From the bottom of my heart, fuck you Pfizer. I have had Covid twice, had my blood oxygen drop as low as 79, and I would still rather die a miserable covid death than suffer the injustice of being greed raped by the absolute worst caricature of capitalist pigs that actually came to life. I hope that money makes your board members miserable and can’t do much to treat the uncurable, flesh eating disease your evil pig carcasses should be justifiably riddled with by karma, leaving your kids to donate your disgustingly afforded estate to charity to cleanse themselves of the nasty aftertaste of human suffering, the faint stink of people who are trying to take paxlovid and recover from a major virus in the rain and vulnerable cold because they can’t afford both rent and medicine, after your death. Burn in hell, you uncaring scum.
EDIT: I realize this is a lot of vitrol to throw out into the universe, but they likely won’t ever see this on Lemmy, and to make matters worse they clearly won’t care anyway. It’s just my own version of catharsis, I guess
had my blood oxygen drop as low as 79
Oh, my aunt’s husband was in this situation. And they live in Armenia, where normal Covid treatment was, is and will be virtually nonexistent.
He’s thankfully alive and didn’t lose any of his wits.
Explain why we make it legal for companies to set their own prices again
It does make companies more willing to invest more into drug research , which is a good thing.
Drug research is overwhelmingly publicly funded. Private R&D is a PR myth we were fed to justify high prices.
I never said wasn’t. What I said is still true.
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No. Those two statements don’t go together like that. They aren’t making big new drugs. At most they are looking for ways to adjust the formula so they can extend patents. There is no amount of profit that makes them willing to do more R&D.
Covid treatment was publicly funded. This is a case of public funding going to research and private companies profiting from it.
Everyone should be outraged from the situation. This cheap treatment is being denied to the majority of the world’s population because of patients, and so covid has more opportunities to mutate and make everyone less safe.
Why don’t we just take investor money and invest in it ourselves?
Others have already pointed out that the covid vaccine was publicly funded ergo the benefit should be publicly owned
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.
Most excellent fact checking 👍
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
Oh no, whatever will we do if old dudes can’t have 6 different types of boner pills?
It’s real easy to sit on the sidelines and spew hate. Not much of a life though.
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.
Oh stop. The government should be running the pharaceutical industry then, not private companies.
Stop simping for evil corporations that don’t give a shit about you.
Game DVDs are not lifesaving drugs.
That’s just an excuse because many drugs are sold at prices much lower what they are sold in the US. They are not selling them at loss in other countries.
Definitely not at a loss to produce no, but maybe a loss overall.
My bet is that the US subsidizes R&D by paying obscene amounts for the drugs and the EU and others just serve as extra income
Your bet?
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.
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
That’s Medicare that you’re thinking of, and they can now negotiate prices. The big one is EpiPen-type products.
No, it’s expensive because the value it provides.
They’re positioning it based on the length of hospital stay it prevents. In that perspective, this is an absolute bargain. For the most part, they’re selling insurance that $1.4k is far cheaper than even one additional night in the hospital. Insurance is willing to pay because it saves them loads of money. For uninsured and underinsured, it sounds like they’re basically not charging.
Only point I’d add is drugs cost more than they are to produce because of R&D costs, which must be recuperated. If costs are high, and volume is low, it means larger markup over the cost to manufacture.
The R&D costs were largely already paid by tax-payer funded research grants and, in this case, additional emergency funding from governments. This is especially the case in the US, where the government is also legally required to hand over patents for government developed drugs to private companies that did none of the work.
Pfizer spent $2 billion dollars in R&D just in 2021 on the drug. The US government & public agencies overall funded $35 million for help with clinical trials. I don’t think it’s intellectually honest to claim that the majority of R&D costs was directly paid by public grants and taxpayer funded research, which is money spent without the expectation of any produced product in hand.
The US government helped speed up the process, reducing R&D costs with the emergency use authorization, and had a contract of $5.3 billion to help buy tens of millions of doses for Americans. I suppose you could make the argument that some of that indirectly helped fund R&D, but then so does every other non-American customer when they pay for a product, which is how the system is supposed to work.
Where exactly are you getting those numbers? They seem rather suspect. The first example that I was able to find, for example, put US government investment at $30 Billion on vaccines alone (https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/how-much-could-covid-19-vaccines-cost-the-u-s-after-commercialization/#:~:text=The federal government has spent,charge to the U.S. population.)
It’s generally a myth that cost to produce has anything to do with market prices.
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!
They don’t do R&D; the university system does and they take the research, often without pay.
I’m always curious about the actual numbers. Here’s their R&D budget by year:
And their overall revenue:
In 2020, their revenue was about $40B on $8.5B in R&D cost. They had a huge revenue increase the last few years, with 2022 being $100B, but R&D only increased to about $11B.
So they do have R&D, but it’s not that big compared to the money they’re bringing in. Their net income has increased substantially, as well.
Thank you for finding the numbers
In the bio industries R&D has almost exclusively become just the D. We like to think that there are a bunch of scientists doing lifelong, painstaking research to develop new drugs or treatments within the labs at Pfizer, Merk, Lilly, or whatever, but a significant portion of the research is done at small independent or school funded labs.
Once one of those small labs creates a decent treatment that will likely pass government testing, a large corp will buy it and say “We just made this brand new thing!”. Really though, their R&D budget is spent on acquisition, production, supply chain development, and marketing.
Working in R&D in a few different positions in my career and this is absolutely the case. Hell some of them you could equate to white label SaaS products. Using research from universities putting it in a neat package and selling it.
The corporate bio industry is so fucked up I can’t even begin to describe it. I tell my friends and family stories, but I sound like an insane person to them. The scale at which money is thrown around is just too large for most people to imagine.
Like this: imagine a worker that makes less than $35k per year processes, and is soley responsible for $20M in products, per month. Product that people all around the world not only use, but ingest. Now imagine that that one worker is the only one in the world who knows how that product is processed. That’s how bio manufacturers work.
In addition to that, I’ve heard that a large portion of that R&D spending is on iterating drugs they already own so that when the patent runs out they can patent a new version and lobby the old one to be made obsolete so generics can’t be made.
I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations
The woman who got the nobel prize for the mRNA research that led to the Pfizer vaccine did a lot of it while employed at Pennsylvania University before they fired her because they didn’t see the research leading to making them money. Then she moved on to Biontech where she continued the research.
I’m not sure how much was done at the university but it was probably not insignificant and then biontech got lucky and snapped it up for basically free.
That is nauseating
Who wants unpaid internships!
Paxlovid kept me alive when I had COVID. This makes me really upset. People will actually die without this.
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.
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.
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.
That’s because in many cases, healthcare has infinite demand.
The eu:
€20 take it or leave it
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?
sorry for your loss
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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.
Je suis d’accord avec vous! 😉
Thanks capitalism!!
/sarcasm.
Ah, trademark laws and patents are obviously governmental stuff. So - not present in some imagined absolute capitalism. And with those abolished (except for stealing authorship still being illegal), I suppose market mechanisms would do their job sufficiently well for this particular case.
Believing in capitalism is believing in humans making rational and moral choices, anyone to do that would be nuts. That’s a proactive answer to politically active people getting triggered by my comment and labeling me as a member of the other crowd.
The amount of Pfizer boot lickers here is astounding
Bots and shills.
