Ebola Cure Not Fully Developed Because Big Pharma Not Interested In Saving Lives Of Poor People In Africa
from the back-burner dept
As you may have heard, there's been a somewhat scary Ebola outbreak in western Africa. You may have also heard about what some are calling a "secret miracle serum" that effectively stops the impact of the virus for those who catch it. It's an experimental drug that hasn't undergone human clinical trials yet, but it was apparently given to a couple of Americans and appears to be working. There's some indication that it would take a couple months to produce a larger number of doses -- though, again, the lack of testing here means that people really aren't sure if it will work (or if there are serious side effects).That said, as one article notes, a big reason that there hasn't been much testing on this is because treating poor people in Africa just isn't very profitable for the drug companies:
“These outbreaks affect the poorest communities on the planet. Although they do create incredible upheaval, they are relatively rare events,” said Daniel Bausch, a medical researcher in the US who works on Ebola and other infectious diseases.While some may question whether or not Bausch's statement is just from frustration from where he is, Big Pharma execs more or less confirm his claims. Remember that it was just a few months ago that we wrote about Bayer's CEO claiming directly that they make drugs for rich people who can afford it:
“So if you look at the interest of pharmaceutical companies, there is not huge enthusiasm to take an Ebola drug through phase one, two, and three of a trial and make an Ebola vaccine that maybe a few tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people will use.”
Bayer Chief Executive Officer Marijn Dekkers called the compulsory license "essentially theft."As we noted at the time, it's worth comparing that statement to what George Merck, the former President of Merck said many decades ago concerning the pharma industry:
"We did not develop this medicine for Indians," Dekkers said Dec. 3. "We developed it for western patients who can afford it."
We try never to forget that medicine is for the people. It is not for the profits. The profits follow, and if we have remembered that, they have never failed to appear. The better we have remembered it, the larger they have been.It seems that we've come a long way from those days.
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Filed Under: africa, clinical trials, drugs, ebola, economics, pharmaceuticals, serum
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Very well, Mr. Dekkers. I'll grant you that. Then, by applying your exact same line of reasoning, your policy of providing life-saving medicine only to rich folks who can afford it is "essentially murder."
If I have to choose between supporting theft and supporting murder, I'll take the thief's side any day.
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A perfect example
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Re: A perfect example
It's interesting how the research came to be "jointly conducted" in the US. A researcher quit his job in the Winnipeg lab, stole 22 vials of (non-infectious) Ebola research materials - Ebola DNA and whatnot - threw them in the trunk of his car and headed across the border to his new job at the US lab. U.S. Customs discovered the vials and arrested him.
http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/local/lab-didnt-tell-police-22-vials-stolen-45078877.html
To put the danger of having the lab nearby into perspective, a few months after it opened the area around it was evacuated. It turned out it was the car battery place across the street that prompted the evacuation after a large amount of battery acid spilled. It could have turned into a harmful gas.
This is what I love about Winnipeg. A level 4 containment biolab playing with Ebola and other viruses gets evacuated because the folks across the street spilled something.
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Re: A perfect example
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Ebola is, for all its horrors, extremely rare, and it's not just companies that have very little incentive to do anything about it. Even getting purely altruistic donors or researchers to devote resources to it is challenging, given that there are so many more diseases (malaria being one example) that affect so many more people, in Africa and elsewhere. Its rarity makes it a low priority, until of course we encounter an outbreak such as this.
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Unless you're suffering from it.
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Re: A perfect example
"It'll cost you a billion dollars to get a drug past the FDA."
"Well, I guess I'll stop research any drug unlikely to make at least a billion dollars, then."
"DAMN YOU FREE MARKET!!!!1"
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Re: Re: A perfect example
While drug companies intentionally make it difficult to speak knowledgeably about costs because they refuse to release breakdowns of the costs associated with drug development, manufacture, and marketing (which is a pretty huge red flag by itself), it is interesting to note that smaller drug companies manage to bring drugs to market for around half a billion dollars altogether.
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Not a cut & dry issue....
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/40714/title/Bioethics-of-Experimental-Eb ola-Treatments/
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Re: Not a cut & dry issue....
When we are talking about ethics it is clear that people who cannot understand the implications are at a dilemma. On the other hand, people who can be led to understand the risk should have the choice. Since Ebola is 50%+ deadly it easily becomes a question of if it is more important to survive or to risk sideeffects. When we are talking the people without the means to understand the choice, it is an ethical dilemma to give it or not to give it. Otherwise this ailment has too high a mortality for people to not want their chances improved...
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Very well, Mr. Dekkers. I'll grant you that. Then, by applying your exact same line of reasoning, your policy of providing life-saving medicine only to rich folks who can afford it is "essentially murder."
If I have to choose between supporting theft and supporting murder, I'll take the thief's side any day.
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What Bayer and other companies would like to forget is that copying is an ability, not a right (and certainly not theft).
The limitation on copying is granted by the government (and ultimately by the society it represents.. no, don't laugh :D) on the premises that it'll serve society in some way (by giving the thing up into the public domain after a certain time).
Governments certainly have the right, to put further conditions on giving this monopoly, like compulsive licensing, when society decides that it is worth more than what it requires normally.
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damned typos
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I am expected to put up my money and bear te cost to develop a product for which there is no profitable demand and for which any profit received will be confiscated to support a group of people who ave a need and no means of support.
Why would I as an investor want to own shares in a company that operates in this fashion?
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You wouldn't.
Happily, there are many people vastly superior to you (which wouldn't take much) who would. But I'm sure this is well beyond your pitifully feeble comprehension and it's certainly outside the scope of your myopic, self-centered, entirely-driven-by-greed world view. So don't trouble your pretty vacuous little head with it.
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Fortunately for my bank account and my eating I am interest in rate of return on investment not in your pampas pontification of why my looking out for myself is immoral; it is not.
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There is, in fact, a major project of great potential benefit to society that I am directly contributing my time and talents to, but as I'm under NDA, (and as boasting about it would be in direct violation of my moral code,) I don't really have much to say about it at the moment except to be careful with your assumptions.
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Second, if you are contributing your time and talents in exchange for money, that's hardly an analogous situation, is it?
Third, have you heard of a humblebrag?
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C'mon, dude, didn't you ever learn in kindergarten that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar?
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wasn't that a movie plot already?
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(Oh, and please: save me the "Silent Spring" nonsense. Even if it weren't junk science, measuring the loss of bird life against the human toll makes you little more than a ghoul that, as I noted above, doesn't actually care much about human life.)
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Very nice troll. I give it a 7/10/
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One of the primary points in favor of banning DDT is that it was no longer working. Even back when Silent Spring came out, it was becoming more and more clear that DDT had lost its effectiveness, because improper application of the pesticide had placed massive, highly effective selective pressure on mosquito populations, causing them to adapt in much the same way as the abuse of antibiotics today is directly responsible for the emergence of multi-antibiotic-resistant super-bacteria.
The problem with DDT isn't just that it's toxic to larger animals such as birds, (but also mammals, including human beings, since it accumulates in tissues,) but that it's toxic to larger animals and does not help against malaria. Not anymore.
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This seems to be particularly true in primitive societies like the United States, where religious fanatics have done their best to drown out sober, serious, adult conversation in favor of their superstitions and myths.
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Yes they are. You just can't apply the same worthless stereotype to them without looking like an ass.
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The whole "DDT was banned despite helping against Malaria" thing simply never happened.
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Under the Stockholm Convention, DDT is banned for all uses EXCEPT to combat malaria. The World Health Organization also endorsed the use of DDT as part of its anti-malaria program in 2006. So, no, environmentalists have NOT gotten in the way of malaria control. And the effect of DDT on birds is well-documented. Here's a recent article from a source that hardly relies on "junk science": http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ddt-still-killing-birds-in-michigan/
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https://medium.com/the-nib/how-to-cure-exotic-diseases-24ccbff8610
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Perhaps its just really really hard to do.
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I think we need both, with the government funding focused on issues that have lesser profit potential but high human need.
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If you need any help imagining the response of existing pharmaceutical companies to a genuine cure for cancer, diabetes, arthritis, or any number of chronic ailments, you need look no farther than the music industry's reaction to file-sharing.
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I would make a distinction between real "research" and "development". Research would here relate to pure land winning poking around, while development would include the process of getting an actual product developed. Research works well on universities today. Development, not so much.
So far the solution has been to make the poking patentable so the sale to private companies gets less obscure, but development is done by private companies today and changing that would make a public "research institute" quite a different thing than the research we know today. Don't get me wrong, it could happen, but the current political movement is in the diametrically opposite direction.
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I'm not saying that Big Pharma isn't full of a bunch of profiteering a-holes (it is); but up until now Ebola hasn't been a particularly big problem. From a numbers perspective it still isn't - influenza, for instance, infects between 5-20% of the American population every year and causes the hospitalizations of 200,000 people in the US alone every year (www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/disease.htm), while this Ebola outbreak currently has fewer than 2,000 infectees.
Ebola is a truly horrendous disease, but working on a vaccination and treatment for a disease that has (until now) infected only 2,387 people in 38 years was not a priority when limited resources were being focused on illnesses affecting a lot more people. Malaria, for instance, killed around 600,000 people in 2012 - most of them Africans(www.who.int/features/factfiles/malaria/en/).
An argument can certainly be made that Big Pharma only started caring about this situation when it started affecting Americans (and thus could potentially be profitable). But the fact is that Ebola historically hasn't affected that many people, and the resources that could have been spent on Ebola were spent on diseases and illnesses killing much larger groups of people.
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(And no, I'm deliberately not counting the Spanish Influenza here. That's more of a scare story than anything relevant to the modern age; the horrors it wrought a century ago were due far more to contemporary medical science not knowing how to deal with it than to the disease itself, and another outbreak of the same virus would not have nearly the same effect today.)
Ebola's effects, on the other hand, are positively horrendous, killing between 50% and 90% half of infectees and leaving behind severe lasting effects on those who survive. Yes, it hasn't ever become an epidemic in a highly urbanized nation yet, but all it would take is once...
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A Spanish-flu type pandemic is also far more likely to occur in an urbanized nation than an Ebola pandemic.
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One idea (not sure if it's a good one) would be to use tax-incentives to create industry consortiums where multiple companies can collaborate. In such a scheme, each company makes a relatively small commitment, but progress could be made.
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The problem with tax incentives is that they take money out of the pockets of the 99% and put it in the pockets of the 1%.
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In many cases, no. Remember, corporations are people too, my friend, and there are plenty of documented cases of large, powerful corporations using tax evasion techniques not available to us normal folks to literally pay no or even negative taxes (receiving more money in tax breaks than they pay out in taxes.) GE is perhaps the most infamous example, but they are by no means the only one.
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I wholeheartedly agree that the U.S. tax code is ridiculously complex and suboptimal, but the notion that rich people don't pay taxes is just as ridiculous (especially if we consider sales tax and other non-income taxes, which are sometimes the only taxes that poorer people are paying).
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it is not LITERALLY that rich people pay no taxes (although there are some who by dint of tax skullduggery do not), but that they do NOT pay their 'fair share'...
rich people also use FAR MORE RESOURCES than poor people: not too many poor people have a private jet that takes advantage of airports built with the 99%'s tax dollars; nor do poor people jet-set around the world as much as wealthy people...
it is off the backs of the poor and middle class that modern stadiums get built, NOT with the pocket money of the team owners... it is off the backs of the poor and middle class taxed at a HIGHER RATE (see, buffet, warren: 'my secretary pays a higher tax rate than i do') that EVERYTHING, including Empire's enforcement arm, the military, gets paid for...
greedy libertards like you make me want to puke... you have NO RESPECT for anyone but the wealthy, your 'values' are skewed 180 degrees from normal... you have totally bought into the 'greed is good' mantra at the expense of 99% of your fellow human beans...
and yet there will be a look of hurt and surprise when the destitute gangs drag you and yours out for a necktie party...
*snort*
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I have a better idea. Let's try this:
"Dear Pharma Company Executive:
You have been selected to assist with our mission of spurring timely innovation in drug research, manufacture, and distribution. Accordingly, at 10:30 AM on March 16, 2016, one of your children is scheduled to be injected with Ebola. We trust that you will by then have in plan sufficient research and development resources to make this event moot. If not, we offer our sincere condolences."
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Cue Pharma Company Executive to start adopting children from third world countries...
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Of course that won't happen because of the 3-M principle: "MINE! MINE! MINE!"
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I'm conflicted
And ebola is scary, yes, but malaria is still far far far worse.
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The Onion nailed this a week ago`
“...Whil e all measures are being taken to contain the spread of the contagion, an effective, safe, and reliable Ebola inoculation unfortunately remains roughly 50 to 60 white people away, if not more... We are confident, however, that with each passing white person, we’re moving closer to an eventual antigenic that will prevent and possibly even eradicate the disease.”
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Title assumes facts not in evidence
Big pharma is interested only in profit; if some lives get saved by accident while profiting, well that's nice.
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Yes, but...
Considering the primary method of transmitting Ebola is through exchange of bodily fluids, I think education is the key to combatting and containing it, not necessarily a cure. Regardless of what ever is discussed here, resources for research and development, regardless of how it's funded, are limited. If there's an alternative to spending, quite literally, billions of dollars to curing something, such as education and hygiene, that's probably where the initial focus should be. Private pharmaceutical companies have issues no doubt, but I don't see vast streams of funding flooding into development of cure in the Public or Charitable sectors either.
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A couple of questions about past Big Pharma R&D priorities
1) I recall hearing a news story on the CBC (our national news broadcaster) some years ago about an effective new treatment (a drug) developed to combat some serious tropical disease. It was shelved because it was "too expensive" -- but it subsequently turned out to be good for minimizing wrinkles and was resurrected as a component for high-end facial cream. What was the product, and what was the disease?
2) Similarly, another news story from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company); it was discovered that some fairly common compound was likely an effective treatment for a common serious ailment (not a "tropical disease, but something actual relevant in good old N. America) but research lagged because the chemical in question was too common and too cheap and probably not patentable (or at least not profitable). If I recall correctly, there was even an effort to raise funds and do the necessary research/trials outside of the pharmaceutical companies, as the pharmaceutical companies weren't interested in pursuing the matter. Again, the same question: What was the product, and what was the disease?
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Where's the cure for confirmation bias?
Actual article: Rare diseases are not the priority target of pharmaceutical research, who would have thought?
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Re: Where's the cure for confirmation bias?
Conservatives have an underlying "theology" that everything should be privatized, because, "
Unfortunately, the private sector must also be able to make a profit, which means that despite the above "theology", the private sector can not do everything.
So if we need a vaccine for Ebola, West Nile, or equine encephalitis, and the private sector cannot do these at a profit, shall we all then simply die?
So I propose a corollary to the privatization "theology":
So in this case, since the private sector cannot make an Ebola vaccine at a profit, and if we need an Ebola virus (which I think is a given based on its contagiousness and mortality) then it falls to government.
The problem is that the private sector bias overrides in every case, so that even when we desperately need a solution, if the private sector can't do it at a profit, well we just do without.
It should not be that way.
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Africa first
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