…will mean that (wait for it!) CHINA will become the dominant pharma power, on the planet. Welp. That’s just…
I N S A N E.
He “gets there” by saying that since (from an era over 75 years ago!), Europe was the center of drug innovation, and then about fifty years ago (and ever since), the US has been the center of most of the innovation… that entire affect was due SOLELY to Europe making medicines more affordable for humans. Uh-huh.
Well — that’s just silly. And to extrapolate from that fiction, to assume that China can catch the US on innovation, in new drug candidates… [will it break into the US Patent office?!] is like assuming that any smaller but developed nation could leapfrog perhaps a trillion dollars in total sunk investments, and forty years of bench work… to suddenly take the lead in all drug research franchises. Um… how?!
But that (not just coincidentally) is only slightly more outrageous than the fictions PhRMA is now peddling, to try to dissuade / prevent federal government agencies from negotiating directly for drugs, on pricing.
And to top it off, he makes equally stupid claims about US tax policy / enforcement.
I will, in future posts explain where PhRMA has gone wrong, on most likely policy outcomes.
But for tonight, ask yourself: could China spend a trillion dollars next year, just to build drug research capacity? Maybe — but it couldn’t do anything else. And where would it find three generations of truly creative cutting edge science leaders? [They almost all work in the Western world now.]
And so — Hinderaker is so far out in right field, that he’s well outside the parking lot fence.
Powerline Lies... 