Big Pharma Case Study

1. What can we learn about health care ethics and Big Pharma from this book? There is a general disconnect between health care ethics and Big Pharma. Pharmaceutical companies do not run on a healthcare model designed to help patients, but on a business model intended to maximize profit. Medical ethicist Harriet Washington writes of how 10 percent of all medical research is dedicated to 90 percent of the world’s ailments (p. 314). Pharmaceutical companies invest such a small percentage of their efforts into research, because there are no lofty profits to be had, investing in medicines that protect patient welfare. Big Pharma boasts that its’ high prices are necessary to recoup their gigantic investments in developing patented medicines.

The African American community have long been treated like “guinea pigs” (p. 223) following a long history of unwarranted medical experimentation and abuse without informed consent on black women and children. Washington writes of how, “In 1995, black and Hispanic children…were given experimental measles vaccines without their parents knowledge…the Medical University of South Carolina was accessed of illegal experimentation when it enrolled pregnant women…most of them black, in a drug treatment research study without their knowledge…three New York City research institutions gave six – to eleven-year-old black boys the cardiotoxic drug …as part of research into genetically mediated violence.”

Some physicians claim to have discovered “black diseases”, with “black remedies”, leading them to create drugs tailored to specific races (p. 155). One such drug was BiDil. Due to a negative bias in pharmaceutical companies, clinical trials of a medication that show signs of ending badly are terminated in order to sell more under patent profits; even if it means not knowing the full effects of a medication. In the case of BiDil, this medication had social and economic effects, evidence of a separate-but-“equal” medicine (p.