The NYT has a nice piece on the marketing campaign for two vaccines against cervical cancer that has led to the rapid spread in use of the new vaccine. Cervical cancer is relatively rare in the United States, and usually not fatal. Furthermore, the longterm effectiveness of the vaccine is not yet known, nor are its potential side-effects fully understood. Nonetheless, through a successful marketing campaign that has involved heavily lobbying of state officials and even using the location of research facilities as a marketing tool, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline have gotten the vaccine widely accepted. Some states even mandated it for school girls. This is the sort of corruption that economists predict result from relying on patent rents to finance research instead of more efficient mechanisms.
--Dean Baker
