On drugs

This story should come as no surprise; cases of corrupt and grotesque drug trial abuses like this have been leaking out of Africa for years. It’s a great example of how corruption happens differently in different places; in Nigeria it’s bottom-up, while in the US (as Wolfowitz so aptly demonstrated) it’s top-down. I know that I wouldn’t want to have my health options to be based on killing children in another part of the world. But this isn’t about health, it’s about profit.

Several friends and I have been discussing open-source models for Stage 3 clinical trials. Distributing the trials across to volunteer doctors who are really trying to improve things, rather than to pharma -run or -bought clinics, would be a good start. Abuses would be possible, but less likely to happen.