Shortly after the Boston meeting, Jim Kim went to WHO headquarters in Geneva. No one he talked to there even knew that the patents on all but one class of the second-line antibiotics had expired years ago. And no one there seemed very interested when he declared, “We can drive down the prices by ninety to ninety-five percent.” Jim didn’t know exactly how to make that happen. Make the assertion, then figure out the means—this was his strategy. “The big-shot strategy,” Farmer called it, approvingly.
