Financing Drug Development: What the Pandemic Has Taught Us

We are still very much in the middle of the pandemic, with the U.S. seeing tens of thousands of new infections daily, and the world experiencing hundreds of thousands of new infections. However, it is not too early to look at areas where we need to reevaluate public policy, most importantly in financing the research and development of new drugs and vaccines.

The accepted wisdom in policy circles has been, that while the government can finance basic research, we need to rely on government-granted...