The Tyranny Of Big PHARMA: Morally *and* Economically Foolish

SHORT TAKES: Biden Gets A "B Minus" Grade on Corporate Influence; A Unified Child Benefit; A "Well-Being" Economy; George Floyd

LONG TAKE

To say that Big PHARMA has cost millions of lives is probably not a revelation—lives lost because the greed of these companies puts live-saving medicine out of the reach of poor people, not to mention lives lost because the cost of drugs bankrupted people who sunk deeper into misery and perished because economic destitution kills.

So, here we are at a key moment with a question that might be answered in just a few weeks: will COVID-19 kill millions of people simply because Big PHARMA’s profits mattered more than the lives of people, principally in poorer countries? And, depending on what he does, Joe Biden will have that monumental loss of life as a stain on his legacy.

I wrote about this two months ago but this is an issue to keep after. So, the background is easy to understand:

Under the World Trade Organization rules, Big Pharma gets *lengthy* monopoly protections for medicines, tests and the technologies used to produce the medicines and tests. That’s one reason people ha…