[carbocation]

What if governments paid for the clinical trials?

[longerthoughts]

The government does frequently fund the discovery of new drugs. The problem is that the return on that investment is usually abysmal and the taxpayer ends up not only paying to fund the drug’s discovery, but also paying absurdly high prices to buy it from pharmaceutical companies who passed some or all of their risk onto taxpayers.

One example: https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/YourMoney/story?id=129651

[umanwizard]

If you read the article, the drug was in fact discovered at UBC, which is a publicly funded university.

But it turns out that discovering the drug wasn't the expensive part. The expensive part was privately funded.

[carbocation]

Of course. Most of basic science in the US is government funded. I'm wondering what the OP thinks about removing the barrier that they identified (private corps paying for the trial vs gov paying for the trial) and how that would affect their thinking.

[NikolaeVarius]

The article has a section that talks about the difficulty of getting the drug even approved for testing by governments in the first place.

[sneak]

The government is the whole reason the clinical trials are required before patients can be treated with a working drug. They are the cause of the problem, not the solution.