A community for discussing events around the World
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
"Tell massive heartless corporation to not make every single penny possible!"
Corporation: "We must say with a heavy heart that we've lost our communications department. They all died of hysterical laughter after receiving a request to put people over profit."
They had 20 years. At some point, you stop asking corporations to do things and start making them do things. 20 years seems like a reasonable place to start.
"Tell massive heartless corporation to not make every single penny possible!"
You’re right that corporate incentives are completely messed up, but when something like this generates negative press it hurts their brand and potentially their bottom line down the road as a result. If they do reverse course it certainly won’t be out of the goodness of their hearts.
Not like we can buy the drug elsewhere /:
This is why I am pro-public healthcare. A market isn’t a free market if I die when I don’t buy your product.
No, but there's a whole lotta stuff branded J&J that you CAN buy elsewhere
These corporations all own many brands.
What's truly comical is that all the people in charge of those corporations probably took ethics classes in business school.
Gotta know ethics and law well if you wanna abuse it.
So first of all, fuck Johnson and Johnson. Drug patents are weird because there's an inherent contradiction, but that in no way absolves the corporation.
The idea of a patent is something reasonable. If you discover a new process or invent a new product, you should get to uniquely benefit from it. You put in the hard work to research and develop it after all. Others shouldn't be able to just read what you did and go do it without having to do the work.
But what if that new product is a new medicine? Or a process to make an existing medicine much more quickly? Leaving you as the sole producer means you can charge really high prices for something lifesaving. And if you run low on stock, too bad to the buyers. That's absurdly immoral and wrong. If someone needs a medication, they should be able to affordably access it. This goes against the idea of a patent.
No matter what we do, the medicine should remain affordable and widely accessible. The question should be "How do we reward the inventor while maintaining the accessibility and affordability?", not "How do we make this accessible and affordable while maintaining the inventor's exclusivity?". Johnson and Johnson is asking the latter question, which is why they can go fuck themselves. As a society we need to ask the former question. How do we reward research and innovation without allowing people to die?
The patent process just doesn't work for this, and we need a new system. The government should be responsible for the distribution of the medicine, and it can maintain a high supply while still rewarding the inventor. Give the inventor preferential treatment, so that their supply is bought and used first. Any demand that they can't meet is filled by other manufacturers, who are free to produce the drug. Maintain this for 5 years before removing the exclusivity status. The idea needs some more refinement of course, but the general idea I think is a good one. By giving the inventor preferential treatment, you can still reward them while keeping the product cheap and plentiful.
Are they called Johnson and Johnson because they're twice as dickish to humanity?
Greed is gonna greed. Shame isn't enough anymore.
Well, in their defense what is their Chief Death Officer supposed to do? He already got neutered in the talc settlement so he had to come up with a new way to cause more deaths.
'I gotta plan Arthur'
Why aren't there any articles about this yet?
My tinfoil hat says J&J comes in with their greenback. 😂
Could have saved Arthur Morgan. Bastards
Johnson and Johnson? Damn, I knew they were assholes but they should stick to being FBI guys.
Corporations gonna corporate. Anyone getting mad at this is missing the lesson. It's like telling a lion on the Serengeti not to eat that gazelle. As long as you have privately owned profit driven businesses involved in medicine their goal is going to be income, not saving lives. Only solution is publicly funded research, and selling at a reasonable cost to not undercut the private companies, which would be just as unethical as the private companies price gouging.
Many of the drugs were these companies make start off as publicly funded research.
Don't think private medicine companies are such a bad thing - there can only be so much research that is publicly funded and we can potentially miss out on some life saving drug not getting developed.
Imo a better solution would be decreasing the patent age so that the companies have only a small window to generate profit, after which the drugs would go into public domain. 20 years is way too long to profit of a discovery
This drug got a huge amount of public funding.
At its core, there's two competing ideas here, and neither are inherent corporate greed (although that's certainly the motivation for JJ).
Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the exclusive rights to create/use that for X time. This rewards and encourages innovation, and companies recoup the cost of research.
A medical discovery which helps people should be as widely and readily accessible as possible.
The second has to be achieved no matter what, so the question is how you provide a profit motive for discovery while not making the product exclusive. What if instead of exclusivity, the creator received preferential treatment? The government buys X of the new drug, and the creator can supply that full amount -- if they can't though, then others can fill the gap. This needs more consideration, but the basic idea is that the creator gets to sell their supply first, and others can sell after that.
Yeah...You need to profit to incentivize innovation and r&d. Fine.
Why does that mean you should get total control? Especially for drugs - for many reasons (it's a very messed up industry), but most of all because public health affects all of us - not just when we're directly connected to the victims.
Already, patents are basically a temporary monopoly. The government sets all sorts of weird limits. It's not a free market, not even remotely close
So why should they get total control instead of fixed percentage by anyone making the drug? Maybe limited to time frame, maybe based on a multiple of cost
Hell, uncle Sam pays for a lot of this research, and the big players spin off subsidiaries to subsidize the risk. We could offer bounties or make the research fully public. There's so many ways to do this better
Instead, we use a method where corporations get to make decisions, with zero concern over the cost in lives, or the drain on society it causes
Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the exclusive rights to create/use that for X time. This rewards and encourages innovation, and companies recoup the cost of research.
I think it's important to distinguish the underlying goal from the mechanism used to achieve this. (In software user story development we distinguish between the "so that" and the "I want".)
So I would restate this as:
Whoever discovers or creates something brand new should have the ability to profit substantially from their discovery or invention.
This does not need to be via a period of exclusivity. Exclusivity is one way of doing it, and it's a pretty good one, but jumping ahead to that shortcuts the ability to come up with other possibilities.
Agreed. There's other ways to accomplish this, and that should be the case for medicines.
Well yeah that's why I said not to undercut private companies, which would be uncompetitive and force them out of business. Mix of public and private.
They got too big for their johnsons.