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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 (kff.org/…/how-much-could-covid-19-vaccines-cost-t….)
$1400 is ridiculous but this post is ridiculous too. Hey OP, I want a vaccine to cure cancer. It’ll cost $13 to produce. Make it for me, test it, go through the approval process and I’ll sell it for $30. P.S. If I get sued, that’s on you too.
Anyone with insurance. If they’re charging your insurance provider $1,400, then you’ll either see that cost passed directly on to you when you get COVID, or see it as an increase in everyone’s monthly insurance cost as they spread out what they’re paying across their whole customer base. The money’s got to come from somewhere. Granted, insurance companies will likely negotiate on the price and not pay that full amount, but it’s not exactly a good-faith negotiation if their starting offer is a 10,000% markup.
Also, 2028 is less than 5 years away and COVID is set to be a persistent staple of society like the yearly flu indefinitely. They’re basically saying that anyone who gets it while committing the heinous crime of being poor is SOL, even though it costs them almost nothing to produce and was developed using our tax dollars to start with.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think the COVID treatments probably create more problems health wise than the disease. At least for younger healthier individuals. After getting the first two immunizations my wife developed pots which she didn’t have before.
Edit: It’s interesting that people are down voting me for my personal experience with the vaccine. I don’t fault them because we are all different and experienced the vaccine differently but since there was little to no clinical testing and the people who received the vaccine were the test subjects I don’t understand why people would be so defensive about it. I also understand if people don’t believe me and that’s ok too.
People are down voting you because your singular personal experience cannot possibly be extrapolated to the entire population who took the vaccine. No one is saying you’re lying, or trying to delegitimize your wife’s condition (I’m sorry that happened to her), but you don’t cite any support for your opening statement
I think the COVID treatments probably create more problems health wise than the disease
I was just stating what happened in my family and due to that my perception on the vaccine is changed compared to before we had them. Unfortunately we may not know for quite some time or at all. NIH will probably never release statistics to gather data on since the vaccine was pushed by every government in the world.
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