If you had any doubt about the “vibe shift” in 2025 Washington, look no further than the impact the Make America Healthy Again movement has had on pharmaceutical innovation and the corporations responsible for it.
When the Biden administration explored manipulating decades-old legislation to seize pharmaceutical patents in December 2023, pioneering drug companies, free marketeers, and intellectual property rights advocates vigorously resisted the move.
The president sought to exploit a never-before-used provision of the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, a landmark measure that has massively juiced innovation in the life sciences, that grants the government “march-in rights” to assume a royalty-free license for drug discoveries that companies have failed to commercialize…