If the holes in the methodology are big enough, you don't need to be highly qualified to notice them and point them out. But in any case I was talking about in a theoretical sense. I didn't actually notice any large holes in their methodology. I don't have either the expertise, or their raw data, to tell if their are any small holes, so in theory they could be there, but I am not claiming any.
But their logic is completely faulty in obvious ways. It has holes you could drive a drive a truck through.
The issue is that profits from the American market are the big driver for R&D spending on new prescription drugs. To counter that they talk about research in other countries, by non-American companies. But that point is totally irrelevant. Foreign companies are also motivated by the possibility of profit from selling their drugs in America. This isn't the sole motivation for an investment in drug R&D and testing. Profits can be made in other markets. But those profits are smaller and thus provide less incentive to make the investment.
They state their point in different ways, but its still the same point. They back it up with a lot of data, but the data is only useful to show the point is true, not that its relevant.
The data would be relevant if the argument was something like "drug companies make no profits from sales outside America", or "profits from non-American markets give no incentive for drug research", but both of those thoughts are straw men. Almost no one would claim such a thing, and if they do its obvious nonsense. The point is that profits from the US provide a disproportionate incentive for drug companies to invest in research, development, and testing of drugs. The data I have to back that up is the data in the paper that you keep talking about. The US market (according to the authors of that paper) provides for 48% of the world wide drug sales. That's with a bit less than 5% of the population. Obviously rich countries are going to amount for a greater percentage of sales, but Europe, which has more people than the US, only accounts for 28%.
Either Light and Lexchin's data is incorrect (in which case why have so much confidence in the rest of the article), or they prove my case for me. |
