I hope you are an adult and no longer live with your parents.
If that is the case remember this. If you cannot have pleasant encounters with him, you are under no obligation to have them at all.
No obligation to keep seeing them, would be kind of hard not to have parents 😛
You still have them, you just don't have contact with them.
but then who will take care of them? they were there at my time of need, shouldn't i also be there?
You sound like you have a good relationship with your parents, many don't.
You can be there for them when they need you without putting up with the anti-vax ravings you mentioned. It is called setting boundaries.
You do what you think is right but also understand that is not a universal thing for all people.
You sound like you have a good relationship with your parents
not really.
i think it is best to minimize contact but not keep null, since these kind of people are self destructive.
that's the only reason i stayed , for their health issues.
What about your health? Your mental health in particular.
Your parents raising you is not something you owe them for. You didn't choose to exist; they chose that for you. Raising you is the bare minimum they can do after making a choice like that. And now that you are older, you can reflect on the manner in which you were raised and decide what your relationship with them needs to look like so you can keep your sanity.
Nope they chose to get a child. You dont have to Do anything for them.
It's all that government big pharma stuff that have given me moobs, things like:
Covid-19 vaccines;
Fluoride in toothpaste and tapwater;
Chemtrails;
a horrendous diet and little exercise;
pride flags
pride flags
You weren't supposed to eat them smh
Right, but if I stop now, how am I going to perform my magic flag butthole trick? checkmate
You shove them up your butt, otherwise you can only do it once. Duh.
Technically you could do it again but it’s even less recommended than the original
But they look like sweets :/
Eating the frigging pride flags are making the frogs gay!
RIP your inbox.
I’ll show my man boobs to anyone who wants to see them. Usually people tell me to stop showing them and say things like “gross” and call me bear tits but that hasn’t stopped me from whipping them out on every occasion and non occasion
Block his router of the content
I watched birds are not real Ted talk the other day, I think it was awesome to give a perspective on the conspiracy stuff and how people run with it.
If it flies, it spies. 🐣
Sorry you are going through that. Same thing happened to me, it really sucks :(
you should introduce him to the library
Gives a whole new meaning to the term "parental controls."
Is your father a senator?
Nano machines son
If you have some disposable cash and you're running into the "watch this video about antivax stuff". I recently discovered Kagi's summarizer works on as many YouTube videos as you want (seemingly by processing the audio itself).
It's been a bit since I've received a video like that, but I think it'll be a huge time saver for the next one... Or the next similar one...
While I'm sure there is a crazy markup, it's important to note the cost to produce - as in manufacture - does not include the cost of drug discovery, which is extremely expensive and involves a good amount of risk over a long period of time.
You can't just compare the cost of discovering a new drug vs. cost of producing a generic without any research like that.
Last year, the three largest US-listed pharmaceutical companies by revenues, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, spent a combined $39.6 billion on R&D. That is, admittedly, a lot of money. But less than Medicare is currently paying on just ten drugs
While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.
Pfizer COVID vaccine wasn't researched or developed by them. It was developed by the German BioNTech.
Still, bringing it to market at the required volumes requires extreme amounts of capital, there's a reason no one can enter the club.
I like Lemmy for exactly this - whenever someone incorrect makes a statement they're factchecked.
Thank you kind person for finding and sharing that source.
OP didn't make an incorrect statement though. What they stated was an important part of the equation. I think a lot of people don't take that type of thing into account and they will read what this post says and assume that Pfizer should be charging $13, or maybe something pretty close like 15 or 20. Clearly 1400 is far far too high, 13 is too low. A reasonable price allows the manufacturer to be successful while not gouging consumers lies somewhere in between, but much much closer to the low end than the high. To me that's really what the person you are responding to is giving evidence for.
Thank you, this is exactly my point.
Most excellent fact checking 👍
R&D on drugs is insanely expensive, but the protections put in place with the pricing are also a bit absurd. Most drug companies will lock down the formula for a period of time and price the drug aggressively for a short time (like a few years) and then open the formula up to generics who buy it and sell the same damn thing for a fraction of the cost.
For clarity I’m agreeing with you that the price is largely due to non-manufacturing costs and the article is misleading as a result, but I also wanted to say that the whole industry is a testament to capital over humanity.
Fuck off with the big pharma apologetics.
Boo hoo the corporation got millions in taxpayer money to develop a vaccine and now they have to profit off of it. I feel so bad for them.
This is subtle astroturfing.
By that same logic: it costs a couple of cents to burn a dvd or to transfer a few gigabytes, yet games costs $60.
All the commenter above you is saying is don't mix up the cost to develop with the cost to mass produce,
I'm going to be unreasonable because I don't like the ethics behind Pharma companies.
They should eat the loss; their research was healthily subsidised by the taxpayer
I'm personally of the opinion that all medical research should be tax funded. But given our current situation, if you tell these companies to 'eat the loss' they will simply stop producing new medicines.
Oh stop. The government should be running the pharaceutical industry then, not private companies.
Stop simping for evil corporations that don't give a shit about you.
Reading comprehension is tough I know. I indeed believe essential services including medical research should be government run.
But since that is not the case right now you can't expect companies to operate on a non profit basis. If stating obvious facts is simping then I guess you can call me a simp.
Oh no, whatever will we do if old dudes can't have 6 different types of boner pills?
Pharma companies spend a majority of their time trying to make new unique drugs, they just fail most of the time. The ones that succeed tend to be ones that are similar to ones that succeeded in the last, which is why you get multiple drugs in the same class, but it's not all they do. For example, we've essentially cured some types of cystic fibrosis, and there's an effective vaccine for malaria now - all developed in the last 10 years.
I don't want to pretend that the big pharma companies aren't evil, but they do have incentives that align with improving human health.
It's real easy to sit on the sidelines and spew hate. Not much of a life though.
...and the video game industry makes more money than any other entertainment industry. Yes, these things should cost more than just their production cost, but there is currently an obscene amount of money being made by the people at the top of these industries - y'know, the ones whose main role in making and distributing the product is just already being obscenely wealthy. And while I don't really care if AAA games are overpriced if they're only $60, I do care if life-saving meds are being held for ransom.
Do y'all need reminded that insulin, a life-or-death drug that's been around since the fucking 1920s, only costs at most $10 to make but currently retails for up to $300 a vial? It does not fucking matter whether or not this particular treatment should cost $13 or $90, the markup on any life saving drug being over 1,000% is blatant price gauging at the expense of human life, and the fact that the pharmaceutical industry does this all the time is common fucking knowledge. Anything approaching a defense of this shit either is in fact astroturfing or is so braindead as to call it a necessity that a publicly traded company demand the sick either choose debt or the grave.
All the commenter above you is saying is don’t mix up the cost to develop with the cost to mass produce,
That cost to develop was likely not borne by Pfizer in the first place.
Last year, the three largest US-listed pharmaceutical companies by revenues, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, spent a combined $39.6 billion on R&D. That is, admittedly, a lot of money. But less than Medicare is currently paying on just ten drugs
While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.
That's just an excuse because many drugs are sold at prices much lower what they are sold in the US. They are not selling them at loss in other countries.
Definitely not at a loss to produce no, but maybe a loss overall.
My bet is that the US subsidizes R&D by paying obscene amounts for the drugs and the EU and others just serve as extra income
I don't think it takes 1.4k to move anything anywhere.
Yes we can. It’s just doesn’t give a good faith assessment of the situation. And why would I want to do that if it’s counter to my rigid world view? sigh better add an /s
It costs $13 to produce paxlovid…
Experts at Harvard University have estimated that the cost of producing a five-day course of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir is $13.
I don't think he meant to the consumer. EU countries can negotiate for the price with pharmaceutical companies, so they can lower the price.
In the US insurance companies can try to negotiate, but their weight is quite low, and the federal government (medicaid, medicare) is forbidden by law to negotiate. Whichever price pharma sets, it's that.
Sounds crazy they are but allowed to negotiate?
Is that the same for anything else the government buys? I can't imagine the army buying 100 tanks and just paying the first price they get?
It's a constitutional thing, government has to guarantee the companies' freedom to set the price they want or something totally moronic like that...
In fact it's the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
In fact it's the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
Yes! That's a great start 👌 especially if the negotiator is NOT getting a kickback from Pharma for negotiating a high price
It's like
– Arms dealer: Each tank cost me 500,000 dollars to make. Give me 5 billion for each.
– Let's negotiate. How about 500 million instead?
– Arms dealer: Fiiine, but only because you're a good client.
This is legitimately how it works in the US between insurance and pharma/medical.
I just had a baby and I added up the total bill from the hospital and it was $100,000. We were in the hospital for 3 days.
My insurance "negotiated" it down to $26,000, and I paid $3000.
The $100,000 is completely made up from the beginning. Pharma and medical just slap big ass ridiculous numbers down, then the insurance fake negotiates down to a still completely ridiculous number, then that cost has to get eaten by people who pay into insurance, which is basically everyone.
... forbidden by law to negotiate.
Is that true? Is there a legitimate reason why they shouldn't be able to?
It's a constitutional thing, government has to guarantee the companies' freedom to set the price they want or something totally moronic like that...
In fact it's the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
How about updating the constitution to solve this specific problem, which is quite significant for the populace? After all, it's the constitution's job to serve the people.
That would require a constitutional amendment, which would require being ratified by 38 or more states. Which would require at least 38 states without significant corruption/obstruction, and a population not braindead/brainwashed enough to vote against their own interests.
So the chances of that happening are abysmally low.
Because medicine shouldn't become a flea market where you're gambling your health against profit maximization.
Give pharmaceutical companies a fair price scale where they can profit, don't let them hyperinflate prices without justification.
It's not the same if Apple prices their phones at 20,000 USD and you decide you're buying other brand, pharma plays these extortion games after they have captured enough market/regulation so most people have to pay or stay sick.
United States countries:
I guess I'll die then
Didn’t the government fund the development? So.. it’s not like they need so much to recover R&D right?
Welcome to the United States. Everything is subsidized, then turned around to fuck the average person.
The government did not for Pfizer. That was Moderns. Pfizer did spend billions of their own cash. This move is largely because the executive leadership way overestimated the amount of covid vaccine and drug treatment revenue for this year, and they are desperate to make up ground.
So they are raising prices and cutting across the board rather than admitting they didn't know what they were doing in their projections. CEO isn't taking a pay cut though. Morons got a winning lottery ticket in the pandemic and assumed they'd keep winning every year.
I know they funded moderna - they basically built Moderna’s new plants including their cmo’s plant so that they could produce at scale. Govt built and funded the plants at risk - prior to fda approval - so that it massively sped up the process to getting the drug in people’s hands. Those plants are now used for other drugs.
I think - but not 100% sure - Pfizer did it on their own.
Still - 10,000% is shameful.
That is almost always the case. Pharma companies are mostly just advertising firms
I'm fine with the public-private partnership but money like this needs to come with strings attached. We should've made an agreement to cap the price. We developed these drugs under the Trump administration so I really don't think the impact to poor and middle class citizens has ever been a thought in his mind.
Paxlovid kept me alive when I had COVID. This makes me really upset. People will actually die without this.
If you don't mind my asking, how much did you pay when you used it?
So many Martin Shkrelis out there pricing drugs to the highest level they can get away with. Every big pharmaceutical company does this kind of thing, especially with new drugs.
That's because in many cases, healthcare has infinite demand.
Thanks capitalism!!
/sarcasm.
I'll never understand why so many people think middlemen somehow makes shit cheaper...
Taxes > government research > cheap meds
With the bonus point of no more pharmaceutical companies selling shit like oxy for profit
Because they think government is inefficient by default, and a commercial business is motivated towards max efficiency to cut costs. Maybe all of this is true, but in capitalism companies also sell for the optimal price based on price elasticity. No competitors + essential live saving product = high prices.
Actually in human societies, not just in capitalism.
People talk about capitalism being bad as if only there people try to eat each other to become richer.
If you read something about reasons the USSR wouldn't have more efficient centralized planning, while having necessary machinery and resources, or why it wouldn't have standardized something, while having the standardization apparatus and planned economy, or why all the Internet-like projects went nowhere in USSR while being much more ambitious due to, again, planned economy, or why despite less fragmentation scale wouldn't make things cheaper to produce in USSR, but the opposite, and so on - that's because every reform would mean someone losing influence, and that someone would naturally use that influence to resist reform.
It's actually fascinating to read how some of those people really believed in Marxism and Communism, and were even very competent sometimes, but the general architecture made the whole thing less than just a sum of its parts. Really sad, though.
I agree that the problems aren't just in Capitalism. However, the country with the unofficial historical tagline, "and then it got worse", may not be the best example. I think China is a really good example of influence peddling outside a free market.
Well, China, when its ruling organization still had some consistent ideology, was a copy of Stalin's USSR, bigger and weaker, give or take. Only it started later.
Its way off that track started with reforms like Kosygin's reforms, would those not be neutered.
I'd say the reason in China this happened was exactly that it was bigger and weaker. It didn't quite have anything like Soviet industrial establishment, and it had the issues of poverty, hunger etc.
Because "government research" doesn't cover mass production and all of the supply chain management. Which is where anything bureaucratic really sucks.
(Unless you need to build things badly, but fast and on large scale, mobilization-style - see Khruschev-era mass construction in ex-USSR, or, for exotic stuff, older state-built housing in Israel which isn't that much better).
Actual production rots very quickly, if centralized and bureaucratic.
I agree that research requires long-term investment and is in general a completely different thing.
There's just so much wrong in your comment I can't address it all...
But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?
We're talking about patents right now.
The rest of what you said is still wrong, can't stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about...
There’s just so much wrong in your comment I can’t address it all…
If you can't then you'd better say nothing.
But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?
You said when talking about pharma companies as middlemen. You remove those middlemen - you have to do tasks they perform.
We’re talking about patents right now.
Yes, patent law should be abolished. That's what I'm talking about while commenting in most threads blaming "capitalism", because in like 2/3 cases patent law is to blame and not that.
The rest of what you said is still wrong, can’t stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about…
Thank you for your unsubstantiated opinion which I can beat with that of my own every time, so not sure why you'd even express it without details.
If you can’t then you’d better say nothing.
You've got a point, I should have said "won't put the effort in".
I looked at your profile, you wait till posts are really old, then spam a bunch of nonsensical replies in it.
I'm just gonna block you. Everyone wins.
I’m just gonna block you. Everyone wins.
Not the worst way to look at this, if you want my opinion.
People vote for it every two years and are shocked, just shocked when they get precisely what they voted for.
Do you think pfizer and other companies who spend hundreds of millions lobbying would be like "aww shucks! the public voted to curb our shitty behavior, let's go home!"?
Ah, trademark laws and patents are obviously governmental stuff. So - not present in some imagined absolute capitalism. And with those abolished (except for stealing authorship still being illegal), I suppose market mechanisms would do their job sufficiently well for this particular case.
Believing in capitalism is believing in humans making rational and moral choices, anyone to do that would be nuts. That's a proactive answer to politically active people getting triggered by my comment and labeling me as a member of the other crowd.
The amount of Pfizer boot lickers here is astounding
Bots and shills.
Bots and shills.
Wish the admins could do something about them (bots at least).
It's like someone urinating in the swimming pool, so that nobody else wants to swim in it.
You have to consider all the R&D they put into it.
(Didn't the government pay for most of that?)
Right?
In a just world, "the people" would see this pricing, realize that they were the ones who paid for the development of it, and simply seize the company.
Whether that took the form of government litigation to force the company to offer this at a reasonable price, or simply a mob of people forcing the company's hand or else they burn it to the ground, either way, there needs to be a stick of fear to go along with the carrot of profit.
I'm not saying they should make no profit, but this is ridiculous.
Their R&D was releasing it to the public.
It's been too long since the aristocrats were reminded that they need us more than we need them and that they can't hire enough of us to stop the rest of us once we take an idea to mind.
Je suis d’accord avec vous! 😉
Seriously, people are acting like this is new. There is no sense in shaming them we've had it brought to the mainstream by people like Martin Skhreli and nothing has been done. Martin Skhreli himself is only in jail because of his ponzi schemes, a.k.a. screwing other rich people out of their money. The only reason Pfizer was praised was because it was needed in a time of need and because they hired plenty of lobbyists.
Ive accepted this behavior as typical and standard issue human nature.
That is why i am mot having kids, seeing that extinction is the best future for humans. Evolution puts any other intelligence in the universe at risk.
I was given (free) Paxlovid when I finally contracted covid this year. We need laws regulating price increases. If you can't demonstrate that your costs for a product or service went up, you can't increase by more than x%. I don't know how you do this without encouraging higher introductory prices because it's not a problem that I've thought about in depth, but something like this needs to happen with further consideration.
Another thing I'd like to see is robber barons getting prosecuted for crimes against humanity, but that's not realistic.
Medicare is now able to negotiate with drug companies on drug prices. Now we just need to bring it home by electing enough politicians (that are open to the idea of course ... so Democrats and likely more progressive Democrats), that a Medicare for all option is also added.
Yeah, that doesn't really work. Because they will always find a way to make costs go up, and then demonstrate it. Auditing such things would benearly impossible.
The only real solution is for certain industries to be nonprofits. Healthcare really shouldn't be about profit, it should ge about care.
Just get rid of copyright, let the person who can create your product the cheapest make money off it
Or would that be too capitalist for the US
Drugs aren't protected by copyright. They're protected by patents.
In either case that would be an extreme move and I would not support getting rid of patents or copyright as they're genuinely useful concepts.
Copyright in particular doesn't just protect the money hungry. Lemmy, Linux, and many other open source projects are protected from those who would prefer to use their source code to make a closed source proprietary application and contribute nothing back.
Copyright needs to go back to 30 years. You have 30 years on a patent to make money off it. If you haven't already made your money back, and a handsome profit in that time, you should have hired a business manager year 2.
Patents are either 14 or 20 years, depending on type. Copyright is absurdly long, but copyright also doesn't apply to drugs, inventions, recipes, game rules, mathematical formulae - mostly just creative works.
Ok, 14 to 20 years on patents seems reasonable. I would still set copyright back to 30 years, since as you pointed out, it's really only affecting the public domain.
I'd be okay with that, but acting like copyright doesn't exist for a reason or ever do any good... Isn't helping actually lead to a solution :)
In a world where you can’t protect your IP, how do you have close sourced?
Military tech is the bigger issue
You keep the source code, methods of operation or manufacturing methods private. Companies can already do this. Patents force companies to make their inventions public information (you can access the patent), in exchange for a limited exclusive right to use this technology.
For no trivial things patent legislation is a great benefit. Everyone can access the patent knowledge. For trivial iterative things patents only benefit the patentee who gets the exclusive rights.
Copyright means anything you produce that is easily to copy, you have legal control over how it's copied and the revenue it may generate. This is for things like art work, books, news stories, code etc. Things that can be copy and pasted or printed.
Copyright is granted when you create the content. There's no application. It ensures someone can make money from the copy they produce. Less people would write books, if Amazon could print and sell copies without paying the author.
Military tech would be private. Even with our current IP protection system. A hostile power doesn't care about infringing IP, there's very little consequence for do this. If you patent military technology, then that info would be public.
Very easily, you compile it.
I think you're thinking of patents rather than copyright. I was about to ask something snarky like "without the ability to patent their discoveries what would cause these drug companies to pay for r&d up front?" but honestly, this one was paid for by government grants anyway and that's really where my problem comes in. We seem to have developed this amazing worst of both worlds where the public bears all the up front expense of r&d and then the government just gives away what we bought for ourselves so that they can raise the price to 100x what the medication actually costs.
I was just being lazy and didn’t write patents and trademarks all together
I figured saying copyright would be enough for people to include the whole copyright office
Patents, trademarks and copyrights are three entirely different things. Patents cover products for sale, and give an inventor the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a given time. Trademarks cover branding, and allow the person registering the trademark to prevent anyone else from using it or something a reasonable person could confuse with it indefinitely. Copyright is exclusively for intellectual property and allows the copyright holder to stop anyone from making copies of their work, derivatives of their work or work that is substantially similar to their work.
This is very incorrect except for the very high level. Patents cover systems and methods and devices that are more than mere physical phenomena. Patent owners are granted an exclusive monopoly over the implementation of what the patent issued on (i.e., its eventual claims) that runs up to 20 years from the time of filing. They are an intellectual property right premised in property theory.
Trademarks cover designators of origin. Fundamentally, they are to reduce consumer confusion and are ultimately nothing more than a presumption once granted in favor of the owner in unfair competition disputes. They are also an intellectual property but are premised in totally different theories of law and can apply to literally anything that can be strongly associated with a company, more or less.
Copyright is an intellectual property, yes, but is limited to creative expression fixed in a tangible medium. This is a very short sentence but has some pretty serious depth to it. Copyright is ultimately a very specific type of right to, and this may shock you, copying a thing (fixed in a tangible medium....you do not have copyright on ideas).
That all said, pharma patents and, really, industry as a whole is super fucked and needs serious reimagining in the current era. But some form of IP absolutely is necessary to incentivize and enable drug creation of it is to persist in our free market capitalist economic structure.
Eliminating capitalism sounds like an easier idea, to be honest.
So you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating and testing a new drug to cure something. Then another company can come along and undercut you since they didn't spend the upfront money. And now you go bankrupt? How is that fair? I'm not saying Big Pharma isn't an issue but as always, the solution is somewhere in the middle.
It’s fair because it helps people
Medicine is a service
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
That would not be true if the government funded things.
I really wish we didn't let Capitalism control vital to our living services.
Why on earth would we want the government funding and running things, that would be a nightmare. Government is far too big as it is now.
Why on earth would we want the government funding and running things
I'll take competency issues over greed and harm anytime.
I’m sorry to say, but all of three often occur with government as well.
I’m sorry to say, but all of three often occur with government as well.
By some groups moreso than others.
I tend to see greed cause harm a lot more often than incompetence.
To be fair, I come from a country where we have free healthcare, free education up to college level (we only pay when taking masters or things like that, after finishing our chosen career.
Our most know public university is pretty top notch if we talk about content and education quality.
And our healthcare is pretty good too, although there is also private healthcare and education. In the education department, at least to my knowledge, there is not really a difference.
The USA is not big. It spends a lot on defense (which usually use to wage innecesary wars or disrupt other governments) and maybe too much in mantaining this horrible two party system you've got.
That said, my country's economy is in very bad shape (Argentina has inflation rates that are sky high).
Guess they’d be stuck with relying on research grants and finding cheaper ways to combat diseases
No, they would just keep everything trade secret and we'd have no idea how to replicate the medicine.
13$ to produce including all the R&D behind it?
I'm not a fan of big pharma, quite the contrary, but I'd be curious to know where this number comes from...
I bet they got a lot of grants and other funding. They aren't disclosing their costs so you can assume it's less that you imagine.
As if they'll lower the price once they've recouped the R&D costs ten times over.
Who paid for the R&D?
That would be the us government soooo.... The citizens of the usa
The government promised to purchase massive quantities of Pfizer manufactured it to guarantee a market, they didn't directly fund R&D.
The government promised to purchase massive quantities of Pfizer manufactured it to guarantee a market, they didn’t directly fund R&D.
I've heard government grants were involved?
Either way, guaranteed funds is still one hell of a profit motive to do the R&D and produce the medicine.
I've heard lots of stuff but you can read the contact in the link I posted
A lot of the research for the mRNA tech that made the vaccine possible was done at Pennsylvania University before they fired the woman doing the research and she moved on to Biontech.
Don’t ever think for a second that pharmaceutical companies did anything during Covid for our benefit. They were working their actuarial tables to figure out how they maximize their profits in the future against sick people dying.
They did save millions of lives, though, and allowed us to stop the constant quarantines months or even years early, whatever their motivations (and I'm not as cynical about that as you).
Meanwhile, all the Internet smartasses who love to criticize the drug industry non-stop did exactly jack shit.
There's nothing wrong with the drugs these companies are developing.
But stopping production or halting research in curing diseases, just because it isn't as "profitable" as selling drugs to treat the symptoms rather than the disease. That's insane.
Selling drugs at insane markups, when it's very clear they cost far less in the EU, and they still earn ton of money. That's insane.
Patent medicin to keep it out of the hands of sick people, because your other not-as-good drug sells better. That's insane.
And who is in charge of making sure this kind of immoral illegal thing doesn't happen? People who are still somehow allowed to collect kickbacks in exchange for looking the other way.
We don't have the information needed to decide whether to be angry.
Drug studies are costly. We need to know how much R&D cost for this drug, what the average is, what percentage of research never hits the market, and then how many doses of this are expected to be sold over say a 5 year period.
Then we can work out a rough true cost of each dose. Then we will know whether to be angry.
Wasn't COVID research funded by taxpayers under form of grants/emergency funds to pharma companies during the pandemic?
Yes, for vaccine research. I don't know if this specifically was covered. Another thing on the list of things we need to know before we get angry.
Much of the research happened long before COVID--at a loss. There's a reason this miraculous new mDNA vaccine technology appeared out of nowhere just in time for the pandemic: researchers had been working on it for years already, using investments and borrowed money. Government grants just went to finishing the vaccine and scaling up so quickly it was kinda mindboggling. They didn't just get to stuff the cash in their pockets.
I think we'd be better off is we shifted R&D to academia. Sure there's a fuck ton of bureaucracy in universities, but maybe then our tax dollars will be put to good use, and people learn.
Last year, the three largest US-listed pharmaceutical companies by revenues, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, spent a combined $39.6 billion on R&D. That is, admittedly, a lot of money. But less than Medicare is currently paying on just ten drugs
While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.
Even if R&D cost $100m for this, they'd still only need to sell roughly 80000 doses to make their money back.
I think you're grossly underestimating how much things cost.
1400 * 8000 = 11.200.00, so you're off by a factor of 10
Edit: Lol, downvoted for a fact
Haha, you got in there before I corrected my typo. The point still stands though! There's a whole lot of people in the world, 80k doses is fuck all.
Average drug research costs are estimated at between 1-3 billion USD. That's the average, so some are much more.
And I'd like to know if this stated price is the sticker price. Insurance companies negotiate much less than sticker price, I live in a country with a government drug department that negotiates much lower prices by doing a single contract for the whole country.
Is this that stupid thing where the sticker price is high but no one actually pays that, it's just to make insurance companies feel like they are negotiating good deals?
Orrr, hear me out, we can be angry right now without any prep, put in a comment about big corpo greed, and move on the to next Lemmy post.
Explain why we make it legal for companies to set their own prices again
It does make companies more willing to invest more into drug research , which is a good thing.
Drug research is overwhelmingly publicly funded. Private R&D is a PR myth we were fed to justify high prices.
I never said wasn’t. What I said is still true.
No. Those two statements don't go together like that. They aren't making big new drugs. At most they are looking for ways to adjust the formula so they can extend patents. There is no amount of profit that makes them willing to do more R&D.
Covid treatment was publicly funded. This is a case of public funding going to research and private companies profiting from it.
Everyone should be outraged from the situation. This cheap treatment is being denied to the majority of the world's population because of patients, and so covid has more opportunities to mutate and make everyone less safe.
Why don't we just take investor money and invest in it ourselves?
Others have already pointed out that the covid vaccine was publicly funded ergo the benefit should be publicly owned
That's called freedom! Go to Russia if you don't like it! /s
Literally
It is shockingly easy to burn things.
I'm just going to leave that thought there.
And then they just rebuilt Arasaka tower and taxed the poor to do it.
Isn't it just this expensive because the government can't negotiate prices? So the insurances will pay a normal price but when the government is paying it'll cost more
They’re positioning it based on the length of hospital stay it prevents. In that perspective, this is an absolute bargain. For the most part, they’re selling insurance that $1.4k is far cheaper than even one additional night in the hospital. Insurance is willing to pay because it saves them loads of money. For uninsured and underinsured, it sounds like they’re basically not charging.
Only point I'd add is drugs cost more than they are to produce because of R&D costs, which must be recuperated. If costs are high, and volume is low, it means larger markup over the cost to manufacture.
The R&D costs were largely already paid by tax-payer funded research grants and, in this case, additional emergency funding from governments. This is especially the case in the US, where the government is also legally required to hand over patents for government developed drugs to private companies that did none of the work.
Pfizer spent $2 billion dollars in R&D just in 2021 on the drug. The US government & public agencies overall funded $35 million for help with clinical trials. I don't think it's intellectually honest to claim that the majority of R&D costs was directly paid by public grants and taxpayer funded research, which is money spent without the expectation of any produced product in hand.
The US government helped speed up the process, reducing R&D costs with the emergency use authorization, and had a contract of $5.3 billion to help buy tens of millions of doses for Americans. I suppose you could make the argument that some of that indirectly helped fund R&D, but then so does every other non-American customer when they pay for a product, which is how the system is supposed to work.
It’s generally a myth that cost to produce has anything to do with market prices.
I’m allergic to Paxlovid; taking it makes my neck and head swell up to where I look like Rocky Balboa after a fight and my neck feels like a giant tree trunk.
This isn’t important, but it’s probably the first time I’ve seen an article about Paxlovid since that happened, so it’s all I could think about for a minute.
I guess I’m not surprised that this is happening with one of the few very essential drugs that isn’t in the list of medications that congress is negotiating prices down on for medicare.
Of course pharmaceutical giants use any opening, opportunity, or loophole to exploit those who are sick. Disgusting.
I’m allergic to Paxlovid; taking it makes my neck and head swell up to where I look like Rocky Balboa after a fight and my neck feels like a giant tree trunk.
Are you aware of which part of it that you're allergic to?
And have you heard of if others have the same allergic reaction?
No, my doctor just had me take Benadryl to see if the reaction started to calm down. When 12 hours later it had, he had me stop taking Paxlovid completely and I didn't finish the pack.
I know anaphylaxis is definitely a reported reaction of Paxlovid, but I have no idea how prevalent it is.
This page on Paxlovid by the NIH mentions it under Monitoring and Adverse Effects.
Thanks, and also for the link.
No problem!
They can treat deez nuts
This is the nature of providers vs insurers in the negotiation war. And those without insurance are the losers of this war.
Or you live in a civilized nation with universal health care lol
I can't even fathom thinking like you do, fucking god what a horrible nation you live in
It's not a matter of thinking like that. It's the truth of what happens. I didn't say I'm ok with the system.
Sorry, I think i was grumpy that morning and a little more attack oriented then my usually aggressive self.
Pfizers R&D budget is 11 billion per year. That money comes from products from the market.
They made 100 billion in profit and spent 11 on research. They can afford to sell things much much cheaper and still have both profits and research money.
But mah greed!!
Their ceo will get fired for transforming a publicly traded company into a welfare organization. If you don’t like that, change our economic system. I would be on board as the same system kills people and environment.
Never mind all the government subsidy which of course comes from the tax pot
Average retail net margins (profit margin as share of revenue) are about 3% on a good year. Pfizer's was something like 30% last year. They cleared 100 billion in revenue, meaning 30 billion in straight profit (the 11 billion came out of the other 60-odd percent, because it's not an even 30). In one year, they made almost enough money to buy Twitter. They made enough profit to cover Kansas and Oklahoma's entire 2022 FY budgets. I'm trying to drive home the absolute ridiculous enormity of those profits, because it's not easy to really grasp. The point is, it's not like they don't have a lot of room to breathe.
Some other things to consider:
-Of that 11 billion, how much is government funding and grants? IIRC, Uncle Sam pays for the development of a whole lot of what ends up being private products in healthcare.
-Of their 60-odd billion in costs, how much was advertising? Look, I know you gotta sell to make money, but advertising to patients is annoying, expensive, and (in terms of medical ethics) icky. It's not like they can't save some money there to do R&D.
The point is: Pfizer could easily cut their prices on life-saving medicine and still have tidy profits.
All your questions are good questions that can easily be answered. None of those are valid to justify novel drugs pricing at production costs.
Quoting one figure is pretty useless to make a point as it exists only as "A big number" with nothing to compare it to.
Since you know their financials enough to quote one figure here:
What is their annual revenue?
What is their annual profit?
They're a publicly traded company. All that info is published in their annual financial report
Like quoting the production cost without any evidence or considering any R&D costs?
I did not start the bullshit.
Last year, the three largest US-listed pharmaceutical companies by revenues, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, spent a combined $39.6 billion on R&D. That is, admittedly, a lot of money. But less than Medicare is currently paying on just ten drugs
While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.
The clinical trials are the most costly and most risky part of development.
From the passage I already quoted:
In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market.
That is not true. Small biotech usually cannot effort late stage development. They either just get buyed by big pharma. Or they licence the lead compound to big pharma and get royalties. Very few exemptions to this.
Edit: the link you provide cites this FT article as a source for this claim. However the article is about M&A and supports my point.
I'll assume you know more about this than I do despite the lack of any citation.
I refuse to believe there's an ethically acceptable business justification for this ridiculous markup.
The entire healthcare industry in the US is built on a foundation of corporate greed. This is just one obvious example.
At least they loose exclusivity after 15 -20 years and generics are usually much cheaper.
The left and right both hate Big Pharma, especially over the pandemic response.
The difference is the left hate them because they profit by exploiting the misfortune of I'll people and essentially hold their lives to ransom.
The right hate them because they use actual science instead of "alternative facts"
This is very off topic but I like that mastodon is now a platform more commonly being used to share information like this. Although for their mobile UI, I really hope they get rid of the bar on the right, it's very odd.
Can't you just use any 3rd party app with a different layout?
credited with helping the development of Improvac, which eradicates boar taint
Doesn't...doesn't that...if an animal doesn't have taint, doesn't that make it a bird?
ahh now it makes more sense why governments let it turn into an endemic virus
Give it a couple of days, the Pfizer CEO will be telling everyone how desperately important it is that they get vaccinated.
Because he needs more money, obviously.
This is treatment, not the vaccine
My point still applies.
Getting the vaccine dramatically lowers the likelihood of needing the treatment, so no, your point is categorically incorrect.
And Pfizer are obviously only interested in the wellbeing of the population. 🤪
They're interested in a safe and effective vaccine, because that will prove their technology and increase their stock value.
You should have paid better attention in Economics, Biology and Chemistry. Or (hopefully) you're still in school and haven't taken those classes yet. Unfortunately, most of the conspiracy nutcases are adults, which I assume you are.
Wait, is "head of huge business is primarily concerned with profits, not with public well-being" a conspiracy theory or standard operating practice under capitalism?
It's an oversimplified way to describe an operating practice under capitalism. Every publicly traded company is required to deliver the most profit to their shareholders, and they can get sued if shareholders don't think the company is doing that. However, there are multiple philosophies on how to get the most profit, so the evilness of a company is on a spectrum.
Private companies are also beholden to their shareholders, but not exclusively for profit. Some may want to make huge sums of money by any means necessary. Others might want to invest in sustainable and ethical companies. Others might not care about profit at all.
Standard practice. Suggesting the vaccine will give you the disease is conspiracy theory.
Good job I didn't suggest that anywhere then.
Then what exactly are you suggesting
But isnt this just kind of a negotiation price?
In reality insurance companies will negotiate and make deals with lower prices, and people will still be covered for the same insurance cost, right?
Disclaimer: Not from US and I dont understand much about your insurance based health care system.
Not sure why so many downvotes. Other than the last statement I don't think you're wrong. Insurance will negotiate with providers and drug manufacturers to get discounts on top of whatever amount they're willing to pay. The result is that patients may get billed for anywhere from the full amount to zero. Regardless it kind of misses the point that US pharma companies are unregulated in their pricing and they are taking advantage of people in life threatening situations.
I almost had a similar issue with my son and a liquid medication that cost $600 for a 3 month supply. Thankfully he was old enough to take pills and the generic pill form was only $12.
Right. So insurance will cover parts of the cost, depending on the insurance.
Thanks, I didnt know.
Pfizer conducts research in various areas, including MS therapy. That costs a lot of money.
But I can't complain anyway, here in Germany you can get Paxlovid free of charge because it's prescribed by a doctor.
Pfizer conducts research in various areas, including MS therapy. That costs a lot of money.
Like when Roche refused to study Rituximab in multiple sclerosis, which has been succesfully used as an off-label medication for more than a decade, and then released Ocrelizumab for MS, a totally different and not at all virtually identical drug for ten times the price?
Pfizer has a profit margin of ~30%, and that's after lobbying and advertising and the billions of fines they had to pay for illegal advertising and kickbacks. Unsurprisingly, extractable profit is a really bad proxy for people's health.
But I can't complain anyway, here in Germany you can get Paxlovid free of charge because it's prescribed by a doctor.
While I usually think the "free at point of service"-argument isn't necessary, it's very relevant here. You're still paying for it, and all the other drugs that have come out over the last few years that are much, much more expensive than the therapies they replace.
Take a look at GLP-1-agonists (Wegovy, Ozempic, ...) which will come to replace/combine with oral antidiabetics like metformine and have now also been approved for obesity without diabetes.
Metformine is basically free a 10ct/pill, i.e. ~3€/patient/month. GLP-1-agonists cost about 250 - 1000€/patient/month. More than half of the German population is overweight, and more than one in eight suffer from type 2 diabetes - with both figures on the rise.
This trend of massive price increases with every new generation of drugs is extremely dangerous healthcare systems themselves, especially public ones, and of course the patients themselves in the end. Every price hike sets a new baseline, and we need to be very, very careful about compounding effects.
Pfizer conducts research in various areas, including MS therapy. That costs a lot of money.
Last year, the three largest US-listed pharmaceutical companies by revenues, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, spent a combined $39.6 billion on R&D. That is, admittedly, a lot of money. But less than Medicare is currently paying on just ten drugs
While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.
Trust the science folks. There's no reason why thes multinational pharma companies would do anything to hurt consumers.
2 things can be true at the same time. In this case the science is good and accurate, and since we live in a capitalist hellscape, corporations will take advantage of the science at every opportunity.
Do you think there is the financial incentive could perhaps skew the "science" in one direction?
On the other hand the vaccine was free. What's their target market, the antivaxers?
IIRC the vaccine was not free. Governments paid for it, so we all did pay for it.
Just don't take the damn Vax. We now know that people who never got vaxed have better immunity than those who did. Studies prove it
So no point getting this crap just to make Pfizer rich
$1400 is ridiculous but this post is ridiculous too. Hey OP, I want a vaccine to cure cancer. It’ll cost $13 to produce. Make it for me, test it, go through the approval process and I’ll sell it for $30. P.S. If I get sued, that’s on you too.
Before I bought Pfizer stock, this type of news would upset me.
I've been saying for years that universal healthcare won't solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control. If they can regulate medical related industries, such as pharma, the need for universal healthcare can be reduced or eliminated. As an added bonus, it would help keep the cost (ie. taxes) for universal healthcare a lot lower. This is pretty common for pharma companies to make insane profits like this, and it's extremely unethical.
universal healthcare won't solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control.
But universal healthcare would get prices under control. You're thinking completely backwards.
universal healthcare won't solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control.
But universal healthcare would get prices under control. You're thinking completely backwards.
I think the COVID treatments probably create more problems health wise than the disease. At least for younger healthier individuals. After getting the first two immunizations my wife developed pots which she didn't have before.
Edit: It's interesting that people are down voting me for my personal experience with the vaccine. I don't fault them because we are all different and experienced the vaccine differently but since there was little to no clinical testing and the people who received the vaccine were the test subjects I don't understand why people would be so defensive about it. I also understand if people don't believe me and that's ok too.
People are down voting you because your singular personal experience cannot possibly be extrapolated to the entire population who took the vaccine. No one is saying you're lying, or trying to delegitimize your wife's condition (I'm sorry that happened to her), but you don't cite any support for your opening statement
I think the COVID treatments probably create more problems health wise than the disease
other than your wife's ailment.
I was just stating what happened in my family and due to that my perception on the vaccine is changed compared to before we had them. Unfortunately we may not know for quite some time or at all. NIH will probably never release statistics to gather data on since the vaccine was pushed by every government in the world.
my dad is refusing to take vaccines because he thinks taking it will automatically make him vote dem because of nano-machine in them.
he also thinks vaccines are kind of HRT.
anyways how's your day?
sorry for your loss
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What is this??
loss
TIL! Thank you for the useful link.
I hope you are an adult and no longer live with your parents.
If that is the case remember this. If you cannot have pleasant encounters with him, you are under no obligation to have them at all.
No obligation to keep seeing them, would be kind of hard not to have parents 😛
You still have them, you just don't have contact with them.
but then who will take care of them? they were there at my time of need, shouldn't i also be there?
You sound like you have a good relationship with your parents, many don't.
You can be there for them when they need you without putting up with the anti-vax ravings you mentioned. It is called setting boundaries.
You do what you think is right but also understand that is not a universal thing for all people.
not really.
i think it is best to minimize contact but not keep null, since these kind of people are self destructive.
that's the only reason i stayed , for their health issues.
What about your health? Your mental health in particular.
Your parents raising you is not something you owe them for. You didn't choose to exist; they chose that for you. Raising you is the bare minimum they can do after making a choice like that. And now that you are older, you can reflect on the manner in which you were raised and decide what your relationship with them needs to look like so you can keep your sanity.
Nope they chose to get a child. You dont have to Do anything for them.
The "them" in that sentence refers to "encounters" not "parents".
Ah so that explains my D cups
It's all that government big pharma stuff that have given me moobs, things like:
You weren't supposed to eat them smh
Right, but if I stop now, how am I going to perform my magic flag butthole trick? checkmate
You shove them up your butt, otherwise you can only do it once. Duh.
Technically you could do it again but it’s even less recommended than the original
But they look like sweets :/
Eating the frigging pride flags are making the frogs gay!
RIP your inbox.
I’ll show my man boobs to anyone who wants to see them. Usually people tell me to stop showing them and say things like “gross” and call me bear tits but that hasn’t stopped me from whipping them out on every occasion and non occasion
Block his router of the content
I watched birds are not real Ted talk the other day, I think it was awesome to give a perspective on the conspiracy stuff and how people run with it.
If it flies, it spies. 🐣
Sorry you are going through that. Same thing happened to me, it really sucks :(
you should introduce him to the library
Gives a whole new meaning to the term "parental controls."
Is your father a senator?
Nano machines son
If you have some disposable cash and you're running into the "watch this video about antivax stuff". I recently discovered Kagi's summarizer works on as many YouTube videos as you want (seemingly by processing the audio itself).
It's been a bit since I've received a video like that, but I think it'll be a huge time saver for the next one... Or the next similar one...
While I'm sure there is a crazy markup, it's important to note the cost to produce - as in manufacture - does not include the cost of drug discovery, which is extremely expensive and involves a good amount of risk over a long period of time.
You can't just compare the cost of discovering a new drug vs. cost of producing a generic without any research like that.
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation
Pfizer COVID vaccine wasn't researched or developed by them. It was developed by the German BioNTech.
Still, bringing it to market at the required volumes requires extreme amounts of capital, there's a reason no one can enter the club.
I like Lemmy for exactly this - whenever someone incorrect makes a statement they're factchecked.
Thank you kind person for finding and sharing that source.
OP didn't make an incorrect statement though. What they stated was an important part of the equation. I think a lot of people don't take that type of thing into account and they will read what this post says and assume that Pfizer should be charging $13, or maybe something pretty close like 15 or 20. Clearly 1400 is far far too high, 13 is too low. A reasonable price allows the manufacturer to be successful while not gouging consumers lies somewhere in between, but much much closer to the low end than the high. To me that's really what the person you are responding to is giving evidence for.
Thank you, this is exactly my point.
Most excellent fact checking 👍
R&D on drugs is insanely expensive, but the protections put in place with the pricing are also a bit absurd. Most drug companies will lock down the formula for a period of time and price the drug aggressively for a short time (like a few years) and then open the formula up to generics who buy it and sell the same damn thing for a fraction of the cost.
For clarity I’m agreeing with you that the price is largely due to non-manufacturing costs and the article is misleading as a result, but I also wanted to say that the whole industry is a testament to capital over humanity.
Fuck off with the big pharma apologetics.
Boo hoo the corporation got millions in taxpayer money to develop a vaccine and now they have to profit off of it. I feel so bad for them.
This is subtle astroturfing.
By that same logic: it costs a couple of cents to burn a dvd or to transfer a few gigabytes, yet games costs $60.
All the commenter above you is saying is don't mix up the cost to develop with the cost to mass produce,
I'm going to be unreasonable because I don't like the ethics behind Pharma companies.
They should eat the loss; their research was healthily subsidised by the taxpayer
I'm personally of the opinion that all medical research should be tax funded. But given our current situation, if you tell these companies to 'eat the loss' they will simply stop producing new medicines.
Oh stop. The government should be running the pharaceutical industry then, not private companies.
Stop simping for evil corporations that don't give a shit about you.
Reading comprehension is tough I know. I indeed believe essential services including medical research should be government run.
But since that is not the case right now you can't expect companies to operate on a non profit basis. If stating obvious facts is simping then I guess you can call me a simp.
Oh no, whatever will we do if old dudes can't have 6 different types of boner pills?
Pharma companies spend a majority of their time trying to make new unique drugs, they just fail most of the time. The ones that succeed tend to be ones that are similar to ones that succeeded in the last, which is why you get multiple drugs in the same class, but it's not all they do. For example, we've essentially cured some types of cystic fibrosis, and there's an effective vaccine for malaria now - all developed in the last 10 years.
I don't want to pretend that the big pharma companies aren't evil, but they do have incentives that align with improving human health.
It's real easy to sit on the sidelines and spew hate. Not much of a life though.
...and the video game industry makes more money than any other entertainment industry. Yes, these things should cost more than just their production cost, but there is currently an obscene amount of money being made by the people at the top of these industries - y'know, the ones whose main role in making and distributing the product is just already being obscenely wealthy. And while I don't really care if AAA games are overpriced if they're only $60, I do care if life-saving meds are being held for ransom.
Do y'all need reminded that insulin, a life-or-death drug that's been around since the fucking 1920s, only costs at most $10 to make but currently retails for up to $300 a vial? It does not fucking matter whether or not this particular treatment should cost $13 or $90, the markup on any life saving drug being over 1,000% is blatant price gauging at the expense of human life, and the fact that the pharmaceutical industry does this all the time is common fucking knowledge. Anything approaching a defense of this shit either is in fact astroturfing or is so braindead as to call it a necessity that a publicly traded company demand the sick either choose debt or the grave.
That cost to develop was likely not borne by Pfizer in the first place.
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation
Game DVDs are not lifesaving drugs.
Are we talking about the vaccine here? Sounds like a post-exposure drug to me
Guess this comment of mine will also get deleted but here goes nothing.
The article is about antiviral medicine, not a vaccine. So you are getting angry at the wrong thing.
That's just an excuse because many drugs are sold at prices much lower what they are sold in the US. They are not selling them at loss in other countries.
Definitely not at a loss to produce no, but maybe a loss overall.
My bet is that the US subsidizes R&D by paying obscene amounts for the drugs and the EU and others just serve as extra income
Your bet?
I don't think it takes 1.4k to move anything anywhere.
Yes we can. It’s just doesn’t give a good faith assessment of the situation. And why would I want to do that if it’s counter to my rigid world view? sigh better add an /s
It costs $13 to produce paxlovid…
https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/pfizer-spikes-paxlovid-prices-to-100-times-cost-of-production
The eu:
Scandinavian countries:
I don't think he meant to the consumer. EU countries can negotiate for the price with pharmaceutical companies, so they can lower the price.
In the US insurance companies can try to negotiate, but their weight is quite low, and the federal government (medicaid, medicare) is forbidden by law to negotiate. Whichever price pharma sets, it's that.
Sounds crazy they are but allowed to negotiate?
Is that the same for anything else the government buys? I can't imagine the army buying 100 tanks and just paying the first price they get?
It's a constitutional thing, government has to guarantee the companies' freedom to set the price they want or something totally moronic like that...
In fact it's the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-judge-refuses-block-medicare-negotiating-drug-prices-2023-09-29/
Yes! That's a great start 👌 especially if the negotiator is NOT getting a kickback from Pharma for negotiating a high price
It's like
– Arms dealer: Each tank cost me 500,000 dollars to make. Give me 5 billion for each.
– Let's negotiate. How about 500 million instead?
– Arms dealer: Fiiine, but only because you're a good client.
This is legitimately how it works in the US between insurance and pharma/medical.
I just had a baby and I added up the total bill from the hospital and it was $100,000. We were in the hospital for 3 days. My insurance "negotiated" it down to $26,000, and I paid $3000.
The $100,000 is completely made up from the beginning. Pharma and medical just slap big ass ridiculous numbers down, then the insurance fake negotiates down to a still completely ridiculous number, then that cost has to get eaten by people who pay into insurance, which is basically everyone.
Is that true? Is there a legitimate reason why they shouldn't be able to?
It's a constitutional thing, government has to guarantee the companies' freedom to set the price they want or something totally moronic like that...
In fact it's the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-judge-refuses-block-medicare-negotiating-drug-prices-2023-09-29/
How about updating the constitution to solve this specific problem, which is quite significant for the populace? After all, it's the constitution's job to serve the people.
That would require a constitutional amendment, which would require being ratified by 38 or more states. Which would require at least 38 states without significant corruption/obstruction, and a population not braindead/brainwashed enough to vote against their own interests.
So the chances of that happening are abysmally low.
Because medicine shouldn't become a flea market where you're gambling your health against profit maximization.
Give pharmaceutical companies a fair price scale where they can profit, don't let them hyperinflate prices without justification.
It's not the same if Apple prices their phones at 20,000 USD and you decide you're buying other brand, pharma plays these extortion games after they have captured enough market/regulation so most people have to pay or stay sick.
United States countries:
Didn’t the government fund the development? So.. it’s not like they need so much to recover R&D right?
Welcome to the United States. Everything is subsidized, then turned around to fuck the average person.
The government did not for Pfizer. That was Moderns. Pfizer did spend billions of their own cash. This move is largely because the executive leadership way overestimated the amount of covid vaccine and drug treatment revenue for this year, and they are desperate to make up ground.
So they are raising prices and cutting across the board rather than admitting they didn't know what they were doing in their projections. CEO isn't taking a pay cut though. Morons got a winning lottery ticket in the pandemic and assumed they'd keep winning every year.
I know they funded moderna - they basically built Moderna’s new plants including their cmo’s plant so that they could produce at scale. Govt built and funded the plants at risk - prior to fda approval - so that it massively sped up the process to getting the drug in people’s hands. Those plants are now used for other drugs.
I think - but not 100% sure - Pfizer did it on their own.
Still - 10,000% is shameful.
That is almost always the case. Pharma companies are mostly just advertising firms
I'm fine with the public-private partnership but money like this needs to come with strings attached. We should've made an agreement to cap the price. We developed these drugs under the Trump administration so I really don't think the impact to poor and middle class citizens has ever been a thought in his mind.
Paxlovid kept me alive when I had COVID. This makes me really upset. People will actually die without this.
If you don't mind my asking, how much did you pay when you used it?
Mine was free.
So many Martin Shkrelis out there pricing drugs to the highest level they can get away with. Every big pharmaceutical company does this kind of thing, especially with new drugs.
That's because in many cases, healthcare has infinite demand.
Thanks capitalism!!
/sarcasm.
I'll never understand why so many people think middlemen somehow makes shit cheaper...
Taxes > government research > cheap meds
With the bonus point of no more pharmaceutical companies selling shit like oxy for profit
Because they think government is inefficient by default, and a commercial business is motivated towards max efficiency to cut costs. Maybe all of this is true, but in capitalism companies also sell for the optimal price based on price elasticity. No competitors + essential live saving product = high prices.
Actually in human societies, not just in capitalism.
People talk about capitalism being bad as if only there people try to eat each other to become richer.
If you read something about reasons the USSR wouldn't have more efficient centralized planning, while having necessary machinery and resources, or why it wouldn't have standardized something, while having the standardization apparatus and planned economy, or why all the Internet-like projects went nowhere in USSR while being much more ambitious due to, again, planned economy, or why despite less fragmentation scale wouldn't make things cheaper to produce in USSR, but the opposite, and so on - that's because every reform would mean someone losing influence, and that someone would naturally use that influence to resist reform.
It's actually fascinating to read how some of those people really believed in Marxism and Communism, and were even very competent sometimes, but the general architecture made the whole thing less than just a sum of its parts. Really sad, though.
I agree that the problems aren't just in Capitalism. However, the country with the unofficial historical tagline, "and then it got worse", may not be the best example. I think China is a really good example of influence peddling outside a free market.
Well, China, when its ruling organization still had some consistent ideology, was a copy of Stalin's USSR, bigger and weaker, give or take. Only it started later.
Its way off that track started with reforms like Kosygin's reforms, would those not be neutered.
I'd say the reason in China this happened was exactly that it was bigger and weaker. It didn't quite have anything like Soviet industrial establishment, and it had the issues of poverty, hunger etc.
Because "government research" doesn't cover mass production and all of the supply chain management. Which is where anything bureaucratic really sucks.
(Unless you need to build things badly, but fast and on large scale, mobilization-style - see Khruschev-era mass construction in ex-USSR, or, for exotic stuff, older state-built housing in Israel which isn't that much better).
Actual production rots very quickly, if centralized and bureaucratic.
I agree that research requires long-term investment and is in general a completely different thing.
There's just so much wrong in your comment I can't address it all...
But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?
We're talking about patents right now.
The rest of what you said is still wrong, can't stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about...
If you can't then you'd better say nothing.
You said when talking about pharma companies as middlemen. You remove those middlemen - you have to do tasks they perform.
Yes, patent law should be abolished. That's what I'm talking about while commenting in most threads blaming "capitalism", because in like 2/3 cases patent law is to blame and not that.
Thank you for your unsubstantiated opinion which I can beat with that of my own every time, so not sure why you'd even express it without details.
You've got a point, I should have said "won't put the effort in".
I looked at your profile, you wait till posts are really old, then spam a bunch of nonsensical replies in it.
I'm just gonna block you. Everyone wins.
Not the worst way to look at this, if you want my opinion.
People vote for it every two years and are shocked, just shocked when they get precisely what they voted for.
Do you think pfizer and other companies who spend hundreds of millions lobbying would be like "aww shucks! the public voted to curb our shitty behavior, let's go home!"?
Ah, trademark laws and patents are obviously governmental stuff. So - not present in some imagined absolute capitalism. And with those abolished (except for stealing authorship still being illegal), I suppose market mechanisms would do their job sufficiently well for this particular case.
Believing in capitalism is believing in humans making rational and moral choices, anyone to do that would be nuts. That's a proactive answer to politically active people getting triggered by my comment and labeling me as a member of the other crowd.
The amount of Pfizer boot lickers here is astounding
Bots and shills.
Wish the admins could do something about them (bots at least).
It's like someone urinating in the swimming pool, so that nobody else wants to swim in it.
You have to consider all the R&D they put into it.
(Didn't the government pay for most of that?)
Right?
In a just world, "the people" would see this pricing, realize that they were the ones who paid for the development of it, and simply seize the company.
Whether that took the form of government litigation to force the company to offer this at a reasonable price, or simply a mob of people forcing the company's hand or else they burn it to the ground, either way, there needs to be a stick of fear to go along with the carrot of profit.
I'm not saying they should make no profit, but this is ridiculous.
Their R&D was releasing it to the public.
It's been too long since the aristocrats were reminded that they need us more than we need them and that they can't hire enough of us to stop the rest of us once we take an idea to mind.
Je suis d’accord avec vous! 😉
Seriously, people are acting like this is new. There is no sense in shaming them we've had it brought to the mainstream by people like Martin Skhreli and nothing has been done. Martin Skhreli himself is only in jail because of his ponzi schemes, a.k.a. screwing other rich people out of their money. The only reason Pfizer was praised was because it was needed in a time of need and because they hired plenty of lobbyists.
Ive accepted this behavior as typical and standard issue human nature.
That is why i am mot having kids, seeing that extinction is the best future for humans. Evolution puts any other intelligence in the universe at risk.
I was given (free) Paxlovid when I finally contracted covid this year. We need laws regulating price increases. If you can't demonstrate that your costs for a product or service went up, you can't increase by more than x%. I don't know how you do this without encouraging higher introductory prices because it's not a problem that I've thought about in depth, but something like this needs to happen with further consideration.
Another thing I'd like to see is robber barons getting prosecuted for crimes against humanity, but that's not realistic.
Biden took the first steps towards combating this in the US with the Inflation Reduction Act: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/03/15/hhs-releases-initial-guidance-historic-medicare-drug-price-negotiation-program-price-applicability-year-2026.html
Medicare is now able to negotiate with drug companies on drug prices. Now we just need to bring it home by electing enough politicians (that are open to the idea of course ... so Democrats and likely more progressive Democrats), that a Medicare for all option is also added.
Yeah, that doesn't really work. Because they will always find a way to make costs go up, and then demonstrate it. Auditing such things would benearly impossible. The only real solution is for certain industries to be nonprofits. Healthcare really shouldn't be about profit, it should ge about care.
Just get rid of copyright, let the person who can create your product the cheapest make money off it
Or would that be too capitalist for the US
Drugs aren't protected by copyright. They're protected by patents.
In either case that would be an extreme move and I would not support getting rid of patents or copyright as they're genuinely useful concepts.
Copyright in particular doesn't just protect the money hungry. Lemmy, Linux, and many other open source projects are protected from those who would prefer to use their source code to make a closed source proprietary application and contribute nothing back.
Copyright needs to go back to 30 years. You have 30 years on a patent to make money off it. If you haven't already made your money back, and a handsome profit in that time, you should have hired a business manager year 2.
Patents are either 14 or 20 years, depending on type. Copyright is absurdly long, but copyright also doesn't apply to drugs, inventions, recipes, game rules, mathematical formulae - mostly just creative works.
Ok, 14 to 20 years on patents seems reasonable. I would still set copyright back to 30 years, since as you pointed out, it's really only affecting the public domain.
I'd be okay with that, but acting like copyright doesn't exist for a reason or ever do any good... Isn't helping actually lead to a solution :)
In a world where you can’t protect your IP, how do you have close sourced?
Military tech is the bigger issue
You keep the source code, methods of operation or manufacturing methods private. Companies can already do this. Patents force companies to make their inventions public information (you can access the patent), in exchange for a limited exclusive right to use this technology.
For no trivial things patent legislation is a great benefit. Everyone can access the patent knowledge. For trivial iterative things patents only benefit the patentee who gets the exclusive rights.
Copyright means anything you produce that is easily to copy, you have legal control over how it's copied and the revenue it may generate. This is for things like art work, books, news stories, code etc. Things that can be copy and pasted or printed.
Copyright is granted when you create the content. There's no application. It ensures someone can make money from the copy they produce. Less people would write books, if Amazon could print and sell copies without paying the author.
Military tech would be private. Even with our current IP protection system. A hostile power doesn't care about infringing IP, there's very little consequence for do this. If you patent military technology, then that info would be public.
Very easily, you compile it.
I think you're thinking of patents rather than copyright. I was about to ask something snarky like "without the ability to patent their discoveries what would cause these drug companies to pay for r&d up front?" but honestly, this one was paid for by government grants anyway and that's really where my problem comes in. We seem to have developed this amazing worst of both worlds where the public bears all the up front expense of r&d and then the government just gives away what we bought for ourselves so that they can raise the price to 100x what the medication actually costs.
I was just being lazy and didn’t write patents and trademarks all together
I figured saying copyright would be enough for people to include the whole copyright office
Patents, trademarks and copyrights are three entirely different things. Patents cover products for sale, and give an inventor the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a given time. Trademarks cover branding, and allow the person registering the trademark to prevent anyone else from using it or something a reasonable person could confuse with it indefinitely. Copyright is exclusively for intellectual property and allows the copyright holder to stop anyone from making copies of their work, derivatives of their work or work that is substantially similar to their work.
This is very incorrect except for the very high level. Patents cover systems and methods and devices that are more than mere physical phenomena. Patent owners are granted an exclusive monopoly over the implementation of what the patent issued on (i.e., its eventual claims) that runs up to 20 years from the time of filing. They are an intellectual property right premised in property theory.
Trademarks cover designators of origin. Fundamentally, they are to reduce consumer confusion and are ultimately nothing more than a presumption once granted in favor of the owner in unfair competition disputes. They are also an intellectual property but are premised in totally different theories of law and can apply to literally anything that can be strongly associated with a company, more or less.
Copyright is an intellectual property, yes, but is limited to creative expression fixed in a tangible medium. This is a very short sentence but has some pretty serious depth to it. Copyright is ultimately a very specific type of right to, and this may shock you, copying a thing (fixed in a tangible medium....you do not have copyright on ideas).
That all said, pharma patents and, really, industry as a whole is super fucked and needs serious reimagining in the current era. But some form of IP absolutely is necessary to incentivize and enable drug creation of it is to persist in our free market capitalist economic structure.
Eliminating capitalism sounds like an easier idea, to be honest.
So you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating and testing a new drug to cure something. Then another company can come along and undercut you since they didn't spend the upfront money. And now you go bankrupt? How is that fair? I'm not saying Big Pharma isn't an issue but as always, the solution is somewhere in the middle.
It’s fair because it helps people
Medicine is a service
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
That would not be true if the government funded things.
I really wish we didn't let Capitalism control vital to our living services.
Why on earth would we want the government funding and running things, that would be a nightmare. Government is far too big as it is now.
I'll take competency issues over greed and harm anytime.
I’m sorry to say, but all of three often occur with government as well.
By some groups moreso than others.
I tend to see greed cause harm a lot more often than incompetence.
To be fair, I come from a country where we have free healthcare, free education up to college level (we only pay when taking masters or things like that, after finishing our chosen career. Our most know public university is pretty top notch if we talk about content and education quality. And our healthcare is pretty good too, although there is also private healthcare and education. In the education department, at least to my knowledge, there is not really a difference. The USA is not big. It spends a lot on defense (which usually use to wage innecesary wars or disrupt other governments) and maybe too much in mantaining this horrible two party system you've got. That said, my country's economy is in very bad shape (Argentina has inflation rates that are sky high).
Guess they’d be stuck with relying on research grants and finding cheaper ways to combat diseases
No, they would just keep everything trade secret and we'd have no idea how to replicate the medicine.
13$ to produce including all the R&D behind it?
I'm not a fan of big pharma, quite the contrary, but I'd be curious to know where this number comes from...
I bet they got a lot of grants and other funding. They aren't disclosing their costs so you can assume it's less that you imagine.
As if they'll lower the price once they've recouped the R&D costs ten times over.
Who paid for the R&D?
That would be the us government soooo.... The citizens of the usa
The government promised to purchase massive quantities of Pfizer manufactured it to guarantee a market, they didn't directly fund R&D.
https://www.mainepublic.org/npr-news/2022-02-01/feds-contract-with-pfizer-for-paxlovid-has-some-surprises
I've heard government grants were involved?
Either way, guaranteed funds is still one hell of a profit motive to do the R&D and produce the medicine.
I've heard lots of stuff but you can read the contact in the link I posted
A lot of the research for the mRNA tech that made the vaccine possible was done at Pennsylvania University before they fired the woman doing the research and she moved on to Biontech.
Paxlovid isn't the vaccine. It's a treatment.
Don’t ever think for a second that pharmaceutical companies did anything during Covid for our benefit. They were working their actuarial tables to figure out how they maximize their profits in the future against sick people dying.
They did save millions of lives, though, and allowed us to stop the constant quarantines months or even years early, whatever their motivations (and I'm not as cynical about that as you).
Meanwhile, all the Internet smartasses who love to criticize the drug industry non-stop did exactly jack shit.
There's nothing wrong with the drugs these companies are developing.
But stopping production or halting research in curing diseases, just because it isn't as "profitable" as selling drugs to treat the symptoms rather than the disease. That's insane.
Selling drugs at insane markups, when it's very clear they cost far less in the EU, and they still earn ton of money. That's insane.
Patent medicin to keep it out of the hands of sick people, because your other not-as-good drug sells better. That's insane.
And who is in charge of making sure this kind of immoral illegal thing doesn't happen? People who are still somehow allowed to collect kickbacks in exchange for looking the other way.
We don't have the information needed to decide whether to be angry.
Drug studies are costly. We need to know how much R&D cost for this drug, what the average is, what percentage of research never hits the market, and then how many doses of this are expected to be sold over say a 5 year period.
Then we can work out a rough true cost of each dose. Then we will know whether to be angry.
Wasn't COVID research funded by taxpayers under form of grants/emergency funds to pharma companies during the pandemic?
Yes, for vaccine research. I don't know if this specifically was covered. Another thing on the list of things we need to know before we get angry.
Much of the research happened long before COVID--at a loss. There's a reason this miraculous new mDNA vaccine technology appeared out of nowhere just in time for the pandemic: researchers had been working on it for years already, using investments and borrowed money. Government grants just went to finishing the vaccine and scaling up so quickly it was kinda mindboggling. They didn't just get to stuff the cash in their pockets.
I think we'd be better off is we shifted R&D to academia. Sure there's a fuck ton of bureaucracy in universities, but maybe then our tax dollars will be put to good use, and people learn.
I would love that.
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation
Even if R&D cost $100m for this, they'd still only need to sell roughly 80000 doses to make their money back.
I think you're grossly underestimating how much things cost.
1400 * 8000 = 11.200.00, so you're off by a factor of 10
Edit: Lol, downvoted for a fact
Haha, you got in there before I corrected my typo. The point still stands though! There's a whole lot of people in the world, 80k doses is fuck all.
Average drug research costs are estimated at between 1-3 billion USD. That's the average, so some are much more.
And I'd like to know if this stated price is the sticker price. Insurance companies negotiate much less than sticker price, I live in a country with a government drug department that negotiates much lower prices by doing a single contract for the whole country.
Is this that stupid thing where the sticker price is high but no one actually pays that, it's just to make insurance companies feel like they are negotiating good deals?
Orrr, hear me out, we can be angry right now without any prep, put in a comment about big corpo greed, and move on the to next Lemmy post.
Ok who let Martin shkreli out of jail?
I think he was released last year.
Explain why we make it legal for companies to set their own prices again
It does make companies more willing to invest more into drug research , which is a good thing.
Drug research is overwhelmingly publicly funded. Private R&D is a PR myth we were fed to justify high prices.
I never said wasn’t. What I said is still true.
No. Those two statements don't go together like that. They aren't making big new drugs. At most they are looking for ways to adjust the formula so they can extend patents. There is no amount of profit that makes them willing to do more R&D.
Covid treatment was publicly funded. This is a case of public funding going to research and private companies profiting from it.
Everyone should be outraged from the situation. This cheap treatment is being denied to the majority of the world's population because of patients, and so covid has more opportunities to mutate and make everyone less safe.
Why don't we just take investor money and invest in it ourselves?
Others have already pointed out that the covid vaccine was publicly funded ergo the benefit should be publicly owned
That's called freedom! Go to Russia if you don't like it! /s
Literally
It is shockingly easy to burn things.
I'm just going to leave that thought there.
And then they just rebuilt Arasaka tower and taxed the poor to do it.
Isn't it just this expensive because the government can't negotiate prices? So the insurances will pay a normal price but when the government is paying it'll cost more
That's Medicare that you're thinking of, and they can now negotiate prices. The big one is EpiPen-type products.
No, it’s expensive because the value it provides.
They’re positioning it based on the length of hospital stay it prevents. In that perspective, this is an absolute bargain. For the most part, they’re selling insurance that $1.4k is far cheaper than even one additional night in the hospital. Insurance is willing to pay because it saves them loads of money. For uninsured and underinsured, it sounds like they’re basically not charging.
Only point I'd add is drugs cost more than they are to produce because of R&D costs, which must be recuperated. If costs are high, and volume is low, it means larger markup over the cost to manufacture.
The R&D costs were largely already paid by tax-payer funded research grants and, in this case, additional emergency funding from governments. This is especially the case in the US, where the government is also legally required to hand over patents for government developed drugs to private companies that did none of the work.
Pfizer spent $2 billion dollars in R&D just in 2021 on the drug. The US government & public agencies overall funded $35 million for help with clinical trials. I don't think it's intellectually honest to claim that the majority of R&D costs was directly paid by public grants and taxpayer funded research, which is money spent without the expectation of any produced product in hand.
The US government helped speed up the process, reducing R&D costs with the emergency use authorization, and had a contract of $5.3 billion to help buy tens of millions of doses for Americans. I suppose you could make the argument that some of that indirectly helped fund R&D, but then so does every other non-American customer when they pay for a product, which is how the system is supposed to work.
Where exactly are you getting those numbers? They seem rather suspect. The first example that I was able to find, for example, put US government investment at $30 Billion on vaccines alone (https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/how-much-could-covid-19-vaccines-cost-the-u-s-after-commercialization/#:~:text=The%20federal%20government%20has%20spent,charge%20to%20the%20U.S.%20population.)
It’s generally a myth that cost to produce has anything to do with market prices.
I’m allergic to Paxlovid; taking it makes my neck and head swell up to where I look like Rocky Balboa after a fight and my neck feels like a giant tree trunk.
This isn’t important, but it’s probably the first time I’ve seen an article about Paxlovid since that happened, so it’s all I could think about for a minute.
I guess I’m not surprised that this is happening with one of the few very essential drugs that isn’t in the list of medications that congress is negotiating prices down on for medicare.
Of course pharmaceutical giants use any opening, opportunity, or loophole to exploit those who are sick. Disgusting.
Are you aware of which part of it that you're allergic to?
And have you heard of if others have the same allergic reaction?
No, my doctor just had me take Benadryl to see if the reaction started to calm down. When 12 hours later it had, he had me stop taking Paxlovid completely and I didn't finish the pack.
I know anaphylaxis is definitely a reported reaction of Paxlovid, but I have no idea how prevalent it is.
This page on Paxlovid by the NIH mentions it under Monitoring and Adverse Effects.
Thanks, and also for the link.
No problem!
They can treat deez nuts
This is the nature of providers vs insurers in the negotiation war. And those without insurance are the losers of this war.
Or you live in a civilized nation with universal health care lol
I can't even fathom thinking like you do, fucking god what a horrible nation you live in
It's not a matter of thinking like that. It's the truth of what happens. I didn't say I'm ok with the system.
Sorry, I think i was grumpy that morning and a little more attack oriented then my usually aggressive self.
I hear you and I sympathize.
Shocked Pikachu Face
Pfizers R&D budget is 11 billion per year. That money comes from products from the market.
They made 100 billion in profit and spent 11 on research. They can afford to sell things much much cheaper and still have both profits and research money.
But mah greed!!
Their ceo will get fired for transforming a publicly traded company into a welfare organization. If you don’t like that, change our economic system. I would be on board as the same system kills people and environment.
Never mind all the government subsidy which of course comes from the tax pot
Average retail net margins (profit margin as share of revenue) are about 3% on a good year. Pfizer's was something like 30% last year. They cleared 100 billion in revenue, meaning 30 billion in straight profit (the 11 billion came out of the other 60-odd percent, because it's not an even 30). In one year, they made almost enough money to buy Twitter. They made enough profit to cover Kansas and Oklahoma's entire 2022 FY budgets. I'm trying to drive home the absolute ridiculous enormity of those profits, because it's not easy to really grasp. The point is, it's not like they don't have a lot of room to breathe.
Some other things to consider:
-Of that 11 billion, how much is government funding and grants? IIRC, Uncle Sam pays for the development of a whole lot of what ends up being private products in healthcare.
-Of their 60-odd billion in costs, how much was advertising? Look, I know you gotta sell to make money, but advertising to patients is annoying, expensive, and (in terms of medical ethics) icky. It's not like they can't save some money there to do R&D.
The point is: Pfizer could easily cut their prices on life-saving medicine and still have tidy profits.
All your questions are good questions that can easily be answered. None of those are valid to justify novel drugs pricing at production costs.
Quoting one figure is pretty useless to make a point as it exists only as "A big number" with nothing to compare it to.
Since you know their financials enough to quote one figure here:
What is their annual revenue?
What is their annual profit?
They're a publicly traded company. All that info is published in their annual financial report
Like quoting the production cost without any evidence or considering any R&D costs? I did not start the bullshit.
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation
The clinical trials are the most costly and most risky part of development.
From the passage I already quoted:
That is not true. Small biotech usually cannot effort late stage development. They either just get buyed by big pharma. Or they licence the lead compound to big pharma and get royalties. Very few exemptions to this.
Edit: the link you provide cites this FT article as a source for this claim. However the article is about M&A and supports my point.
I'll assume you know more about this than I do despite the lack of any citation.
I refuse to believe there's an ethically acceptable business justification for this ridiculous markup.
The entire healthcare industry in the US is built on a foundation of corporate greed. This is just one obvious example.
At least they loose exclusivity after 15 -20 years and generics are usually much cheaper.
The left and right both hate Big Pharma, especially over the pandemic response.
The difference is the left hate them because they profit by exploiting the misfortune of I'll people and essentially hold their lives to ransom.
The right hate them because they use actual science instead of "alternative facts"
This is very off topic but I like that mastodon is now a platform more commonly being used to share information like this. Although for their mobile UI, I really hope they get rid of the bar on the right, it's very odd.
Can't you just use any 3rd party app with a different layout?
For muh profit$.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bourla
Doesn't...doesn't that...if an animal doesn't have taint, doesn't that make it a bird?
ahh now it makes more sense why governments let it turn into an endemic virus
Give it a couple of days, the Pfizer CEO will be telling everyone how desperately important it is that they get vaccinated.
Because he needs more money, obviously.
This is treatment, not the vaccine
My point still applies.
Getting the vaccine dramatically lowers the likelihood of needing the treatment, so no, your point is categorically incorrect.
And Pfizer are obviously only interested in the wellbeing of the population. 🤪
They're interested in a safe and effective vaccine, because that will prove their technology and increase their stock value.
You should have paid better attention in Economics, Biology and Chemistry. Or (hopefully) you're still in school and haven't taken those classes yet. Unfortunately, most of the conspiracy nutcases are adults, which I assume you are.
Wait, is "head of huge business is primarily concerned with profits, not with public well-being" a conspiracy theory or standard operating practice under capitalism?
It's an oversimplified way to describe an operating practice under capitalism. Every publicly traded company is required to deliver the most profit to their shareholders, and they can get sued if shareholders don't think the company is doing that. However, there are multiple philosophies on how to get the most profit, so the evilness of a company is on a spectrum.
Private companies are also beholden to their shareholders, but not exclusively for profit. Some may want to make huge sums of money by any means necessary. Others might want to invest in sustainable and ethical companies. Others might not care about profit at all.
Standard practice. Suggesting the vaccine will give you the disease is conspiracy theory.
Good job I didn't suggest that anywhere then.
Then what exactly are you suggesting
But isnt this just kind of a negotiation price? In reality insurance companies will negotiate and make deals with lower prices, and people will still be covered for the same insurance cost, right?
Disclaimer: Not from US and I dont understand much about your insurance based health care system.
Not sure why so many downvotes. Other than the last statement I don't think you're wrong. Insurance will negotiate with providers and drug manufacturers to get discounts on top of whatever amount they're willing to pay. The result is that patients may get billed for anywhere from the full amount to zero. Regardless it kind of misses the point that US pharma companies are unregulated in their pricing and they are taking advantage of people in life threatening situations.
I almost had a similar issue with my son and a liquid medication that cost $600 for a 3 month supply. Thankfully he was old enough to take pills and the generic pill form was only $12.
Right. So insurance will cover parts of the cost, depending on the insurance. Thanks, I didnt know.
Pfizer conducts research in various areas, including MS therapy. That costs a lot of money.
But I can't complain anyway, here in Germany you can get Paxlovid free of charge because it's prescribed by a doctor.
Like when Roche refused to study Rituximab in multiple sclerosis, which has been succesfully used as an off-label medication for more than a decade, and then released Ocrelizumab for MS, a totally different and not at all virtually identical drug for ten times the price?
Pfizer has a profit margin of ~30%, and that's after lobbying and advertising and the billions of fines they had to pay for illegal advertising and kickbacks. Unsurprisingly, extractable profit is a really bad proxy for people's health.
While I usually think the "free at point of service"-argument isn't necessary, it's very relevant here. You're still paying for it, and all the other drugs that have come out over the last few years that are much, much more expensive than the therapies they replace.
Take a look at GLP-1-agonists (Wegovy, Ozempic, ...) which will come to replace/combine with oral antidiabetics like metformine and have now also been approved for obesity without diabetes.
Metformine is basically free a 10ct/pill, i.e. ~3€/patient/month. GLP-1-agonists cost about 250 - 1000€/patient/month. More than half of the German population is overweight, and more than one in eight suffer from type 2 diabetes - with both figures on the rise.
This trend of massive price increases with every new generation of drugs is extremely dangerous healthcare systems themselves, especially public ones, and of course the patients themselves in the end. Every price hike sets a new baseline, and we need to be very, very careful about compounding effects.
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation
Trust the science folks. There's no reason why thes multinational pharma companies would do anything to hurt consumers.
2 things can be true at the same time. In this case the science is good and accurate, and since we live in a capitalist hellscape, corporations will take advantage of the science at every opportunity.
Do you think there is the financial incentive could perhaps skew the "science" in one direction?
On the other hand the vaccine was free. What's their target market, the antivaxers?
IIRC the vaccine was not free. Governments paid for it, so we all did pay for it.
Just don't take the damn Vax. We now know that people who never got vaxed have better immunity than those who did. Studies prove it
So no point getting this crap just to make Pfizer rich
$1400 is ridiculous but this post is ridiculous too. Hey OP, I want a vaccine to cure cancer. It’ll cost $13 to produce. Make it for me, test it, go through the approval process and I’ll sell it for $30. P.S. If I get sued, that’s on you too.
Before I bought Pfizer stock, this type of news would upset me.
I've been saying for years that universal healthcare won't solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control. If they can regulate medical related industries, such as pharma, the need for universal healthcare can be reduced or eliminated. As an added bonus, it would help keep the cost (ie. taxes) for universal healthcare a lot lower. This is pretty common for pharma companies to make insane profits like this, and it's extremely unethical.
But universal healthcare would get prices under control. You're thinking completely backwards.
But universal healthcare would get prices under control. You're thinking completely backwards.
I think the COVID treatments probably create more problems health wise than the disease. At least for younger healthier individuals. After getting the first two immunizations my wife developed pots which she didn't have before.
Edit: It's interesting that people are down voting me for my personal experience with the vaccine. I don't fault them because we are all different and experienced the vaccine differently but since there was little to no clinical testing and the people who received the vaccine were the test subjects I don't understand why people would be so defensive about it. I also understand if people don't believe me and that's ok too.
People are down voting you because your singular personal experience cannot possibly be extrapolated to the entire population who took the vaccine. No one is saying you're lying, or trying to delegitimize your wife's condition (I'm sorry that happened to her), but you don't cite any support for your opening statement
other than your wife's ailment.
I was just stating what happened in my family and due to that my perception on the vaccine is changed compared to before we had them. Unfortunately we may not know for quite some time or at all. NIH will probably never release statistics to gather data on since the vaccine was pushed by every government in the world.