Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13875

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Light D.
Missing the real issue about the pneumo AMC
Development Today 2008 Jun 11; XVIII:(8):11
http://www.development-today.com/magazine/2008/DT_8/Opinion/3490

Abstract:

The Advance Market Commitment that donors want to use to promote vaccines for poor children is really not about markets
at all. It is a one-time, pre-fixed buyout. If donors had started with the question of how to maximize the number of
poor children saved, the answer would not be an AMC, writes Donald Light.

Over the past few months, the GAVI Alliance and its Expert Economic Group have been working hard to address the “major
uncertainties” about how much it will cost to expand capacity to produce the new generation of pneumoccocal vaccines for
poor countries and “in finding a price that will work” for GlaxoSmithKline and Wyeth to do the job. The resulting
39-page, single-space report is all about saving the AMC mechanism and meeting the innovator companies’ demands, not
about how to maximize the number of poor children saved. That question does not get one paragraph. If it did, any
sensible person would not use an AMC approach…

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909