Yup, Andrew Sullivan has gay rights and I have medical research.
Jim Glassman helps me out with a thoughtful and trenchant piece on TCS: The Fight for the Future of Drug Research and Development
... bringing new vaccines and other drugs to market -- even with the possibility that the Global Fund will purchase them in bulk -- is by no means assured. And the obstacles are not merely scientific. They involve a vigorous movement to transform the process of inventing and distributing pharmaceuticals from a largely free-market model to a largely collectivist one.
At the heart of the new model is a disdain for rights to intellectual property, which, in the old model, provides the main incentive for spending the vast amounts -- an average of $800 million -- to develop a single drug and bring it to market.
The current climate of animosity toward drug companies, many analysts believe, can only discourage research and development.
For example, a study by Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute found that the number of companies working on anti-retroviral research to stop HIV from developing into AIDS dropped by 27 percent between 1997 and 2003, "with fewer compounds in the development phase."It is not hard to understand why. Firms that develop such drugs are vilified by radicals and run the risk that their products will simply be ripped off by copycats in India, Thailand and other developing countries -- with the encouragement of groups like the Clinton Foundation, Oxfam and even the World Health Organization.
All these people "gonna fight the drug companies!" Glad to hear it Senator, if you didn't fight them they might do research on miracle cures -- we can't have that.
Posted by jk at October 28, 2004 04:00 PM