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.

• lemann@lemmy.one ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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    • Gordon@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Oh no, whatever will we do if old dudes can’t have 6 different types of boner pills?

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      • Same@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        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.

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      • FMT99@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        It’s real easy to sit on the sidelines and spew hate. Not much of a life though.

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• be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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 ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Game DVDs are not lifesaving drugs.

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• Saxoboneless@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ 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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