aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, January 30, 2006

Funding priorities

60 Minutes reported last night on the development of a treatment for radiation sickness. The company developed the drug assuming a huge marked, based in part on meetings with the Pentagon and the fear of a nuclear attack on a major American city.

But when the Health & Human Services Department announced that it would buy the drug from whatever company had the best product, it made a commitment to purchase only 100,000 doses. Bob Marsella, the vice president of Hollis-Eden which developed an effective drug, Neumune, makes this important point:

“They’re supposed to create a market, not a starting point,” says Marsella. “If they were going to buy tanks for the military would they just buy one tank, or would they buy 100 tanks? And I think that the contractor would have a hard time spending all the money and research and not have a guarantee that they’re going to buy more than one tank.”

I was struck because the military analogy is such a good one. We know we have threats here, new threats from the new kind of war we’re waging. We hear scenarios of mass casualties from Bird Flu or nuclear attack or environmental catastrophe. But the military remains the only area where we are willing to commit the kind of money that any of these threats demand.