Everyone Hates the Pharmaceutical Industry!

I think people have good cause to hate the pharmaceutical industry. Their unreasonable prices for specialty drugs (especially in the US), their constant price increases, their political power (in the US), and their seeming disdain for the public health unless it suits their interests all make the industry, shall we say, unpopular.  When I was working at Wyeth, my biggest complaint about our marketing effort was those ads directed at consumers on television and radio. As a physician, these advertisements made my stomach turn.  I heard constant complaints by other physicians whose patients were constantly questioning them about the advertised drugs or even demanding that they be treated with those drugs.  When I inquired of our marketing colleagues, they had lots of ready-made arguments for why these advertisements were better for patients and physicians (to say nothing of Wyeth’s top line). And I have a bridge I can sell you.

Let’s try to be objective here.  Pharmaceutical companies do not exist to protect the public health and they are not charities or non-profit companies.  They exist to benefit their investors and shareholders. And, they argue, the high risk and tremendous cost ($2.6 billion and counting) of bringing a drug to market requires that they take steps to protect their bottom line. 

The industry recognizes that when they do serve the public health, it can improve their bottom line. This is clearly true for drugs that will cure hepatitis C but is manifestly not true for antibiotics.  And this brings me to the point of this short blog.

In order to incentivize the research and development of new and desperately needed antibiotics, we need to provide an attractive market for these drugs.  (See my interview with Pfizer in this regard). To do this, we will provide a prize or reward to companies who get such products approved and on the market.  This money will come from taxpayers or consumers or both.  OK.  Everyone who wants to give more money to the pharmaceutical industry raise your hands! 

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is our dilemma. If we do not fix the broken antibiotic market by providing such a prize through government action, we will run out of effective antibiotics in the next 40-50 years or so (unless we can slow the emergence of resistance further). If we do fix the market, we will be spending taxpayer or consumer money to reward an industry we hate. People in the US Congress are on a knife’s-edge here. 

I believe that if we could put this case to the population in a way that people could understand, we could go a long way to making our representatives more comfortable with this idea. We would have to deal with all the objections that we have all heard before. Why can’t the government discover and develop and commercialize antibiotics instead of the industry since we will have to pay for it anyway? Why shouldn’t we tax the industry to pay for this award? Etc., etc. 

My impression is that very few in Congress are brave enough to take the action we need to save our future. We need to clear the way for them by taking our case directly to their constituents. And we need to do this quickly and be much more effectively than we have been until now.