But why doesn't any other medicine or treatment fall under this rule? What about other life-saving drugs such as penicillin or cancer drugs, why don't they get this protection? Big Pharma gets sued all the time but that doesn't stop the introduction of new medications.
You don't know that, and from what we know about economics, it is probably false.
Lawsuits,
even justified ones, cost money that could be better spent either doing more development, or hell, fattening the wallets of those who develop drugs, making them more likely to develop more to become even more wealthy.
Let's put it bluntly, so no one misunderstands me: I think society would be better off (read: more lives saved this way than other ways) greatly limiting lawsuits of all types against all kinds of medicine.
This is just part of the larger picture, where lawsuits, regulatory costs (paperwork), regulatory slowdowns (FDA, congressional meddling), taxes on profits, and so on, all contribute to making it harder to earn a profit developing new drugs and treatments (machines that go "ping").
Offset would be the benefits provided by the existence of such things. For the sake of argument, let's say they're Glorious. No matter. This benefit, net, would get swallowed by the cumulative slowdown, year after year, which accrues like interest.
Yey, regulation X saved 10,000 lives over 50 years. Yet if it delays a good heart disease drug even 1 year, it's cost 100,000 lives.
If someone were dying, drowning, and someone were sprinting to go save them, would you put all kinds of cobblestones and oil spills in their way? No. You'd strap a rocket to their back.
Look at it that way. All this **** are major cobblestones everywhere slowing down the sprinting researchers.
Childhood vaccines don't cause autism and very few children die or injured by them, so why does this one product warrent this special treatment?
Look how long it took to beat down the outright fraud, which lead to "common knowledge" that vaccines could be bad. You don't think unscrupulous lawyers wouldn't gladly use it for profiteering? Indeed, that's what lead to this whole problem in the first place with vaccines -- the guy was faking up data to provide for lawsuits. Look at the breast implant fiasco, where Dow went into bankruptcy, even though long-term studies showed no statistical differences between those with and without, w.r.t. the typical "problems everyone knows", such as lupus, auto-immune, chronic fatigue syndrome, and a dozen other things touted loudly by the lawyers.
And, as I've said, it doesn't warrant special treatment for (just) itself -- the same argument applies to any medical development effort.
