The Washington Post Opinion: Pyotte: Don’t let hedge funds undermine public health, by David Pyott
This post originally appeared in The Washington Post on November 18, 2015.
America leads the world in ingenuity. Innovation is how we created the Internet, sent a man to the moon, discovered vaccines to eliminate polio and developed therapies that treat the world’s deadliest and most debilitating diseases. But now medical innovation is under attack.
The aggressors are predatory hedge funds with a new investment strategy: taking short positions on the stock of companies that create innovative medicines, then — in a very public manner — challenging the patents on those medicines. The stock falls and their bet against the company pays off. These billionaire-led hedge funds obviously have no intention of making these medicines, so why challenge a patent? To make more money.