Arthur Laffer has long explained the genius of trade through the horrors of incurable forms of cancer. Considering, for instance, pancreatic cancer, Laffer asks rapt listeners if they would refuse a lifesaving cure solely because it was created in China. Tick tock, tick tock…
Readers get it. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there similarly aren’t any protectionists in oncology wards.
It’s accepted wisdom that the U.S. must “beat China” as though trade is a game with winners and losers. What a mistaken, backwards, and surely slow-growth way of looking at production. It implies that when producers exchange with each other, they’re at war.
No, it’s just individuals and machines dividing up work so that products and services can be produced as quickly as possible, abundantly as possible, and at the lowest prices possible. The health implications of the previous truth are profound. Think China again.
As evidenced by all the misguided talk about “beating China,” it’s a known in the U.S. that there’s a growing amount of technological, scientific and medical talent there. The latter explains why the “winning” narrative is so anti-progress, and surely anti-health. Put another way, if Americans and Chinese aren’t working together then everything we want, including cancer cures, will be slower to reach us.
Thankfully the above truths are increasingly being recognized by U.S. pharmaceutical giants. As a recent report in the Wall Street Journal indicated, “Finding innovative ways to treat cancer is Pfizer’s biggest priority, so to boost cutting-edge technologies, Pfizer executives went to Shenyang, China. There, last summer, Pfizer paid $1.25 billion to China’s 3SBio for rights to a cancer drug candidate.” Amen. The genius of work divided doesn’t suddenly lose validity when American individuals are working alongside Chinese individuals.
What’s exciting is that according to a McKinsey study cited in the same Journal report, “China accounted for 30% of the world’s pipeline of experimental drugs last year.” Stop and think about the importance of what’s taking place among drugmakers in China: they’ve joined the fight for cures.
Their advances aren’t a threat to the U.S., rather they’re a solution. The much bigger threat to Americans was when the Chinese people were personally and economically shackled so that they couldn’t innovate. In a pharmaceutical sense, but surely in any product sense, it meant that Americans were working alone. And in working alone, they were progressing much more slowly.
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told the Journal that “China is rallying their innovation to degrees that we haven’t seen before.” This is very exciting for Pfizer, and by extension the whole world. That’s because the frontiers of progress are much more expansive the more that talent is collaborating rather than producing in siloed fashion.
Crucially, this doesn’t mean there will be no competition. It just means part of the competition will involve drug innovators in both countries aggressively searching for the best ways to work together in pursuit of cures.
Notable here is that part of the competition will be regulatory. As the Journal indicated later in its report, China has “created a regulatory system that permits rapid testing and speedier approvals of drug candidates, making it easier for drug researchers to innovate.” Brilliant. Sometimes regulatory competition is as important as the commercial kind.
Who will come up with a pancreatic cancer cure first, the U.S. or China? Assuming they don’t arrive at it together, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is the cure, at which point there are once again no protectionists in oncology wards.
