this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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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.
We don't have the information needed to decide whether to be angry.
Drug studies are costly. We need to know how much R&D cost for this drug, what the average is, what percentage of research never hits the market, and then how many doses of this are expected to be sold over say a 5 year period.
Then we can work out a rough true cost of each dose. Then we will know whether to be angry.
Wasn't COVID research funded by taxpayers under form of grants/emergency funds to pharma companies during the pandemic?
Yes, for vaccine research. I don't know if this specifically was covered. Another thing on the list of things we need to know before we get angry.
Much of the research happened long before COVID--at a loss. There's a reason this miraculous new mDNA vaccine technology appeared out of nowhere just in time for the pandemic: researchers had been working on it for years already, using investments and borrowed money. Government grants just went to finishing the vaccine and scaling up so quickly it was kinda mindboggling. They didn't just get to stuff the cash in their pockets.
I think we'd be better off is we shifted R&D to academia. Sure there's a fuck ton of bureaucracy in universities, but maybe then our tax dollars will be put to good use, and people learn.
I would love that.
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation
Even if R&D cost $100m for this, they'd still only need to sell roughly 80000 doses to make their money back.
I think you're grossly underestimating how much things cost.
Haha, you got in there before I corrected my typo. The point still stands though! There's a whole lot of people in the world, 80k doses is fuck all.
Average drug research costs are estimated at between 1-3 billion USD. That's the average, so some are much more.
And I'd like to know if this stated price is the sticker price. Insurance companies negotiate much less than sticker price, I live in a country with a government drug department that negotiates much lower prices by doing a single contract for the whole country.
Is this that stupid thing where the sticker price is high but no one actually pays that, it's just to make insurance companies feel like they are negotiating good deals?
Orrr, hear me out, we can be angry right now without any prep, put in a comment about big corpo greed, and move on the to next Lemmy post.