Technology

Pfizer conducts research in various areas, including MS therapy. That costs a lot of money.

Like when Roche refused to study Rituximab in multiple sclerosis, which has been succesfully used as an off-label medication for more than a decade, and then released Ocrelizumab for MS, a totally different and not at all virtually identical drug for ten times the price?

Pfizer has a profit margin of ~30%, and that's after lobbying and advertising and the billions of fines they had to pay for illegal advertising and kickbacks. Unsurprisingly, extractable profit is a really bad proxy for people's health.

But I can't complain anyway, here in Germany you can get Paxlovid free of charge because it's prescribed by a doctor.

While I usually think the "free at point of service"-argument isn't necessary, it's very relevant here. You're still paying for it, and all the other drugs that have come out over the last few years that are much, much more expensive than the therapies they replace.

Take a look at GLP-1-agonists (Wegovy, Ozempic, ...) which will come to replace/combine with oral antidiabetics like metformine and have now also been approved for obesity without diabetes.

Metformine is basically free a 10ct/pill, i.e. ~3€/patient/month. GLP-1-agonists cost about 250 - 1000€/patient/month. More than half of the German population is overweight, and more than one in eight suffer from type 2 diabetes - with both figures on the rise.

This trend of massive price increases with every new generation of drugs is extremely dangerous healthcare systems themselves, especially public ones, and of course the patients themselves in the end. Every price hike sets a new baseline, and we need to be very, very careful about compounding effects.

Pfizer conducts research in various areas, including MS therapy. That costs a lot of money.

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.