Saturday, September 10, 2011

The Precautionary Principle

At Samizdata we have this comment on "the precautionary principle" and the drug industry.  The author of the post, Johnathan Pearce, mentions a talk by Mary Ruwart on development of drugs:
She argued that the cost to life in terms of drugs and treatments that never got approved runs to several million people, far outweighing the likely number of deaths from drugs that might have dangerous side-effects.
It brings to mind the requirement for bicycle helmets.  At what cost?

Regards  —  Cliff
at

2 comments:

  1. The New Englander9/10/2011 02:35:00 PM

    Fascinating but unsurprising when you go back and look at the incentives.

    All those thousands or millions of people who didn't get the treatment that they never knew about to begin with wouldn't know who or what to sue.

    But it only takes ONE victim's family (or, their crafty lawyer) to go after a company whose product caused or even MAY have caused a death to put that entire business at risk.

    That puts both the companies on the regulators in a "playing not to lose" rather than a "playing to win" mindset.

    I would call the result a tragedy, but I think Joseph Stalin would disagree -- it's a statistic.

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  2. C R Krieger9/10/2011 02:43:00 PM

    Great Stalin quote!  Well played.

    Regards  —  Cliff

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