WHATEVER you think of free markets, it鈥檚 hard to deny that they create powerful forces for innovation. Profit encourages investment in new technologies and products, while competition ensures that they keep coming.
But not always. Consider antibiotics. A successful antibiotic drives its own obsolescence: the more of it you sell, the more bacteria resist it. You can鈥檛 improve sales through marketing, for fear of encouraging overuse, which also promotes resistance.
The market forces that proved so effective at coming up with a remedy for male impotence have let us down when it comes to antibiotic resistance. That鈥檚 alarming. As 快猫短视频 has reported for two decades, the abuse of antibiotics has led to the emergence of resistant bacteria and hard-to-treat infections. And since antibiotics are poor earners, there鈥檚 little new in the drug-delivery pipeline.
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After years of mounting concern, the now desperate global healthcare community is finally taking steps outside the normal market-driven drug development process. The broad idea is to de-link the payment a company receives for developing a drug from its subsequent sales. That should give companies confidence that they will make money, although as yet there鈥檚 no consensus on exactly how to do it (see 鈥�Superbug crisis: Global push to save antibiotics begins鈥�).
Fortunately, we have plenty of ideas. Our society already makes things that aren鈥檛 driven by profits from sales: taxpayer-funded public goods like roads, schools or basic research. Fixing the market failure in antibiotics production means transforming pharma companies 鈥� or parts of them 鈥� into public goods producers, with public interest rather than profit driving R&D and marketing.
聯Fixing the market failure in antibiotics production means transforming pharma companies聰
The industry has little to lose: it isn鈥檛 making much money on antibiotics anyway. But the stakes are high for everyone else. Turning shareholder-owned pharma firms into socially motivated medicine-makers will not be easy. And the challenge isn鈥檛 just finding new drugs 鈥� it also involves conserving the efficacy of old ones.
The furore over the attempted takeover of the UK鈥檚 AstraZeneca by US-based Pfizer showed how contentious state involvement in the pharma industry can be. But now the door to non-market solutions is open, governments should press on: and not just the health ministers who discussed the idea in Geneva this week.
Antibiotic resistance is a huge, implacable and evolving threat. It demands a weighty, determined and flexible response.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淎nti-resistance movement鈥�
