If you liked The Secret Barrister, then this is a must-read

Kenber builds on his important investigative reports for The Times—which rightly won him the 2017 award for Outstanding Contribution to Health or Medical Journalism—with this iconoclastic take on the abuses and distorted priorities of the pharmaceutical industry. At the heart of Kenber’s cogent and well-researched argument is an acknowledgement of the perverse incentives generated by the ‘wider view of drugs as financial assets disconnected from their societal importance’ and the ways in which this has led to rampant price-hiking, negativity impacted on research and development, and, most importantly, left many patients without the drugs they need.

Indeed, what is perhaps most powerful about this book is the way in which Kenber skilfully weaves in the many interviews he conducted with individuals whose loved ones died because of a lack of access to medications: a stark reminder of the ultimate impact of the ravenous appetites of shareholders, seemingly concerned only with profits. There is, for example, the awful story of the death of Meghan Patterson—a forty-seven-year-old nurse in Dayton, Ohio—who’d been unable to afford the insulin she’d been prescribed for her Type 1 diabetes. What’s particularly disturbing about this story is how there is, as Kenber writes, ‘no intrinsic reason why insulin must be so expensive’. He notes that ‘prices have soared from $20 to $275 per vial’ in the US even though a study has estimated than $6 would still give pharmaceutical companies a ‘healthy profit’.

‘It is only by facing up to all this,’ Kenber concludes, ‘and tackling the hard policy debates and decisions which must follow, that we can avoid a future in which the medicines we need are not available, either because they are unaffordable or because commercial drug discovery has been abandoned.’

It is high time that policy makers take heed of this important message.

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