Curing Ebola with Thomas Pogge

Fundamentally, the Health Impact Fund rewards pharmaceutical innovation according to the successful outcomes of the new medicine, rather than according to whether or not the new medicine has a sufficiently wealthy target audience.

Though not cheap to implement, when divested across multiple state actors, and when considering the Fund's ability to provide future cost savings by mitigating against humanitarian crises, the Fund would not be restrictively expensive - potentially even cost-neutral.

Pogge's initiative represents a significant improvement upon the alternative of governments individually selecting under-researched diseases and attracting scientists by competing with private sector salaries. Such 'push' factor incentives are notoriously ineffective, especially when compared to the 'pull' factor incentives provided by the possibility of exponentially large back-end profits. As opposed to direct government funding, the Health Impact Fund maintains an inducement for private enterprise participation.

By delivering a viable alternative to the patent system, the Health Impact Fund offers an otherwise absent encouragement for socially conscious companies to develop drugs targeted toward global health challenges such as Ebola. What's more, pharmaceutical companies would likely be further tempted to participate in the Fund by the prospect that they would receive a public relations benefit above and beyond their profit margins.

Large-scale global institutional reform is near impossible to achieve. It is here that Thomas Pogge's project gains increased credibility. Rather than a sweeping reform, the Health Impact Fund is a relatively small, non-intrusive supplement to the existing institutional order - yet intelligently targeted in such a way as to have the capacity to produce disproportionately large global health outcomes.

As a means to ensure that private companies continue to invest in pharmaceutical development, there is simply no conceivable alternative to the patent system. It is therefore vital that the harmful side-effects of the system, such as under-investment in diseases that prominently affect poorer populations are offset as much as possible by supplementary design features. Thomas Pogge's Health Impact Fund is the best available means of achieving this. The best chance of ensuring that research and developed is targeted towards the diseases and regions where it can have the greatest health impact. And the best means of mitigating against future global health crises on the scale of the current Ebola outbreak.