Yet still, they have done little to heed the WHO's warnings about the other sixteen pathogens: a report released last month by the Access to Medicine Foundation shows that by 2020, only 6 out of the 16 pathogens had any research in the pipelines.

It makes sense for pharma companies to prioritize research for diseases that have the richest patients — while paying little heed to diseases that kill poorer patients.

This means that diseases like cancer and diabetes receive lots of research funding, and diseases like Ebola, Zika virus, and malaria, don't.

It is an established fact that drug prices are not decided based on R&D costs, but on the maximum amount pharma companies think they can charge.

The old line goes that Big Pharma needs to charge such high prices to cover the costs of drug research and reinvest in new medicines.

Pharma companies often defend their high drug prices by claiming that they need to charge a lot because most drugs fail in clinical trials, and the cost of bringing new drugs to market is getting more expensive.

A 2018 report showed that the US National Institute of Health (NIH) contributed funding to all 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 2010 and 2016, and provided $100 billion in research money.

American taxpayers are covering the cost of medical research and getting slammed with inflated drug prices in return.The pharma folks I speak with argue vehemently against changing the system.

This is a ridiculous argument, as we are already covering the costs of failed drug research while paying excess billions in drug prices for successful research.

The private companies would not have been able to get a drug to market so quickly if the public hadn't paid for it first.

The idea is that instead of having pharma companies use patents to create monopolies and charge ridiculous prices for drugs, governments will offer a combination of cash prizes, contracts, and tax credits as market entry rewards to fund research.

This means that drug prices would be directly tied to the cost of developing the drug rather than whatever pharma companies believe a desperate dying patient should be willing to pay for it.

In 2017, Bernie Sanders introduced legislation to delink the incentives awarded to pharma companies through the patent system and replace it with public market entry awards.

Sanders' so-called Medical Innovation Prize Fund would be equal to 0.55% of GDP, amounting to $102 billion in research funding.

Andrew Witty, former CEO of GlaxoSmithKline , proposed delinkage as a way to fund research for rare diseases ; Joseph Stiglitz, the 2001 winner for the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, has also argued to replace the patent system with market entry rewards.

Hence, the next time the WHO says that a research is needed for new pathogens, governments could create a cash prize to incentivize pharma companies, so that there's research in the pipelines to help bring a drug to market faster.

Under the current patent system, pharma companies hoard their data and research from competitors who could use it to develop their own drug.