By Kevin D. Williamson
Friday, December 18, 2020
If you feel like you haven’t been exposed to enough
stupidity today and would like to remedy that, the New
York Times is here to deliver.
“Big pharma is fooling us,” reads the New York Times headline. “Heroic work
went into the development of the coronavirus vaccines. But that doesn’t mean
this industry deserves your affection.” The essay is by Stephen Buranyi, and it
contains some absolute gems:
The turpitude of the pharmaceutical
industry is so commonplace that it has become part of the cultural wallpaper.
The screenwriters of the 1993 movie “The Fugitive” knew they could find a
perfectly plausible villain to menace Harrison Ford in a faceless drug company
out to cover up its malfeasance. (The film was a hit.) In John le Carré’s 2001
novel “The Constant Gardner,” [sic] a
British diplomat uncovering a pharma giant testing dangerous drugs on poor
Africans is similarly easily to swallow: Its plotline echoes a real case
involving Pfizer in Nigeria. (The company has denied any wrongdoing and settled
out of court the suit brought by the families of children who died during
the testing.)
And yet, since the pharmaceutical
industry stepped in with the vaccines, generations worth of ill will appears to
be melting away. Last year, Gallup polling had the pharmaceutical industry
ranked the most
disliked in America, below both big oil and big government. By this
September — even before the vaccines arrived — the industry’s approval rating
was already
improving.
So, the worry here is that people may be responding more
strongly to a real-world vaccine against a real-world plague than they are to .
. . fictitious events in movies and novels.
Okey-dokey.
Amitabh Chandra of the Harvard Business School raises one
obvious multiple-choice question in response: “Let’s think about the argument
in this article: A virus causes over $16 trillion to damage to the U.S.,
through lost lives and lost economic activity. The government pays $10 billion
and we get two vaccines with 95 percent effectiveness in nine months. This was:
1.) a really good deal; 2.) a handout to big pharma.”
The issue of “affection” raised in the headline is
interesting. One of the things that is genuinely great — and, ultimately,
humane — about the free-market system is that it doesn’t matter very much how
buyers and sellers feel about one another. If I need to fill up the car and the
price is right, does it really matter if I feel any “affection” for 7-Eleven,
or do I just give them the money and get my gasoline and go? (I do feel some
affection for 7-Eleven, a former employer of mine, many years ago. I also kind
of hate 7-Eleven, because they are a very bad neighbor.) Even the companies
people tend to have affectionate feelings about — Apple, Porsche, Armani,
whatever — mostly work for money, not love. That’s how it should be. Adam Smith
had that one right.
We need not be under any illusions about the pharmaceutical business to believe, as many of us do, that Pfizer et al. are much more likely to be of some use in an epidemic than are op-ed moralists at the New York Times.
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