New money pouring into health care and life sciences by the private and public sectors may have kept the U.S. from going into a deep recession – by now.
We knew the country was getting old and the pandemic started a new wave of public funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other agencies to make sure the new discovery of drugs and therapeutics become a priority to avoid a wholesale shutdown of the economy such as the one in 2020. Companies such as Pfizer and Moderna benefitted greatly from the federal government spending billions to buy their Covid-19 vaccines.
But it is only now that we realize, after analyzing one year’s worth of economic data – and watching the massive tech layoffs at Twitter, Facebook parent Meta Platforms, and others — that health care and life sciences research and commercialization are increasingly playing a bigger role in our economy in creating jobs and forcing the dollar to move downstream to help affiliated services tied to the sector.