WASHINGTON — A House committee on Wednesday moved forward with a bill that will not include any incentive for drug companies to develop new antibiotics, despite efforts by lobbyists and lawmakers to insert such provisions into the legislation.
Drug companies and public health advocates had hoped that some sort of incentive for companies to develop new antibiotics would be included in a bipartisan, must-pass bill that’s been working its way through the legislative process since the beginning of the year. The lack of new antibiotics is widely seen as a pressing public health concern, as infections that are resistant to the current supply of drugs kill tens of thousands of Americans each year, and pharmaceutical companies have a hard time making money on antibiotics.
Antibiotics are a serious issue. We are already running into antibiotic resistant pathogens, and people are dying. The number of deaths is being under-counted, since medical providers have tricks to get around reporting. It is really clear that the Market Driven System is not operating on a level where they could find new antibiotics, or produce necessary drugs. Since the US Taxpayers have already funded a lot of the preliminary research, perhaps the government needs to fund their own labs. The monopolistic, price gouging, and criminal behavior by pharmaceutical companies makes it clear they don’t see profitability here. The mass media has been soft peddling this issue, due to their ties to pharma, so the public remains misinformed as to their odds of getting infected in a hospital. The infection rates are censored, since they could cut into profitability, they have been replaced with corporate advertising.
As the cost of development goes up exponentially each year, primarily due to increasing regulatory demands, drugs designed for short term use, like antibiotics, can’t recover their costs. It’s not surprising that companies are pulling out of this type of research.