Antibiotics: Why Keynes was good for your health

article of the week

Long, long ago, back in the 1940s, there was a set of beliefs called Keynesianism. It prized economic growth over financial targets and general welfare over the accumulation of vast quantities of lucre. Its prizing of State intervention and higher taxes won the Second World War, and led to thirty years of prosperity and technological advance. But it had its critics. And they had all the money, and therefore all the newspapers. Poor old Keynes was doomed.

Among the advances of those years of public-private partnership there were many advances. Computers and IT, semiconductors, aviation, space technology….but one has been forgotten. It was these years that Ernst Chain and others were able to take the discoveries of Alexander Fleming and turn them into the first generation of mass antibiotics. It was a revolution in health care. And, it has to be said a great reduction in human suffering. Yet enter the Free market Fundamentalists in 1979, and antibiotic development fell by the way. Why? There’s no money in it. And slowly resistance crept back, slowly at first until today, when we balance on the edge of another great pandemic.

But there is hope. Today Nature Briefings reveals that, by throwing out the profit motive, two exciting new antimicrobial drugs have been developed. Allow us to scrap this from Nature

Successful trials of two new antimicrobial drugs — zoliflodacin for drug-resistant gonorrhoea and an antifungal, fosravuconazole — were conducted by non-profit organizations that were founded specifically to bring such drugs to the market. Most legacy pharmaceutical firms have withdrawn from the field, and many of the small biotechnology companies that picked up the torch have gone bankrupt. These two latest achievements suggest that non-profits could help to solve the problem of drug access, while fending off the rise of drug-resistant microbes, which contribute to almost five million deaths per year.Nature | 10 min read

Now, there is a link there to a superb article by Maryn McKenna, which we honestly think you should read as well. But nothing so sums up the belief of this blog so fully. Wealth is about so many more things than just money.

#antibiotics #jm keynes #research #science #economics