Technology

They made 100 billion in profit and spent 11 on research. They can afford to sell things much much cheaper and still have both profits and research money.

Average retail net margins (profit margin as share of revenue) are about 3% on a good year. Pfizer's was something like 30% last year. They cleared 100 billion in revenue, meaning 30 billion in straight profit (the 11 billion came out of the other 60-odd percent, because it's not an even 30). In one year, they made almost enough money to buy Twitter. They made enough profit to cover Kansas and Oklahoma's entire 2022 FY budgets. I'm trying to drive home the absolute ridiculous enormity of those profits, because it's not easy to really grasp. The point is, it's not like they don't have a lot of room to breathe.

Some other things to consider:

-Of that 11 billion, how much is government funding and grants? IIRC, Uncle Sam pays for the development of a whole lot of what ends up being private products in healthcare.

-Of their 60-odd billion in costs, how much was advertising? Look, I know you gotta sell to make money, but advertising to patients is annoying, expensive, and (in terms of medical ethics) icky. It's not like they can't save some money there to do R&D.

The point is: Pfizer could easily cut their prices on life-saving medicine and still have tidy profits.

Quoting one figure is pretty useless to make a point as it exists only as "A big number" with nothing to compare it to.

Since you know their financials enough to quote one figure here:

What is their annual revenue?

What is their annual profit?

https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation

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.