdash. The more likely reason is that by courting the doctors' attention, they give them a lot of useful information regarding available products and applications, then dump a load of free samples on them besides so that the doctor can actually give them to patients, rather than just recommend them out of thin air.
This is true. I think that the vast majority doctors really do try to prescribe the best thing out there. However, they do so without much attention to price, in most cases. And in most cases, that's what their patients want, especially when they have the same co-pay regardless of the drug. So you get the familiar situation where the doctors want to prescribe the most efficacious drug, regardless of cost, the patient wants the best as well, regardless of cost, and the insurance company is the one that wants to consider cost and be the bad guy. That, of course, is a whole different story.
I don't watch a whole lot of TV but have never seen an ad for Botox
I have, when I was a poor graduate student, benefitted from free samples of a medication
I know the pharma industry is locus of ideological hatered among the left (Picture the "three minutes hate" in 1984 - that's a book for you illiterates) That captures the foaming at the mouth I hear from left/libs going on about pharma
yes, they market a lot, but as opposed to say, cat food, which is only sold to cat owners, pharma needs to cover a wide swath of society
Good for them, I don't begrudge a dime they make
So you get the familiar situation where the doctors want to prescribe the most efficacious drug, regardless of cost, the patient wants the best as well, regardless of cost, and the insurance company is the one that wants to consider cost and be the bad guy. That, of course, is a whole different story.
Certainly true. OTOH, the insurance company has a good incentive to balance this by countering prescription recommendations with a list of suitable generics, and customers with high-deducible plans have further incentive to look into a generic, when possible.
Free speech is getting more and more unpopular in the U.S. Eighteen years ago I recall a drug rep coming by and showing me a review about Buspar improving the response to antidepressants. I use this therapy now almost every day (for tachyphylaxis). He couldn't now bring me that article. Everything has to be approved by legal and the FDA, relate to the approved indication for the drug. If an article is in PubMed, which is the indexing service of the National Library of Medicine, the rep ought to, as years ago, be able to discuss it.
Free drug samples don't help poor people very much.
Heard this on NPR (click my name for the link):
The analysis, published in the current issue of the American Journal of Public Health, shows that 12 percent of Americans got free drug samples in 2003. But rich people get free prescription drug samples more often than poor people.
For an expose of where those pharma marketing costs go (other than advertising), see:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pUSM2_rpxk&NR=1
or, in more detail,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/28/business/28cheer.html?scp=1&sq=pharmaceutical+reps+cheerleaders&st=nyt
Seriously, I'd like to see Radio Free Megan interview specialists in this field, including those who are on the opposite side of the issue from Megan, such as Marcia Angell.
You want to reduce the expenditure on marketing? Make it less tax deductable: problem solved.
You want to decrease health care costs by getting the government involved in developing drugs? How does that reduce costs, it merely shifts them to a direct government expenditure?
The only way to reduce the cost of drugs, is to reduce the costs of FDA approvals. I don't see anyone voting for that.
My only hope is that some other major markets (China) will have lower approval costs, so that drugs can continue to be developed even at lower revenue levels.
For an expose of where those pharma marketing costs go
Yes, the "expose" that drug reps are often attractive young women must have taken some serious investigative journalism. I just hope they can get the story out.
Really, what, exactly is the problem supposed to be here? And what's your solution? Forbid drug companies from hiring young women as sales reps?
'Free drug samples don't help the poor...' Just from what poor people tell me, and compared to those better off, the poor are more helped.
without knowing the numbers, I would guess most pharma marketing expenses to be spent on drug detailing, that is the salaries and expenses of drug reps; clearly whats left for advertising in media would likely be a small proportion of total pharmaceutical advertising expenses. So far, so good re Megan's post.
But its misleading to suggest that the cost of samples is a large part of the advertising budget; as other commenters have pointed out, the cost of such samples to the companies (that is, their manufacuring cost) is close to nil.
According to this 2004 study, samples make up 27 percent of pharmaceutical marketing budgets. Detailing is about one third of the total spending; "unmonitored promotion" is another quarter.
Let's have a reality check here.
When I was a kid, childhood leukemia was a death sentence. For that matter, so was adult leukemia. How many of you know people who have been successfully treated for leukemia? The list of diseases that drugs can treat successfully is lengthy, and none of those drugs existed 50 years ago. Did the politicians who rant and rave (e.g., Obama, Clinton, Edwards, McCain) about "Big Pharma" have anything at all to do that? Of course not - none of them have ever saved anyone's life, they've just demagogued the people and corporations that actually create miracle drugs that save lives. A pox on them all, I say.
Here's a little something. Some folks may not like it, but at least it's a cite, as opposed to pie-in-the-sky theorizing:
http://www.citizen.org/documents/ACFDC.PDF
The reality check, DBL, would consist of you at the very least providing cites and sources for this claim, and how much of this was publicly financed or researched, and how much was actually done by the big companies.
Research. Try it sometime. Your opinion when it's not backed up by any facts doesn't mean squat to me.
JordanT: I could be wrong, but it's my understanding that Big Pharma no longer treats physicians this way. They can't take them to far away places, they can't get them outlandishly nice food and they can't get them really expensive gifts. My source: the ridiculous "Policy on Interaction with Medical Professionals" e-course I had to take at my pharma employer.
Scent: Trash-talking other people's opinions as "cite-less" while linking Marcia Angell and Public Citizen is rich.
Free drug samples don't help poor people very much.
Yes they do.
I have a chronic condition for which only one specific patented drug helps. When first diagnosed I had no health insurance. The doctor's office used to send me home with a big bag of samples - free - from the drug company.
Now I have insurance, and pay for it like anyone else. But free samples DO help people that cannot pay for drugs, and free samples ARE part of the marketing budget.
The nurse, BTW, had stories about how the drug company reps would come in and buy lunch for the whole office, hand out T-Shirts and pens, fridge magnets, etcetera.
"My only hope is that some other major markets (China) will have lower approval costs, so that drugs can continue to be developed even at lower revenue levels."
China could easily lower approval costs to zero, especially for drugs whose patents are held by 'princelings' (sons of top party members). Or, if they're forced to go through the motions, they can test the drugs on prisoners before they execute them and sell their organs. After all, virtually 100% of all executed prisoners currently are patriotic enough to insist on donating their organs, so they surely would be patriotic enough to give informed consent to testing.
With the Beijing Olympics coming up, there will be plenty of willing volunteers to test even the most dangerous drugs (although they'd have to be tested quickly), and your test results would be guaranteed if you had the right connections. Hiring the princelings would simply be a new form of marketing expense.
For 2006 Merck's 10K says they spent $8.2B on marketing & administrative expenses on $22.6B in total sales. That's 36%. As reference, they spent $4.8B in R&D.
Are they unusual? Are they spending more than 1/2 of m&a expenses on admin & overhead costs?
http://www.merck.com/finance/annualreport/ar2006/fivePatients.html
A great deal of drug marketing isn't done to convince physicians and patients to use Drug A rather than nothing -- it's to convince them that Drug A is more desirable than Drug B.
My mom is a nurse in a reproductive endocrinologist's office, and I don't think I ever used a post-it note in my childhood which didn't advertise a fertility drug. Their drug rep regularly takes them out to lunch at pricey restaurants, gives them free samples of medication which costs hundreds of dollars a vial, and does all the typically evil Big Pharma stuff.
However, from my perspective as a patient, it's not especially sinister. All of the various infertility medications of a given class work about equally well, so what do I care if it's Follistim or Gonal-F? Each cycle of IVF costs the patient around $5K a pop in drug costs, which in the vast majority of cases is not covered by insurance. Obviously, it makes a difference to Serono if I use their drug rather than Organon's, but it's not like I'm going to let my doctor talk me into spending tens of thousands of dollars on infertility treatment I don't really need at all. We know I need the treatment, and that there's no material difference in the available drugs, so it's a matter of complete indifference to me which one he prescribes.
(By the way, reproductive medicine is an interesting subject for anyone who's interested in the business of health care, since it's one of the very few areas of medicine which is almost entirely a free market rather than an insurance-based one.)
So, not being a hypocrite is somehow not a good thing, I take it.
Pretty much characterizes the right wing these days. As do cite- and fact-free opinions. Bud, you got a problem with these cites, don't be lazy. _Tell_ us, specifically, what's wrong with them, what facts are in error, which data upon which a conclusion is based is inappropriate, etc. Believe it or not, some of us prefer being wrong and then getting it right to being wrong but insisting that we're right regardless. The former is reality-based, the latter, ideology.
A while back, someone asked why there are so few 'conservatives' in academia. I submit that the behavior demonstrated above is _precisely_ why there are so few.
Yes, the "expose" that drug reps are often attractive young women must have taken some serious investigative journalism. I just hope they can get the story out.
I read the report and have some issues with it:
One of the findings is that the NIH found that the NIH was responsible for much of the research that went into many blockbuster drugs. Gee, that's a shock... "NewsFlash! NIH Report Says NIH Really Important!"
The report criticises drug companies for spending most of the R&D budget on applied research and product development instead of basic research. Um... duh? Drug companies are usually trying to develop a . . . drug. So most of their R&D is going to be applied and/or geared towards making a fancy molecule into something you can take in pill form. That's actually a pretty important part of bringing a drug to market.
It also criticises the drug industry for using tax credits. It actually makes a pretty good argument for ending some of the benefits that the government provides to drug companies. I'd be okay with that. But I feel that way about a lot of corporate welfare. But I don't blame the corporations for taking advantage of it. I claim my mortgage tax deduction and any other benefits I can legally claim.
This paragraph actually supports the claim that high U.S. prices subsidize European drug consumers... even the European drug companies use the U.S. to make their profits. So slashing drug company profits in the U.S. would probably hurt European R&D, too!
Meaningless statement obviously made to scare people. What was the percentage return on investment? If the R&D investment was $36 million, then the return is 100%... pretty good. If the R&D investment was $500 million, then $36 million is 18%, not so good considering there are other costs than R&D.
So let's cut their prices/profits and find out! When faced with uncertainty, the obvious course is to impose government regulation just to see if it works!
So they believe that cutting prices and profits will encourage drug companies to move away from the safer "me-too" drugs to more risky drugs? They are counting on the drug company management to be incompetent?
Then there's a whole section on how advertising works and how awful it is that drug companies advertise... I guess they should stick to strategies that don't work. Or get punished by the government. And in the discussion, "Marketing and Administration" is sometimes used as a proxy for "advertising"...
Um... every industry receives 20-year monopoly patents on their inventions, allowing them to charge whatever the market will bear. Heck, even people who sell life jackets and smoke alarms charge whatever the market will bear. Bastards.
The paper's recommendations range from some sensible reductions in corporate welfare to a massive enlargment of the FDA in order to micromanage the drug industry. They would have the FDA set prices (indirectly) based on non-market factors, leading to surpluses and/or shortages.
Actually, one of the big problems with the drug market is that the market is currently screwed up by the fact that most people pay a co-pay and don't have an incentive to shop around. Two-tiered co-pays (higher for name-brand when generic is available) help this, but maybe we should try making the market MORE efficient (by requiring drug co-pays to be a percentage of price or something) before we make it much LESS efficient.
One of the conclusions of the paper is that the drug industry is very healthy and profitable. Um... so let's be sure and put a stop to that nonsense.
'Scuse me, but if I'm not a shareholder for a pharma company, why do I give a crap how they budget?
The bottom line is: I can choose to either buy medicine that's been prescribed for me or not. I can request a generic, the latest-and-greatest on the market, or anything in between. I have yet to have a doctor force me to buy anything.
As long as the final decision to consume rests with me, I repeat, why should I give a crap how the drug companies budget their expenses?
Alas, Big Pharma has developed drugs for pox.
"'if they believe that they're getting a decent return on investment with huge spending on gifts to influence professionals behaviour, that'd worry me more.'
This one is also faulty because it assumes that after doctors self-select out of a very exclusive portion of the population on terms of intellgience, humanitarian concern, and perseverence, complete 7+ years of school followed by residency, and then go through the travails of setting up or assimilating into a practice...they then somehow become mindless sheep who accept whatever they're fed by pharmaceutical marketing."
I'm only aware of two of my doctors doing it, and only one tried to do it to me. The other revealed it after going to prison on an unrelated matter. So far, I can only think of 13 doctors who have prescribed medication for me or my family. That's a pretty bad ratio.
"As long as the final decision to consume rests with me, I repeat, why should I give a crap how the drug companies budget their expenses?"-Posted by Christina
So if they budget money for bribing researchers into declaring a questionable drug safe, a drug that you later get prescribed, that's OK with you.
I'd love to see the government invest in drug development. There is a clear area where it could be highly beneficial, and without infringing greatly upon industrial drug development: antibiotics. Antibiotics are a poor risk for commercial drug for a number of reasons:
1) Development of new antibiotics is hard. Bacteria are highly evolved, due to their short generation time, and have been defending against antibiotics since long before we came along.
2) Nobody wants to pay for a new prescription antibiotic until the generics fail, so there is little incentive for drug companies to develop new antibiotics until people start dying because the old ones aren't working--and the lead time in antibiotic development is so long (see point 1) that a lot more people will die before they succeed.
3) Antibiotics actually cure, so the profit potential is less than for drugs that treat the symptoms of chronic diseases. On top of that, it is bad public relations to charge a high price for a life-saving antibiotic. So the financial incentive is weak
So the government could step in, develop new antibiotics, and not really tread much on anybody's toes.
But I do have a few worries:
Where's the money going to come from? The NIH budget has been shrinking in real dollars for several years. The kind of academic research funded by NIH is complementary to, not duplicative of, the research done by pharmaceutical companies. Most academic research focuses on projects that have no clear return on investment in any reasonable time frame--stuff that no sane drug company would invest in. But that truly basic research is often where the new drug targets come from. The drug industry simply is not going to do this research, and the NIH budget is squeezed tight as it is.
And what happens if they develop a drug and it fails in Phase III, after a billion (or just 100M, pick your favorite number) dollars has been sunk into it? Is there really a political and public will to accept that as the price of doing this sort of research, and try again? Or will there be public recriminations, culminating in the whole project being canned?
But it seems like the perfect test for the proposition that serious noncommercial drug development is possible. If it can't be done for antibiotics, then it probably can't be done at all.
So how about it, enemies of Big Pharm? Can we all get together behind a push for a huge national investment in government supported antibiotic development--one that is in addition to, rather than part of, the NIH basic research budget? It's a chance to prove your point, not to mention getting us the new antibiotics that we are going to need when one of those troubling every-drug-resistant infections finally goes epidemic.
I've always found it interesting that the two companies most responsible for the betterment of mankind are the most reviled: drug and oil companies. Think about it – what other industry has done more to alleviate suffering on this planet then these two? No other. Yet, regardless of how much they improve our lives, there seems to be no end to calls for their punishment.
I’m not qualified to break down the psychological basis for that belief but I’m sure it does not speak well for those that hold it. What seems to be forgotten is that the men and women who work and own the oil and drug companies owe us _nothing_. You have as much right to drugs as you have a right to oil. That is to say, none.
That they act in their own best interest is no reason to vilify them either. Can you say differently about yourself and your own actions? Even if you did, it wouldn’t negate their right to do it. No matter how much you believe you are entitled to the fruits of their labor, until you pay for product it is not yours. Period.