Comment by throwanem
1 year ago
It is too specific an argument to be applicable here. Thalidomide was privately developed, as is the cancer miracle drug derivative of it, Revlimid or lenalidomide, discussed early in the article.
The argument is also not too well presented, in that it lacks grounding. For example:
> Why would [a pharma company] want to make something that benefits 1/100000 of the population when something like insulin has a huge market and few competitors?
Because insulin has a huge market and few competitors. That means they have defense in depth on pricing because their manufacturing will be highly specialized and high-throughput, else they could not continue to serve the market unless protected: someone would acquire them or shoulder them out. If you try to disrupt that incumbent, the same will happen to you; you'll be either acquihired, vivisected, or left to go bankrupt in peace for lack of anything novel enough to attract interest.
If, conversely, you can go to one person in every hundred thousand and offer them a pill that will make the difference between life and death - a pill that no one else, ideally, can possibly sell them - well, what can't you ask in return? The traditional rate I understand to have been in the order of one to ten firstborn sons and heirs.
We do things differently now, of course, or less overtly at least. But the business case when considered amorally, as any of that species must be to be understood on its own terms, is trivially clear. The discussion you really want to have is that of whether income inequality can and must be allowed to dictate even partially the dimensions of a human life, versus whether that can and must be prevented. I'm not going to pretend I could summarize the state of the field on that one, which has much older names even than "theodicy."
A fair point, but I'd point out that the research which showed revlimid was a well tolerated cancer medicine didn't happen because of private investment, but rather public NIH grants and funding. The lead author that ran the trials wasn't a pharma employee, but rather a staff member of a cancer research institution.
If someone is going to find that Benadryl can treat a new disease, it won't be a pharma company.
A fair point, indeed. Now we reach the question in a way that anyone can follow: if the cost of development is already sunk, and the cost of discovery is publicly defrayed, then what justifies these absurd revenue multiples of development cost when they come at a price measurable in human suffering and death? In what way is this not sheer price gouging of a particularly vicious kind?
That's the sort of question folks like my prior interlocutor, who appears now to have abandoned the effort, really don't want to answer. And no wonder! There's no way for them to do so while maintaining the usual comfortable abstraction over the essential bloodthirstiness of their philosophy.