The For-Profit Pharmaceutical Industry Is Leaving Us Exposed to Pandemics Like Coronavirus
The pharmaceutical industry has so far failed to develop a coronavirus cure. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg: the privatized health care model can’t provide the drugs we need to combat even deadlier bacterial epidemics, because they’re producing drugs for profit rather than human need.
Male nurses wearing a face mask and overalls bring a patient on a stretcher into the newly built Columbus COVID-2 temporary hospital to fight the new coronavirus infection, on March 16, 2020, at the Gemelli hospital in Rome. Andreas Solaro / AFP via Getty
The rapid spread of COVID-19 is revealing the manifest failures of the US health-care system, from our lack of preventive care and emergency response preparedness to our failure to produce a cure. These problems are rooted in the organization of our health-care system around the profit motive. But the coronavirus is just the tip of the iceberg. If and when the disease is contained, our for-profit system leaves us vulnerable to even more frightening epidemics.
“Deadly Superbugs Win as Wall Street Flees Makers of Antibiotics,” Bloomberg reported in June 2019. The growing threat of these “superbugs” — bacterial infections that are resistant to standard antibiotics — means that development of new antibiotics is badly needed.
But because research and development of antibiotics is insufficiently profitable, drug companies aren’t stepping up. Without medicines to combat superbugs, humanity is at risk of other deadly epidemics unseen since the discovery of antibiotics.
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