this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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Pfizer says it will price Covid treatment Paxlovid at nearly $1,400 for a five-day course, which researchers estimate only costs Pfizer $13 to produce. That's a 10,000%+ markup. Shameful. (mastodon.world)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Wasn't COVID research funded by taxpayers under form of grants/emergency funds to pharma companies during the pandemic?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I would love that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Even if R&D cost $100m for this, they'd still only need to sell roughly 80000 doses to make their money back.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I think you're grossly underestimating how much things cost.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

1400 * 8000 = 11.200.00, so you're off by a factor of 10

Edit: Lol, downvoted for a fact

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago

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.