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Intellectual property is a scam. A commonly heard defense of intellectual property is that it is needed for companies to fund their R&D. However pharmaceutical companies typically spent a lot more money on marketing & sales than they do on R&D. Big Pharma spending money on marketing and sales is harmful to our health. Apparently it's a lot more lucrative to get people drugged up on painkillers or whatever than to discover new medicine. If we didn't have intellectual property then we would have competition resulting in the lowest possible medicine prices. Companies would have no money for marketing so medicine would be judged on their actual properties, only the best would be given to patients, not the best marketed, but best health-wise. Companies would have no money for R&D either, but the government could fund R&D We shouldn't blame the players, we created a system that produces these bad actors. Let's change the system so that these bad actors couldn't exist. Intellectual property is a international problem, join the pirate party of your country and let's make it happen!
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
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.
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,
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?
The eu:
€20 take it or leave 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Explain why we make it legal for companies to set their own prices again
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