In defense of big pharma

I work in a company that is part of the overarching "health care" industry. There is a lot to criticize about the industry, and I do so every day, but many of the popular books and articles today are simply dishonest in their approach. Peter Huber in Commentary gets it exactly right:

In an April 2005 obituary, the New York Times described Maurice Hilleman as the man who “probably saved more lives than any other scientist in the 20th century.” What kind of genius does it take to get that on your tombstone? Hilleman himself, it seems, “credited much of his success to his boyhood work with chickens.” He went on to use fertilized chicken eggs to grow large quantities of bacteria and viruses that were then weakened or killed to produce vaccines. The technique was known before Hilleman arrived, but isolating and then safely breeding a pathogen requires the touch of a very delicate artist. “Maurice was that artist,” another scientist later recalled; “no one had the green thumb of mass production that he had.”

By farming eggs, Maurice Hilleman saved tens of millions of lives, and prevented deafness, blindness, and other permanent disabilities among many millions more. No Albert Schweitzer or Florence Nightingale could ever post numbers like his. Doctors and nurses save lives one on one, and are paid by the hour. Hilleman saved lives by the carton, at grocery-store prices—acres of cartons, hundreds of millions of warm eggs replicating his genius around the clock.

Getting drug policy right depends mainly on getting that difference straight—the difference, that is, between ministering to the sick and making medicines—and grasping its implications from the start.