What We Can Learn from the Production of Penicillin in WWII

The introduction and implementation of penicillin might just be what our nation needs to develop a vaccine that will help us combat the coronavirus pandemic. It might not be a direct vaccine, it might just be a cure-all method. 

If the production of penicillin in WWII could teach us one thing, it's that American society needs to re-think the way that medical expenditure is really being used to benefit the public. 

Unfortunately, the for-profit healthcare system in America worked much better back in the day when most doctors acted independently. Nowadays, money goes straight to the institution and trickles down to the professionals that actually make the drugs. 

So, bluntly speaking, the money has to fall out of the pockets of the people who own the institutions through investment. These are not doctors, they are wealthy business people who are looking to (in some cases) better society through their investment in the medical field. 

Now, in order to truly recover from this pandemic, the US government might have to think back to when it distributed penicillin to society in the 1940s. 

When penicillin was discovered in 1928, it was considered to be a primitive and confusing method of production that was difficult to replicate. Penicillin was not synthesized, it was grown in Petri dishes in such small quantities that it was almost impossible to synthesize en-masse. 

Penicillin gets extracted from a mold, and most laboratories had setups for sythesization of drugs, not biological production. So, pre-WWII, penicillin was insanely difficult to get your hands on. 

But, when WWII began and the US people started hurting more than ever before, the US government assisted in funding the production of penicillin and distributed it both to the American people and the American soldiers for free. 

This needs to happen in order to return the world to normal once more. 

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Post originally appeared on History Obsessed.