Comment on Pfizer says it will price Covid treatment Paxlovid at nearly $1,400 for a five-day course, which researchers estimate only costs Pfizer $13 to produce. That's a 10,000%+ markup. Shameful.

deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation

  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.

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  • Rinox@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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  • repungnant_canary@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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    • flawedFraction@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

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      • deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Thank you, this is exactly my point.

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  • WYLD_STALLYNS@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Most excellent fact checking 👍

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• clausetrophobic@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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  • admin@lemmy.my-box.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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,

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    • lemann@lemmy.one ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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

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      • FMT99@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        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.

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    • be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      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.

      https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation

      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.

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    • Emerald@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Game DVDs are not lifesaving drugs.

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    • Saxoboneless@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      …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.

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  • RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    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.

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  • LufyCZ@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Are we talking about the vaccine here? Sounds like a post-exposure drug to me

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• natecox@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

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• Weslee@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  [deleted]

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  • RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Well here you go again when people with no scientific education pull up literature as a gotcha. Thanks for giving me flashbacks to the high times of the pandemic. Sorry for the harsh reply but its posts like this that just funnel into misinformation around this already heavily polarized topic.

    To explain, Paxlovid is not a vaccine, it is an actual medicine/treatment. So it was not funded by taxpayers as the article states. Unless there is some other info on how this specific medicine was also funded by taxpayers of course, I am not an expert on research funding. But the article only mentions vaccine research.

    That said, I also do not think its a fair price necessarily. But it is true one should not equate production price as a fair price as R&D of drugs havr high costs, mostly also because a lot of drug programs fail making all prior investment to them a loss.

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  • deranger@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Paxlovid is not a COVID vaccine, it’s an antiviral

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    • wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Smh just use windows defender people

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• SkyezOpen@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I don’t think it takes 1.4k to move anything anywhere.

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• nix@merv.news ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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.

  commondreams.org/…/pfizer-spikes-paxlovid-prices-…

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• SuckMyWang@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  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

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