War of words over WHO drug pricing report

Right-wing advocacy group The Pacific Research Institute (PRI) has attacked  a report which found that the price of cancer treatments is excessive, authored by the World Health Organization (WHO).

Among other conclusions, the WHO finds that “the rate of growth of expenditure on cancer medicines greatly exceeds the rate of growth of newly diagnosed cancer cases.”

The authors also challenged a common argument from industry, that high prices are justified by the cost of drug development, finding: “The costs of R&D and production may bear little or no relationship to how pharmaceutical companies set prices of cancer medicines.”