In Goldman Sachs’s April 10 report, “The Genome Revolution,” its
analysts ponder the rise of biotech companies who believe they will
develop “one-shot” cures for chronic illnesses; in a moment of rare
public frankness, the report’s authors ask, “Is curing patients a
sustainable business model?”
The authors were apparently spooked by the tale of Gilead Sciences, who
developed a Hepatitis C therapy that is more than 90% effective, making
$12.5B in 2015 – the year of the therapy’s release – a number that
fell to $4B this year.
The analysts are making a commonsense observation: capitalism is
incompatible with human flourishing. Markets will not, on their own,
fund profoundly effective cures for diseases that destroy our lives and
families. This is a very strong argument for heavily taxing the profits
of pharma companies’ investors and other one percenters, and then
turning the money over to publicly funded scientific research that
eschews all patents, and which is made available for free under the
terms of the Access To Medicines treaty, whereby any country that
devotes a set fraction of its GDP to pharma research gets free access to
the fruits of all the other national signatories.
Humans have shared microbial destiny. If there’s one thing that
challenges the extreme libertarian conception of owing nothing to your
neighbor save the equilibrium established by your mutual selfishness,
it’s epidemiology. Your right to swing your fist ends where it connects
with my nose; your right to create or sustain reservoirs of pathogens
that will likely kill some or all of your neighbors is likewise subject
to their willingness to tolerate your recklessness.
Goldman Sachs’s analysts suggest three “cures” for the problem of
one-shot cures; and taxing the rich to fund socialized pharma research
isn’t among them; rather, they propose eschewing rare diseases, to
ensure that the pool of patients is large enough to produce a return on
their investment, or developing one-shot cures fast enough to “offset
the declining revenue trajectory of prior assets.”
