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Pharmacies could be called the most “rock solid” entity in our health care system. Even before Covid, pharmacies were held in high esteem; during the pandemic, they raised their game by making it easy for tens of millions of Americans to get vaccinated, fulfilling a long-standing ambition of pharmacists to provide more expansive clinical services. (Stephen Buck, 11/21)

One key quid pro quo of the US pharmaceutical market is that consumers should expect to pay high prices for a set period of time for drugs offering important clinical advantages, after which generic competition quickly lowers prices closer to the cost of production. This trade-off was the intent of the Hatch-Waxman Act of 1984, the bipartisan compromise that increased brand-name drug manufacturers’ revenues by expanding exclusivity periods while facilitating subsequent regulatory approvals of interchangeable generic versions of the drugs. (Francis J. Crosson, MD and Aaron S. Kesselheim, MD, JD, MPH, 11/20)

In JAMA Internal Medicine, Osipenko and colleagues1 expand our knowledge about the role of the public sector in both contributing to the development of new drugs and the therapeutic gains from those drugs. They found that 27% of the 632 new drugs introduced to the French market between 2008 and 2018 originated either in the academic setting alone or in collaboration with the commercial sector. (Joel Lexchin, MSc, MD, 11/20)