Lowry on how The FDA Makes You Sick

Clever title. Lowry's, of course, not mine.

Of course the article is more than just a clever title, providing some much needed analysis of the current vaccine debacle. The upshot - "When it ceases to be profitable to make a vaccine (or a prescription drug, or anything else), companies stop making it." Other relevant truths include the following:

* Litigation, regulation, and government pricing have hammered vaccine makers during the past two decades, chasing them out of business.

* Democrats would bring the same model of failure to the prescription-drug market and make it just as unprofitable.

* In the 1980s, many vaccine makers were driven out of business by litigation costs. Congress eventually passed legislation protecting vaccine makers from out-of-control lawsuits.

* Another blow came from Hillary Clinton. She championed getting the government into the pediatric-vaccine business in a big way in the 1990s. It now buys 60 percent of pediatric vaccines, dictating cut-rate prices that have dried up vaccine-manufacturing capacity. More regulation inevitably accompanied the government purchases.

* Rather than more government intervention, what vaccine manufacturers need is the government's permission to innovate so they can move beyond the inefficiencies of the current system.

Here are some other good articles on the subject of drugs:

Drug Prices Are Reasonable

Missing the Point

Also worth checking out is the paper "Prices And Availability Of Pharmaceuticals: Evidence From Nine Countries," which can be found here:
Link