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.
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.
Submitted 10 months ago by i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://mastodon.world/@luckytran@med-mastodon.com/111268762350747190
Comments
deranger@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
be_excellent_to_each_other@kbin.social 10 months ago
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.
Rinox@feddit.it 10 months 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.
repungnant_canary@lemmy.world 10 months 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.
WYLD_STALLYNS@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Most excellent fact checking 👍
clausetrophobic@sh.itjust.works 10 months 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.
admin@lemmy.my-box.dev 10 months 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,
RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months 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.
LufyCZ@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Are we talking about the vaccine here? Sounds like a post-exposure drug to me
natecox@programming.dev 10 months 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.
Weslee@lemmy.world 10 months ago
[deleted]RootBeerGuy@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months 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.
deranger@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Paxlovid is not a COVID vaccine, it’s an antiviral
SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I don’t think it takes 1.4k to move anything anywhere.
nix@merv.news 10 months 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.
SuckMyWang@lemmy.world 10 months 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
aniki@lemm.ee 10 months ago
[deleted]onlinepersona@programming.dev 10 months ago
Tax them too: www.tax-the-rich.eu
Emerald@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Torches would burn the bodies too much. You need a proper grill.
kylua@lemmy.world 10 months ago
changes need to happen badly
tym@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Sounds good. In the meantime, I’m going to buy some Pfizer stock for my kids sake.
ezchili@iusearchlinux.fyi 10 months ago
The eu:
€20 take it or leave it
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Didn’t the government fund the development? So… it’s not like they need so much to recover R&D right?
Isakk86@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Welcome to the United States. Everything is subsidized, then turned around to fuck the average person.
MirthfulAlembic@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Kongar@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
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.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
BellaDonna@mujico.org 10 months ago
Paxlovid kept me alive when I had COVID. This makes me really upset. People will actually die without this.
HiddenLychee@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If you don’t mind my asking, how much did you pay when you used it?
happyhippo@feddit.it 10 months ago
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…
UnspecificGravity@lemmings.world 10 months ago
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.
blue_zephyr@lemmy.world 10 months ago
As if they’ll lower the price once they’ve recouped the R&D costs ten times over.
BassTurd@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Who paid for the R&D?
pyldriver@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That would be the us government soooo… The citizens of the usa
IHaveTwoCows@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Taxpayers, through the university system
CrypticFawn@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
Thanks capitalism!!
/sarcasm.
givesomefucks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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
VinnieFarsheds@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 10 months ago
People vote for it every two years and are shocked, just shocked when they get precisely what they voted for.
LostWon@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
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.
r3df0x@7.62x54r.ru 10 months ago
That’s because in many cases, healthcare has infinite demand.
Kodemystic@lemmy.kodemystic.dev 10 months ago
The amount of Pfizer boot lickers here is astounding
reverendsteveii@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
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.
Nobody@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
db2@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
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.
Nacktmull@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s called freedom! Go to Russia if you don’t like it! /s
Smoogs@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ok who let Martin shkreli out of jail?
Jackthelad@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
silent2k@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Pfizers R&D budget is 11 billion per year. That money comes from products from the market.
AMillionNames@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
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.
boatsnhos931@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They can treat deez nuts
EdibleFriend@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It is shockingly easy to burn things.
I’m just going to leave that thought there.
cunning_bolt@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This is the nature of providers vs insurers in the negotiation war. And those without insurance are the losers of this war.
PigsInClover@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
r3df0x@7.62x54r.ru 10 months ago
The left and right both hate Big Pharma, especially over the pandemic response.
rivermonster@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Regulate the fuck out of the drug companies or nationalize them. Idc which, but operating unbridled is clearly a failure. Unregulated capitalism will kill us.
tsonfeir@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Unless the Pfizer ceo is beheaded, then get used to it.
Zerlyna@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Shocked Pikachu Face
mojo@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
cricket97@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Trust the science folks. There’s no reason why thes multinational pharma companies would do anything to hurt consumers.
Jay@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
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.
i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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?
sudoku@programming.dev 10 months ago
sorry for your loss
Spiralvortexisalie@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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Pons_Aelius@kbin.social 10 months ago
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 then at all.
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
To keep seeing them, would be kind of hard not to have parents 😛
SuckMyWang@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ah so that explains my D cups
PhobosAnomaly@feddit.uk 10 months ago
It’s all that government big pharma stuff that have given me moobs, things like:
unconsciousvoidling@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
RIP your inbox.
TwoGems@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Block his router of the content
Kaavi@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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. 🐣
Aurenkin@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Sorry you are going through that. Same thing happened to me, it really sucks :(
i_have_no_enemies@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Image
sturmblast@lemmy.world 10 months ago
you should introduce him to the library
AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Gives a whole new meaning to the term “parental controls.”
DrPop@lemmy.one 10 months ago
Is your father a senator?
Nano machines son
Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 10 months ago
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…