People need to understand how the pharmacology pipeline works.<p>The Federal government provides funds for research. That research finds novel compounds and new treatments. The product of that resaerch then gets transferred to private companies who commercialize it and then make massive profits from it.<p>Generally speaking, drug companies don't research with one exception: patent extension. A given compound will be patented and then the patent owner will have a monopoly over that for a number of years, supposedly because there'd be no investment otherwise, but that patent will ultimately expire. Except... it doesn't really. It's why over a century later we're still dealing with insulin patents. "Patent extension" is the process where you make a small change to a molecule or a delivery system and then get a new patent, refusing to sell the old. And it can be hard for someone else to produce a generic for many reasons.<p>Now I have a lot of problems with this system:<p>1. Any form of patent extension should be illegal, basically;<p>2. The institutions who actually come up with this should share in the profits. After all, it's the government paying for it;<p>3. We give a monopoly to these companies in the US where it's illegal to import the exact same product from overseas, which leads to something costing $800 in the US and $5 in France.<p>But given this is the system we're stuck with, cutting off funding makes absolutely no sense. Why?<p>1. It's going to dramatically impact drug companies negatively in the future as their supply of new products dries up;<p>2. It's antoerh element of soft power where the US can use the power to produce certain medicines to influence other countries. Think about what happens if China becomes the source for the world's medicines (personally, i'd be a fan but the purveyors of this policy most definitely are not).<p>Government research has given us things like the Internet and mRNA vaccines. This is so unbelievably shortsighted.<p>And why are they doing it? Well, the party of Free Speech is punishing institutions because some of their students made factually correct but mean statements about Israel.