$3 for 3 months. Save 90%.
$3 for 3 months. Save 90%.

Opinion: Big Pharma doesn't deserve all the hate

Sandip Shah

Americans loathe the pharmaceutical industry. It ranks dead last in a recent Gallup poll that tracks the public's opinion of 25 different sectors. Even the federal government is more popular, with a net favorability rating of negative 27 points, compared to pharma's negative 31-point rating. 

This scorn is misplaced. It's true that the biopharmaceutical sector contains a few bad actors who price gouge and cut regulatory corners. But the majority of drug companies are responsible corporate citizens that spend billions to invent lifesaving medicines. 

If we let our collective resentment turn into tangible, anti-innovation policies – such as drug price controls – we'll end up worse off.

Sandip Shah

American pharmaceutical researchers deserve credit for the lion's share of medical progress. In 2017, drug firms poured $97 billion into research and development operations in the United States. That's more than double the U.S. government's spending on scientific research. Scientists in U.S. labs are currently developing 4,500 experimental drugs – more than half of all medicines in development worldwide. 

Thanks to these efforts, Americans are beating deadly diseases in record numbers. Cancer death rates have declined close to 30% since the 1990s. Researchers credit nearly three-quarters of these survival gains to groundbreaking new drugs.

Biopharmaceutical research also revolutionized the treatment of HIV/AIDS. Just 30 years ago, a diagnosis was a death sentence. In the mid-1990s, scientists developed highly active antiretroviral therapies. These drugs caused HIV/AIDS death rates to plummet 88%, and have averted close to 1 million premature deaths in the United States alone.  

Scientists have recently turned their attention to new types of drugs, such as gene and immunotherapies, that reprogram patients' own bodies to fight disease. Doctors are already using these cutting-edge medicines to treat hemophilia, leukemia and blindness.   

Progress like this doesn't come easy. Each new drug is the result of millions of man-hours of research and testing. It takes over a decade to turn a promising lab compound into a marketable medicine. For every experimental drug that makes it to patients, nine others fail in clinical trials.  

Taking this failure rate into consideration, it costs more than $2 billion on average to bring a new treatment to market. 



To see the true face of the pharmaceutical industry, Americans can look to innovators like the late Maurice Hilleman, a Merck researcher who developed eight of the 14 most common children's vaccines, including the immunizations for chickenpox and measles. Researchers like him have collectively saved and improved tens of millions of lives.

The biopharmaceutical industry isn't perfect. No industry is. But drug companies work every day to cure our deadliest diseases, risking billions of dollars in the process. 

