Big Pharma has feels for mifepristone
Corporations are not people, my friends. They have no feelings, only appetites and strong instincts for self-preservation. In that way, they are primitively animal-ish the way A.I. simulates thought. But damned if they aren’t territorial, too.
David Dayen considers Big Pharma’s reaction to the potential banning of mifepristone:
The pharmaceutical industry is very upset. Right-wing federal judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling overturning the Food and Drug Administration’s 23-year-old approval of abortion medication mifepristone could severely damage companies’ ability to develop and market prescription drugs. Companies could spend a fortune getting a drug approved, only to see the courts take issue with the process, and the money washed down the drain. To them, it’s the worst thing a court ruling can be: bad for business.
That’s why Big Pharma is speaking out. On Monday, industry leaders fashioned an open letter condemning Kacsmaryk’s “act of judicial interference,” which “creates uncertainty for the entire biopharma industry … Adding regulatory uncertainty to the already inherently risky work of discovering and developing new medicines will likely have the effect of reducing incentives for investment, endangering the innovation that characterizes our industry.” Over 400 industry CEOs and top executives have signed on to the letter, as of Tuesday afternoon.
Not that Big Pharma cares about its customers. The group displays not even a ChatGPT level of feelings for them. The words woman or women appear nowhere in their 400-word missive. But the group does experience a primitive sense of betrayal, Dayen observes:
[T]he industry’s lament about judicial activism feels a bit like Dr. Frankenstein expressing outrage over the destruction carried out by his monster. The pharmaceutical industry as a whole, and many of the individual officials who signed the letter, financially supported the Senate Republicans who confirmed Kacsmaryk to the federal bench.
They’ve donated self-interestedly to both Republicans and Democrats, writes Dayen, to be fair, as avarice has no party.
Though it’s possible that the ruling will create an irreparable split, given the alignment between drugmakers and anti-regulatory Republicans (all of whom opposed price negotiation on prescription drugs through Medicare last year), it’s unlikely to happen. The only lawmakers who are sure to get left out of the campaign funding bonanza are progressives who want to cut spending on prescription drugs.
Dayen accounts for some of the money PhRMA members have thrown at Republican politicians. Additional millions flung at dark money groups is by design beyond accounting, save perhaps for a “$4.5 million donation from PhRMA in 2020 supported the American Action Network, a right-wing group.”
So if the pharmaceutical industry is looking for someone to blame when right-wing judges don’t respect the FDA approval process, and if they want to cry about the significant investments into drug development that could be lost if it gets blown up, they could try looking in a mirror.
These artificial lifeforms can spare us their silicon tears.