Read: 2026-01-20
Recommend: 3/10
I discovered some interesting facts about Tuberculosis, but I disagree with the author’s characterization of pharmaceutical companies as villains for maintaining high prices on effective treatments.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
Over a century later, BCG is still our only vaccine for TB
many drugs that effectively treat multidrug-resistant strains of tuberculosis remain very expensive, and not because they are made of gold or platinum, or because we have to fly to the moon to find them. They are expensive because 1. Prices are kept artificially high by pharmaceutical companies, and 2. We are afraid that making these drugs less rare will lead to further antibiotic resistance. But as Dr. Carole Mitnick said to me once, “This is a human-manufactured problem that needs a human solution. If medications were a public good, the burden of disease would drive the priorities of the industry and TB treatment would be varied and plentiful.” And so we must fight not just for reform within the system but also for better systems that understand human health not primarily as a market, but primarily as a shared priority for our species.