SICK MONEY
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE GLOBAL PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY
BILL KENBER
Canongate, 432pp, £18.99
Billy Kenber’s new book looks in depth at the global business of pharmaceuticals – and it discovers, few readers will be surprised to find, that corporate greed and exploitation plays just as much of a part in the story as the selfless desire to push the boundaries of medical science and save lives. A host of books with titles such as Bottle of Lies, Bad Pharma, Empire of Pain, Dopesick, Selling Sickness and The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It have already told us as much.
That said, as Martha Gill observed writing in the Times, the Covid crisis did rather a lot to reform Big Pharma’s image: ‘A pandemic illustrates rather sharply the importance of having a $1 trillion industry dedicated to finding new medicines and translating those discoveries into billions of doses.’ Even so, Gill added, Kenber reveals that the story wasn’t that simple. Drug companies don’t like vaccines (they eradicate diseases so you don’t get repeat customers), and when Covid struck most were reluctant to get involved until they were promised billions in government subsidies. Even then, they preferred to sell the drugs to rich countries at high mark-ups and declined to share intellectual property rights with poorer countries.
Kenber’s indictment of the industry, she said, distinguished itself from its predecessors ‘by its investigative power and meticulous clarity’, and its scope goes far beyond Covid. It begins with the discovery of penicillin in 1928 and takes us to the present day ‘in an account studded with victims, villains and heroes’, notable among them ‘the South African drug company prepared to destroy stocks of a cancer medicine for children rather than bring down the price’.
The book ends with a call for action: ‘There is still hope for redemption, and Kenber lays out a plan for reform,’ said Gill. She added: ‘Whatever the remedy, it can’t come too soon.’