McCain on pharmaceutical research at MI townhall (1-12-08)

Government can save lives by considering the following when making policy.
1) Drug profits fuel life saving research. Any government policy that reduces profits, no matter how well-meaning will decrease the amount of money available for drug-discovery.
2)Tort reform. Vaccine development is particularly sensitive to legal liability because vaccines produce lifelong immunity after only one or a few shots and thus produce less profit than drugs like penicillin which may be used several times in a person’s life. If an adverse reaction occurs 1 in 100,000 cases with a vaccine that reduces mortality in that population by 5%, 4,999 people will be saved for every person who is harmed by the vaccine. and yet fear of lawsuits may lead a drug manufacturer to pull such a vaccine from the market or may scare the executives enough that they never invest the money to develop the vaccine in the first place. Vaccines are so effective at saving lives that they allow people to forget just how bad the disease was in the first place. Looking back at how much life has been improved by vaccines, it is frightening to see how many fewer vaccines are being developed today than in the past.
3) University research provides the impetus for pharmaceutical development. Drug companies routinely commence drug development on the basis of information made available by a university patent. The Bayh-Dole act of 1980 provides an incentive for universities to find companies which will take its discoveries and turn them into life-saving products by giving universities patent rights to all research funded by the federal government. Bayh-Dole has vastly increased the rate of commercialization and thus the return on the taxpayer-funded investment in basic research.

Duration : 0:2:40

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