How America Became the World’s Medicine Chest—and Why That Status Is at Risk

Will the United States destroy the pharmaceutical innovation that for generations has improved the lives of Americans?

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Commentary

In the mid-1980s, AIDS was still a strange and terrifying disease. It was one of the great fears of that era, next to nuclear war with the Soviets, which seemed like a real possibility at the time. I was a child in 1987 and didn’t understand much about AIDS, but I knew it was a death sentence.