Drugs that work for everyone — with Mark Dybul

When the CEO of Walmart explained why his company was partnering with a U.S. global AIDS program, he didn't mention humanitarian concerns. He said Walmart couldn’t make its ten-year growth projections without a healthy, economically growing Africa—because a sick continent disrupted supply chains and eliminated future customers.

I’m joined this week by Ambassador Mark Dybul, one of the architects of the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, who argues that America has forgotten the core insight of the Marshall Plan: supporting other countries’ economic growth creates markets for American businesses, not competition for American workers.

We talk about drug development, too—why many drugs don’t work in women and people of color, how buying HIV drugs for Africa led to improved treatments for Americans, whether the FDA was wrong to reject MDMA for PTSD, and the changes that could cut drug development expenses by orders of magnitude while producing treatments that actually work for everyone, supporting American geopolitical dominance, and defusing geopolitical instabilities that will “make pandemics looks like child’s play”.