The Free Market Isn’t Up to the Coronavirus Challenge
If it’s not profitable for pharmaceutical companies to produce a cure, they won't produce a cure. We cannot win the fight against coronaviruses and future infectious diseases unless we properly fund a public sector that values public health over profit.
Residents of Mei Foo protest against government plans to convert the Jao Tsung-I Academy into a quarantine camp on February 2, 2020 in Hong Kong, China. Anthony Kwan / Getty
Amid all the breathless reporting on the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak, one quote in Nature from one of the world’s leading experts on this family of viruses, structural biologist Rolf Hilgenfeld, stood out.
“The total number of people infected, if you combine SARS, MERS [previous related coronavirus outbreaks] and this new virus, is under 12,500 people. That’s not a market. The number of cases is too small. Pharmaceutical companies are not interested,” he told the scientific journal.
Hilgenfeld was on his way to Hubei province even as the Chinese government was placing the 57-million population of Wuhan and surrounding cities under lockdown, or fēng chéng, to test early-stage drug candidates on animals infected by the new coronavirus, designated 2019-nCoV.
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