Congress Considers Paying Developers of New Antibiotics

Facts

• It has been reported that a bipartisan group of US lawmakers plans to introduce legislation aimed at incentivizing drugmakers to develop antibiotics and antifungal drugs.¹
• Bills that were proposed in the House and Senate on Thursday, if passed, would allocate $6B to the purchase of new drugs for the treatment of drug-resistant bacteria and fungi.²
• According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly 3M people in the US are infected each year with drug-resistant bacteria, 35K of whom die as a result.¹
• Public health experts say manufacturers of some promising antibiotics have gone bankrupt because the drugs are only needed in emergencies, and so demand for them is rarely profitable.²
• The proposed bill would create a committee of federal officials, patients, and doctors to decide which new treatments approved by the Food and Drug Administration the federal government should purchase. Manufacturers would be paid between $750M and $3B for new drugs over several years, which would be free for Medicaid patients and veterans.¹
• Previous versions of the legislation were introduced in 2021 and 2022 but did not receive any votes.³

Sources: ¹Wall Street Journal, ²MSN, and ³Bloomberg Law.

Narratives

• Pro-establishment narrative, as provided by Bloomberg Law. Market forces alone are not enough to ensure that essential drugs needed to protect public health will be produced. This legislation would guarantee that funds are made available to continue to develop and produce treatments for drug-resistant bacteria and fungi.
• Establishment-critical narrative, as provided by STAT. While it is important to encourage pharmaceutical companies to produce antibiotics, this type of legislation is not the answer. It fails to set the minimum requirements of acceptable clinical trial standards and is essentially just a giveaway to the pharmaceutical industry.

Predictions