Checking big pharma is popular among the American public

By European standards, Biden’s actions are moderate. Most countries negotiate the price of drugs purchased by public health systems. While drug prices are still high across Europe, putting severe strain on overburdened health systems, they are a fraction of the price paid by Americans. What makes Biden’s action so significant is precisely that, up to now, Big Pharma has always had the upper hand in the US, using its power to extract whatever profits it likes from the American public. Despite the unpopularity of the industry, only a few brave politicians would stand up to it.

What’s changed? First, it’s difficult to overstate the impact of the so-called “opioid crisis” on American society. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have died from opioid overdoses. The real scandal is that the major contributor to this epidemic was a drug company called Purdue Pharma, which spent years pushing an opioid called OxyContin on patients. The drug is so strong and addictive that it shouldn’t be prescribed for any but the most serious, end-of-life, pain. But Purdue spent a fortune cajoling doctors into prescribing the drug for even moderate pain, pretending there was little chance of getting hooked. The levels of addiction and death that followed hollowed out whole towns, as can be seen in the recent dramatisation by Netflix, Painkiller.

So the opioid crisis has created mass hostility to the pharma industry. But there’s something deeper going on too, a realisation that these corporations, which we assume are inventing the life-saving medicines of the future, are actually seriously failing in that task.

A big wake-up moment was the COVID-19 pandemic. In the run-up to the pandemic, Big Pharma had little interest in researching pathogens that might cause a major epidemic, or indeed in researching vaccines full stop. They simply didn’t represent the sort of jackpot that, say, a new cancer drug could produce.