Healthy Skepticism Library item: 1640

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

Collins K.
Profitable gifts: a history of the Merck Mectizan donation program and its implications for international health.
Perspect Biol Med 2004 Win; 47:(1):100-9
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15061171

Abstract:

A unique public/private partnership situated around a pharmaceutical, Merck’s Mectizan donation program stands out as an example of corporate philanthropy in the history of the pharmaceutical industry and provides insight into future public/private partnerships in public health. This paper considers the issues Merck faced in the decision to donate Mectizan (ivermectin) and in the subsequent development of the Mectizan donation program, delineating the moral and financial debates that arose within the company. Coming after almost 15 years of donation, this assessment of the program’s strengths and shortcomings suggests how the pharmaceutical industry can better serve as a viable partner in improving international health.

Keywords:
Community Health Planning/economics* Community Health Planning/history Developing Countries/economics Drug Industry/economics* Drug Industry/history Financing, Organized*/history Gift Giving* History, 20th Century History, 21st Century Humans International Cooperation Ivermectin/economics* Ivermectin/therapeutic use Onchocerciasis/drug therapy* Onchocerciasis/economics Ivermectin

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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