Fortune favors the big
Ah! The advantages of being big! Here's another case of Big Pharma using its clout, its presence behind closed doors, to get unrestricted access to US tax dollars, all in the name of homeland security.
Since 9/11, the government has been rightly concerned about the creation of pandemic diseases and their being loosed on the US population (smallpox, anthrax, or yet unknown ones). For that reason, a program to develop the capacity to create rapid-response vaccines has been created as part of national security. Vaccines, as we have pointed out, are not major profit-makers for drug companies, and there is some danger that the expertise and apparatus to make new ones would decline without government spending. (Source: Slate.com, "Homeland Security's Mystery Money", 2/23/2004) We'll quote the Slate article,
Encouraging the production of new vaccines and antitoxins is a good idea. But this program seems to have no oversight, timetables, quality standards, or other strings attached. Its connection to tangible results is so tenuous that the OMB, in calculating how much has really been budgeted for homeland security, makes a point of deducting the allocations to the BioShield program.
The Administration is planning to write a hefty (around $2 billion), no-strings check to large pharmaceuticals, to encourage them to develop products that cannot be specified yet for an undetermined threat, with no specific criteria or demanded expectations. The drug companies, already the beneficiaries of the recent Medicare drug program bill, are handed yet another nice gift. This happens at a time when local police, fire, and emergency crews that do have concrete and expensive responsibilities for national security are being stiffed, and when only $3.6 billion is being budgeted for bioterrorism in the federal health and human services department, include the Center of Disease Control.
The companies that are likely to profit? Pfizer, Bayer, and other large companies will be handed money, with no ceding of their patent rights and with little organized supervision. The assumption is that while big government is always suspect, big business can do no wrong. An influential oligopoly once again gets to write the plan to favor their interests, and you can bet that they were helping the legislators with the complex task of drafting the legislation.
