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.
Most excellent fact checking 👍
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.
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.
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 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.
Oh no, whatever will we do if old dudes can’t have 6 different types of boner pills?
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.
It’s real easy to sit on the sidelines and spew hate. Not much of a life though.
Game DVDs are not lifesaving drugs.
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.
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?
Removed by mod
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!
deleted by creator
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
Paxlovid kept me alive when I had COVID. This makes me really upset. People will actually die without this.
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.
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
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?
The eu:
€20 take it or leave it
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.
ahh now it makes more sense why governments let it turn into an endemic virus
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
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.)
