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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What is this??
TIL! Thank you for the useful link.
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 them at all.
No obligation to keep seeing them, would be kind of hard not to have parents 😛
You still have them, you just don’t have contact with them.
but then who will take care of them? they were there at my time of need, shouldn’t i also be there?
You sound like you have a good relationship with your parents, many don’t.
You can be there for them when they need you without putting up with the anti-vax ravings you mentioned. It is called setting boundaries.
You do what you think is right but also understand that is not a universal thing for all people.
You sound like you have a good relationship with your parents
not really.
i think it is best to minimize contact but not keep null, since these kind of people are self destructive.
that’s the only reason i stayed , for their health issues.
What about your health? Your mental health in particular.
Your parents raising you is not something you owe them for. You didn’t choose to exist; they chose that for you. Raising you is the bare minimum they can do after making a choice like that. And now that you are older, you can reflect on the manner in which you were raised and decide what your relationship with them needs to look like so you can keep your sanity.
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Nope they chose to get a child. You dont have to Do anything for them.
The “them” in that sentence refers to “encounters” not “parents”.
Ah so that explains my D cups
It’s all that government big pharma stuff that have given me moobs, things like:
- Covid-19 vaccines;
- Fluoride in toothpaste and tapwater;
- Chemtrails;
- a horrendous diet and little exercise;
- pride flags
pride flags
You weren’t supposed to eat them smh
Right, but if I stop now, how am I going to perform my magic flag butthole trick? checkmate
You shove them up your butt, otherwise you can only do it once. Duh.
Technically you could do it again but it’s even less recommended than the original
But they look like sweets :/
Eating the frigging pride flags are making the frogs gay!
RIP your inbox.
I’ll show my man boobs to anyone who wants to see them. Usually people tell me to stop showing them and say things like “gross” and call me bear tits but that hasn’t stopped me from whipping them out on every occasion and non occasion
Block his router of the content
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. 🐣
Sorry you are going through that. Same thing happened to me, it really sucks :(
you should introduce him to the library
Gives a whole new meaning to the term “parental controls.”
Is your father a senator?
Nano machines son
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…
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.
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.
Thank you, this is exactly my point.
Most excellent fact checking 👍
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.
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.
Reading comprehension is tough I know. I indeed believe essential services including medical research should be government run.
But since that is not the case right now you can’t expect companies to operate on a non profit basis. If stating obvious facts is simping then I guess you can call me a simp.
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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.
…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.
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.
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.
Game DVDs are not lifesaving drugs.
Are we talking about the vaccine here? Sounds like a post-exposure drug to me
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.
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?
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That’s what they make you believe. Why American still pay high prices for insulin? It doesn’t cost that much to produce. It just those companies are paying politicians to keep things in their advantages and give you those excuses.
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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 have high costs, mostly also because a lot of drug programs fail, making all prior investment to them a loss.
Paxlovid is not a COVID vaccine, it’s an antiviral.
Smh just use windows defender people
I don’t think it takes 1.4k to move anything anywhere.
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
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.
https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/pfizer-spikes-paxlovid-prices-to-100-times-cost-of-production
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Tax them too: https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/
Torches would burn the bodies too much. You need a proper grill.
changes need to happen badly
Sounds good. In the meantime, I’m going to buy some Pfizer stock for my kids sake.
This comment is loaded with wishful thinking.
That’s optimistic tbh. More like my comment is the result of 2 decades of fighting the good fight only to watch those I’m trying to help dig a deeper hole. Time to tend my little patch of grass, build a sturdy fence, and hope for a renaissance.
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There is some level of R&D they do to productize it, manufacturability and scaling. And running drug safety trials cannot be cheap, especially the liability insurance.
That all said, I think it’s criminal that the university labs pay so little. PhD students barely make over $40k, set by the NIH. Not adjusted for CoL either.
I think I have more of an issue with the for-profit nature of pharma companies. Shareholders shouldn’t be involved in medicine.
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.
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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.
Who wants unpaid internships!
AFAIK some US agency did R&D for COVID, they just
bribedsponsored Right People
The eu:
€20 take it or leave it
Scandinavian countries:
Free, take it or leave it
I don’t think he meant to the consumer. EU countries can negotiate for the price with pharmaceutical companies, so they can lower the price.
In the US insurance companies can try to negotiate, but their weight is quite low, and the federal government (medicaid, medicare) is forbidden by law to negotiate. Whichever price pharma sets, it’s that.
Sounds crazy they are but allowed to negotiate?
Is that the same for anything else the government buys? I can’t imagine the army buying 100 tanks and just paying the first price they get?
It’s a constitutional thing, government has to guarantee the companies’ freedom to set the price they want or something totally moronic like that…
In fact it’s the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
In fact it’s the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
Yes! That’s a great start 👌 especially if the negotiator is NOT getting a kickback from Pharma for negotiating a high price
It’s like
– Arms dealer: Each tank cost me 500,000 dollars to make. Give me 5 billion for each.
– Let’s negotiate. How about 500 million instead?
– Arms dealer: Fiiine, but only because you’re a good client.
This is legitimately how it works in the US between insurance and pharma/medical.
I just had a baby and I added up the total bill from the hospital and it was $100,000. We were in the hospital for 3 days. My insurance “negotiated” it down to $26,000, and I paid $3000.
The $100,000 is completely made up from the beginning. Pharma and medical just slap big ass ridiculous numbers down, then the insurance fake negotiates down to a still completely ridiculous number, then that cost has to get eaten by people who pay into insurance, which is basically everyone.
… forbidden by law to negotiate.
Is that true? Is there a legitimate reason why they shouldn’t be able to?
It’s a constitutional thing, government has to guarantee the companies’ freedom to set the price they want or something totally moronic like that…
In fact it’s the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
How about updating the constitution to solve this specific problem, which is quite significant for the populace? After all, it’s the constitution’s job to serve the people.
That would require a constitutional amendment, which would require being ratified by 38 or more states. Which would require at least 38 states without significant corruption/obstruction, and a population not braindead/brainwashed enough to vote against their own interests.
So the chances of that happening are abysmally low.
Because medicine shouldn’t become a flea market where you’re gambling your health against profit maximization.
Give pharmaceutical companies a fair price scale where they can profit, don’t let them hyperinflate prices without justification.
It’s not the same if Apple prices their phones at 20,000 USD and you decide you’re buying other brand, pharma plays these extortion games after they have captured enough market/regulation so most people have to pay or stay sick.
United States countries:
I guess I’ll die then
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
Much better strategy: you take the medicine… survive… and refuse to pay in protest. Sure, you might get sued for non-payment of bills… then a bunch of people can fight a class action lawsuit against pfizer.
and they lose $13. its a no win situation :/
If your scenario had more molotov cocktails, i think there’d be a winning situation.
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.
I get the anger. We really need to fully socialize these medical development centers. But on the other hand, they did most of the work. They didn’t have to.
I’m sure the research was publicly funded, and the profit will be private as is tradition.
Yep, that Pfizer for you, using taxpayer money to R&D drugs they will use to price gouge the public who paid for it, out of the kindness of their hearts.
They didn’t do most of the work. Not even close.
Didn’t the government fund the development? So… it’s not like they need so much to recover R&D right?
Welcome to the United States. Everything is subsidized, then turned around to fuck the average person.
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.
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.
That is almost always the case. Pharma companies are mostly just advertising firms
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.
Paxlovid kept me alive when I had COVID. This makes me really upset. People will actually die without this.
If you don’t mind my asking, how much did you pay when you used it?
Mine was free.
What a novel concept
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.
Thanks capitalism!!
/sarcasm.
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
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.
Actually in human societies, not just in capitalism.
People talk about capitalism being bad as if only there people try to eat each other to become richer.
If you read something about reasons the USSR wouldn’t have more efficient centralized planning, while having necessary machinery and resources, or why it wouldn’t have standardized something, while having the standardization apparatus and planned economy, or why all the Internet-like projects went nowhere in USSR while being much more ambitious due to, again, planned economy, or why despite less fragmentation scale wouldn’t make things cheaper to produce in USSR, but the opposite, and so on - that’s because every reform would mean someone losing influence, and that someone would naturally use that influence to resist reform.
It’s actually fascinating to read how some of those people really believed in Marxism and Communism, and were even very competent sometimes, but the general architecture made the whole thing less than just a sum of its parts. Really sad, though.
I agree that the problems aren’t just in Capitalism. However, the country with the unofficial historical tagline, “and then it got worse”, may not be the best example. I think China is a really good example of influence peddling outside a free market.
Well, China, when its ruling organization still had some consistent ideology, was a copy of Stalin’s USSR, bigger and weaker, give or take. Only it started later.
Its way off that track started with reforms like Kosygin’s reforms, would those not be neutered.
I’d say the reason in China this happened was exactly that it was bigger and weaker. It didn’t quite have anything like Soviet industrial establishment, and it had the issues of poverty, hunger etc.
Because “government research” doesn’t cover mass production and all of the supply chain management. Which is where anything bureaucratic really sucks.
(Unless you need to build things badly, but fast and on large scale, mobilization-style - see Khruschev-era mass construction in ex-USSR, or, for exotic stuff, older state-built housing in Israel which isn’t that much better).
Actual production rots very quickly, if centralized and bureaucratic.
I agree that research requires long-term investment and is in general a completely different thing.
There’s just so much wrong in your comment I can’t address it all…
But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?
We’re talking about patents right now.
The rest of what you said is still wrong, can’t stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about…
There’s just so much wrong in your comment I can’t address it all…
If you can’t then you’d better say nothing.
But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?
You said when talking about pharma companies as middlemen. You remove those middlemen - you have to do tasks they perform.
We’re talking about patents right now.
Yes, patent law should be abolished. That’s what I’m talking about while commenting in most threads blaming “capitalism”, because in like 2/3 cases patent law is to blame and not that.
The rest of what you said is still wrong, can’t stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about…
Thank you for your unsubstantiated opinion which I can beat with that of my own every time, so not sure why you’d even express it without details.
If you can’t then you’d better say nothing.
You’ve got a point, I should have said “won’t put the effort in”.
I looked at your profile, you wait till posts are really old, then spam a bunch of nonsensical replies in it.
I’m just gonna block you. Everyone wins.
I’m just gonna block you. Everyone wins.
Not the worst way to look at this, if you want my opinion.
People vote for it every two years and are shocked, just shocked when they get precisely what they voted for.
Do you think pfizer and other companies who spend hundreds of millions lobbying would be like “aww shucks! the public voted to curb our shitty behavior, let’s go home!”?
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.
Bots and shills.
Wish the admins could do something about them (bots at least).
It’s like someone urinating in the swimming pool, so that nobody else wants to swim in it.
You have to consider all the R&D they put into it.
(Didn’t the government pay for most of that?)
Right?
In a just world, “the people” would see this pricing, realize that they were the ones who paid for the development of it, and simply seize the company.
Whether that took the form of government litigation to force the company to offer this at a reasonable price, or simply a mob of people forcing the company’s hand or else they burn it to the ground, either way, there needs to be a stick of fear to go along with the carrot of profit.
I’m not saying they should make no profit, but this is ridiculous.
Their R&D was releasing it to the public.
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! 😉
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.
Ive accepted this behavior as typical and standard issue human nature.
That is why i am mot having kids, seeing that extinction is the best future for humans. Evolution puts any other intelligence in the universe at risk.
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.
Biden took the first steps towards combating this in the US with the Inflation Reduction Act: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/03/15/hhs-releases-initial-guidance-historic-medicare-drug-price-negotiation-program-price-applicability-year-2026.html
Medicare is now able to negotiate with drug companies on drug prices. Now we just need to bring it home by electing enough politicians (that are open to the idea of course … so Democrats and likely more progressive Democrats), that a Medicare for all option is also added.
Yeah, that doesn’t really work. Because they will always find a way to make costs go up, and then demonstrate it. Auditing such things would benearly impossible. The only real solution is for certain industries to be nonprofits. Healthcare really shouldn’t be about profit, it should ge about care.
Just get rid of copyright, let the person who can create your product the cheapest make money off it
Or would that be too capitalist for the US
Drugs aren’t protected by copyright. They’re protected by patents.
In either case that would be an extreme move and I would not support getting rid of patents or copyright as they’re genuinely useful concepts.
Copyright in particular doesn’t just protect the money hungry. Lemmy, Linux, and many other open source projects are protected from those who would prefer to use their source code to make a closed source proprietary application and contribute nothing back.
Copyright needs to go back to 30 years. You have 30 years on a patent to make money off it. If you haven’t already made your money back, and a handsome profit in that time, you should have hired a business manager year 2.
Patents are either 14 or 20 years, depending on type. Copyright is absurdly long, but copyright also doesn’t apply to drugs, inventions, recipes, game rules, mathematical formulae - mostly just creative works.
Ok, 14 to 20 years on patents seems reasonable. I would still set copyright back to 30 years, since as you pointed out, it’s really only affecting the public domain.
I’d be okay with that, but acting like copyright doesn’t exist for a reason or ever do any good… Isn’t helping actually lead to a solution :)
In a world where you can’t protect your IP, how do you have close sourced?
Military tech is the bigger issue
You keep the source code, methods of operation or manufacturing methods private. Companies can already do this. Patents force companies to make their inventions public information (you can access the patent), in exchange for a limited exclusive right to use this technology.
For no trivial things patent legislation is a great benefit. Everyone can access the patent knowledge. For trivial iterative things patents only benefit the patentee who gets the exclusive rights.
Copyright means anything you produce that is easily to copy, you have legal control over how it’s copied and the revenue it may generate. This is for things like art work, books, news stories, code etc. Things that can be copy and pasted or printed.
Copyright is granted when you create the content. There’s no application. It ensures someone can make money from the copy they produce. Less people would write books, if Amazon could print and sell copies without paying the author.
Military tech would be private. Even with our current IP protection system. A hostile power doesn’t care about infringing IP, there’s very little consequence for do this. If you patent military technology, then that info would be public.
Very easily, you compile it.
I think you’re thinking of patents rather than copyright. I was about to ask something snarky like “without the ability to patent their discoveries what would cause these drug companies to pay for r&d up front?” but honestly, this one was paid for by government grants anyway and that’s really where my problem comes in. We seem to have developed this amazing worst of both worlds where the public bears all the up front expense of r&d and then the government just gives away what we bought for ourselves so that they can raise the price to 100x what the medication actually costs.
I was just being lazy and didn’t write patents and trademarks all together
I figured saying copyright would be enough for people to include the whole copyright office
Patents, trademarks and copyrights are three entirely different things. Patents cover products for sale, and give an inventor the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a given time. Trademarks cover branding, and allow the person registering the trademark to prevent anyone else from using it or something a reasonable person could confuse with it indefinitely. Copyright is exclusively for intellectual property and allows the copyright holder to stop anyone from making copies of their work, derivatives of their work or work that is substantially similar to their work.
This is very incorrect except for the very high level. Patents cover systems and methods and devices that are more than mere physical phenomena. Patent owners are granted an exclusive monopoly over the implementation of what the patent issued on (i.e., its eventual claims) that runs up to 20 years from the time of filing. They are an intellectual property right premised in property theory.
Trademarks cover designators of origin. Fundamentally, they are to reduce consumer confusion and are ultimately nothing more than a presumption once granted in favor of the owner in unfair competition disputes. They are also an intellectual property but are premised in totally different theories of law and can apply to literally anything that can be strongly associated with a company, more or less.
Copyright is an intellectual property, yes, but is limited to creative expression fixed in a tangible medium. This is a very short sentence but has some pretty serious depth to it. Copyright is ultimately a very specific type of right to, and this may shock you, copying a thing (fixed in a tangible medium…you do not have copyright on ideas).
That all said, pharma patents and, really, industry as a whole is super fucked and needs serious reimagining in the current era. But some form of IP absolutely is necessary to incentivize and enable drug creation of it is to persist in our free market capitalist economic structure.
Eliminating capitalism sounds like an easier idea, to be honest.
So you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating and testing a new drug to cure something. Then another company can come along and undercut you since they didn’t spend the upfront money. And now you go bankrupt? How is that fair? I’m not saying Big Pharma isn’t an issue but as always, the solution is somewhere in the middle.
It’s fair because it helps people
Medicine is a service
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
That would not be true if the government funded things.
I really wish we didn’t let Capitalism control vital to our living services.
Why on earth would we want the government funding and running things, that would be a nightmare. Government is far too big as it is now.
To be fair, I come from a country where we have free healthcare, free education up to college level (we only pay when taking masters or things like that, after finishing our chosen career. Our most know public university is pretty top notch if we talk about content and education quality. And our healthcare is pretty good too, although there is also private healthcare and education. In the education department, at least to my knowledge, there is not really a difference. The USA is not big. It spends a lot on defense (which usually use to wage innecesary wars or disrupt other governments) and maybe too much in mantaining this horrible two party system you’ve got. That said, my country’s economy is in very bad shape (Argentina has inflation rates that are sky high).
Why on earth would we want the government funding and running things
I’ll take competency issues over greed and harm anytime.
Guess they’d be stuck with relying on research grants and finding cheaper ways to combat diseases
No, they would just keep everything trade secret and we’d have no idea how to replicate the medicine.
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…
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.
As if they’ll lower the price once they’ve recouped the R&D costs ten times over.
Who paid for the R&D?
That would be the us government soooo… The citizens of the usa
The government promised to purchase massive quantities of Pfizer manufactured it to guarantee a market, they didn’t directly fund R&D.
The government promised to purchase massive quantities of Pfizer manufactured it to guarantee a market, they didn’t directly fund R&D.
I’ve heard government grants were involved?
Either way, guaranteed funds is still one hell of a profit motive to do the R&D and produce the medicine.
I’ve heard lots of stuff but you can read the contact in the link I posted
A lot of the research for the mRNA tech that made the vaccine possible was done at Pennsylvania University before they fired the woman doing the research and she moved on to Biontech.
Paxlovid isn’t the vaccine. It’s a treatment.
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