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‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine (www.404media.co)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Sharing because I found this very interesting.

The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has a DIY design for a home lab you can set up to reproduce expensive medication for dirt cheap, producing medication like that used to cure Hepatitis C, along with software they developed that can be used to create chemical compounds out of common household materials.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (3 children)

He does mention the fact that medicine research is hard and requires money but doesn't explain how to solve that. This is a big argument of big pharma prices, they say it finances future research. I think a good example is how incredibly fast we got a COVID vaccine. It happened because private investors had massively invested in research platforms and they invested because they are expecting gains.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 3 months ago (1 children)

that’s not the full story though. according to the NIH, the US government spent over 30 billion dollars on the covid vaccines.

and this is not unique to the covid vaccine. here’s a source with two particularly damning quotes:

“Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.”

and

A 2018 study on the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) financial contributions to new drug approvals found that the agency “contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016.” More than $100 billion in NIH funding went toward research that contributed directly or indirectly to the 210 drugs approved during that six-year period.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Ok, so we should be able to control the prices for drugs where the research has been publicly funded. But how do we avoid losing the private investors who contributed?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 months ago

well, according to the congressional budget office,

In 2023, federal subsidies for health insurance are estimated to be $1.8 trillion

and this report by research america shows that the private sector spent around $150 billion on “research and development” in 2019.

it’s no secret that the private healthcare industry jacks up the prices of things to increase profits. so, some napkin math makes me think it’s not that far-fetched to think that we can save more than $150 billion in healthcare subsidies if we stop privatized healthcare and dramatically lower the costs of medical care. we could then put that $150 billion back into research, without needing to appease the private sector at all.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Medicine still works in europe and is also being developed in europe. Maybe look at how the EU/european countries do it? A lot of it is having regulations. The free market isn't free if the choice between getting the product or not is the difference between life and death.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I am from EU, especially one of those countries with free health care. I believe we have a mix of public research, private research (ex: Sanofi, Servier), expensive proprietary drugs and government controlled public domain generic drugs. But there was an alert recently on drug making sovereignty because no company is interested in making those less profitable generic drugs in France, so they are outsourced to cheaper countries and there's a risk of penury.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Isn’t it the case that a lot of the research is funded by governments through universities and then the pharmaceutical companies come in and scoop up the IP and charge crazy prices.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

Not only that, but then they go and blow half of their budget on adverts instead of R&D.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

How to solve it is simple, our tax dollars already pay for the research, the results are public property