The Free Press
This is what happened to me and my family one awful day in 2016: First, my lungs filled with blood clots. My blood-oxygen level dropped to nearly 80 percent, and doctors told me I might have a day to live. As I was literally wheeled into a cardiac ICU and told someone needed to summon my family, my wife called to say the Mayo Clinic had just informed her she had a rare, genetic, and incurable form of lung cancer.
That was nine years ago. We are still both here, thanks to God and the much-maligned “Big Pharma.”
That disparaging label got a workout from both Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his Senate interrogators during confirmation hearings this week. But let me tell you about the other side of this now-hackneyed phrase. Without innovative drugs developed with great scientific skill at tremendous cost by the pharmaceutical industry, my family and I would not be here today. There are countless other people who can say the same.
On that awful April 15 in 2016, doctors treated me like I was a stroke victim, injecting me with tissue plasminogen activator, or tPA, which immediately began breaking up the clots in my lungs. Scientists identified tPA in 1947 and, over the course of five decades, turned it into a miracle drug that improves recovery for stroke victims.
To maintain my health after that scary episode, they prescribed Xarelto, a blood thinner, once a day. It works and prevents stroke recurrence without leaving me vulnerable to extensive bruising as so many other blood thinners do. Though I have no risky genetic propensity for clotting, I log enough miles in planes annually to travel around the world multiple times, necessitating the ongoing use of blood thinners.
To comprehend the survival story of my wife, Christy, first requires a bit of a flashback. A week before Christmas in 2006, we learned that she had proliferating benign tumors in her lungs. (This was a correction from an earlier, horrifying, diagnosis of fatal malignancy.)
We learned through that medical workup that she has a genetic mutation known as Factor V Leiden that makes her unusually susceptible to blood clots. When pregnant with our second child, she gave herself abdominal blood thinner injections daily. Her doctor made her stop riding her skateboard. She stayed bruised—as I do not with Xarelto—but we had a healthy son, who is now 16.
In other words, if pharmaceutical companies had not developed an injectable form of blood thinner safe to use during pregnancy, we could have never had our second child.
After Christy’s diagnosis with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in 2016, a new lung biopsy revealed she has an epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) mutation. Her cancer is a genetic oddity, generally mutating the same way for everyone in the same order. That makes developing specialized medicines important. Christy now takes a small pill every day called Tagrisso.
The British-Swedish multinational AstraZeneca developed Tagrisso and got accelerated approval for the medicine in the United States in 2015, before European Union approval in 2016. Christy’s lungs are filled with tiny tumors, each less than a centimeter wide. Tagrisso keeps them from growing. In 2016, Christy’s oncologist, one of the doctors who helped develop Tagrisso, gave her two years to live. Doctors told us to expect Christy would—like her mother, who died of breast cancer when Christy was in first grade—not live to see her children walk across a high school graduation stage.
But Christy saw our daughter off to college last August. Eight years after receiving Tagrisso, she is one of the longest surviving patients on the drug, and her experience has helped the Food and Drug Administration advance Tagrisso approval for more patients.
We, like many others, hesitated to give our daughter the human papillomavirus vaccine in part because of the scary reports on the internet we read. Skeptics claimed the HPV vaccine, intended to reduce lifetime risk of cervical and other cancers, was insufficiently tested or had major adverse effects. They accused Merck, the developer, of buying off politicians to approve the drug despite serious risks.
But in Scotland, the HPV vaccine has eliminated cervical cancer in those who received the shot. Australia is on track to entirely eliminate cervical cancer. Our doctor convinced us that, given Christy’s medical history, we should let our child receive the shot. Had we believed the Big Pharma bashers on the internet instead, we might not have done so.
Of course, people should do their own research, as the internet empowers them to do. They should also bear in mind the Dunning-Kruger effect, which posits that certitude about a given subject sometimes bears an inverse relationship with actual expertise. Yes, experts have failed us. Excessive Covid lockdowns—which kept children from school even though they were at the least risk of death and serious illness from the virus—are a prime example.
Nor are American pharmaceutical companies altruistic heroes; they’re in business to make a profit for their shareholders. But profits are the reward for risking capital and producing something of great value. My wife’s Tagrisso is such a product. Tagrisso got approval in the United States before Europe thanks, in large part, to the United States’s robust pharmaceutical industry and the regulatory system that accompanies it.
And yes, the United States has a tragic chronic disease burden, for which medications are probably not the exclusive, or even primary, answer. But Big Pharma is becoming a scapegoat for problems that often originated in, or were compounded by, poor lifestyle choices.
For all its well-documented inefficiencies, the American healthcare system is second to none. And the pharmaceutical industry is an essential part of it. My son and my daughter still have their parents because of Big Pharma. I have a wife because of Big Pharma. And millions of others are alive because a scientist, paid well out of the revenue generated by a company’s previously issued medicines, discovered a new miracle medicine that could save or prolong a life.
Every three months, with metronomic regularity, my wife submits to a battery of tests to see if her Tagrisso has finally stopped working. She has weird and random side effects. These actually reassure her the medicine is still working. Last month, after eight years, her doctor told her that she can move to scans every four months. She celebrated by riding her Harley and planning the next addition to her tattoo sleeve, a work of body art that chronicles her life and her fight against cancer. You might think of it as a thank-you note to Big Pharma.
Read Republican Congressman Chip Roy’s response to Erick Erickson: “Why I’m Backing RFK Jr.”