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There's one reading of COVID, which is it confirmed the importance of big pharmaceutical companies

that without those companies so frequently derided and bashed by the likes of

me and the rest of us at Navara Media, we would have been in big trouble and the fact we had

vaccines as quickly as we did to COVID-19 reflected that in fact they know a lot more about how to do

this than the rest of us. We should just shut up basically. But what if that was in fact a

marketing coup? What if that interpretation of the last several years was spin and a success

of public relations? What if big pharma more than just failing to uphold the levels of innovation

we might expect? More than just failing to see accelerating improvements in progress,

they're actually holding innovation back and suppressing access to life-saving medicines

for some of the poorest people in the world. Well that's the contention of today's guest.

Nick Didden is the director of Global Justice now and the author of a new book, Pharma Nomics.

Nick Didden, welcome to Downstreet. Thank you. Before we talk about your book,

tell our listeners our viewers who you are. Why are we talking to you? What's your profile? Why are

you an authority on the issue of development healthcare, the Global South? So I work at an

organisation called Global Justice now. We're a campaign organisation. We work in solidarity with

groups from the Global South and for the last six years. We've been working on reform of the

pharmaceutical sector and we happen to be working on it when a major pandemic broke out, which

highlighted a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about. So we're going to be using the words

big pharma. A lot of people hear big ears on the here. Big tech. Big this, big that. I saw

Tom Howard the other day talk about the RSPB being an impediment to growth. I said you can call

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