I’m allergic to Paxlovid; taking it makes my neck and head swell up to where I look like Rocky Balboa after a fight and my neck feels like a giant tree trunk.
This isn’t important, but it’s probably the first time I’ve seen an article about Paxlovid since that happened, so it’s all I could think about for a minute.
I guess I’m not surprised that this is happening with one of the few very essential drugs that isn’t in the list of medications that congress is negotiating prices down on for medicare.
Of course pharmaceutical giants use any opening, opportunity, or loophole to exploit those who are sick. Disgusting.
I’m allergic to Paxlovid; taking it makes my neck and head swell up to where I look like Rocky Balboa after a fight and my neck feels like a giant tree trunk.
Are you aware of which part of it that you’re allergic to?
And have you heard of if others have the same allergic reaction?
No, my doctor just had me take Benadryl to see if the reaction started to calm down. When 12 hours later it had, he had me stop taking Paxlovid completely and I didn’t finish the pack.
I know anaphylaxis is definitely a reported reaction of Paxlovid, but I have no idea how prevalent it is.
This page on Paxlovid by the NIH mentions it under Monitoring and Adverse Effects.
Thanks, and also for the link.
No problem!
It’s been too long since the aristocrats were reminded that they need us more than we need them and that they can’t hire enough of us to stop the rest of us once we take an idea to mind.
Je suis d’accord avec vous! 😉
So many Martin Shkrelis out there pricing drugs to the highest level they can get away with. Every big pharmaceutical company does this kind of thing, especially with new drugs.
That’s because in many cases, healthcare has infinite demand.
Explain why we make it legal for companies to set their own prices again
It does make companies more willing to invest more into drug research , which is a good thing.
Drug research is overwhelmingly publicly funded. Private R&D is a PR myth we were fed to justify high prices.
I never said wasn’t. What I said is still true.
Why don’t we just take investor money and invest in it ourselves?
Others have already pointed out that the covid vaccine was publicly funded ergo the benefit should be publicly owned
Covid treatment was publicly funded. This is a case of public funding going to research and private companies profiting from it.
Everyone should be outraged from the situation. This cheap treatment is being denied to the majority of the world’s population because of patients, and so covid has more opportunities to mutate and make everyone less safe.
This is very off topic but I like that mastodon is now a platform more commonly being used to share information like this. Although for their mobile UI, I really hope they get rid of the bar on the right, it’s very odd.
Can’t you just use any 3rd party app with a different layout?
Thanks capitalism!!
/sarcasm.
I’ll never understand why so many people think middlemen somehow makes shit cheaper…
Taxes > government research > cheap meds
With the bonus point of no more pharmaceutical companies selling shit like oxy for profit
Because they think government is inefficient by default, and a commercial business is motivated towards max efficiency to cut costs. Maybe all of this is true, but in capitalism companies also sell for the optimal price based on price elasticity. No competitors + essential live saving product = high prices.
Actually in human societies, not just in capitalism.
People talk about capitalism being bad as if only there people try to eat each other to become richer.
If you read something about reasons the USSR wouldn’t have more efficient centralized planning, while having necessary machinery and resources, or why it wouldn’t have standardized something, while having the standardization apparatus and planned economy, or why all the Internet-like projects went nowhere in USSR while being much more ambitious due to, again, planned economy, or why despite less fragmentation scale wouldn’t make things cheaper to produce in USSR, but the opposite, and so on - that’s because every reform would mean someone losing influence, and that someone would naturally use that influence to resist reform.
It’s actually fascinating to read how some of those people really believed in Marxism and Communism, and were even very competent sometimes, but the general architecture made the whole thing less than just a sum of its parts. Really sad, though.
I agree that the problems aren’t just in Capitalism. However, the country with the unofficial historical tagline, “and then it got worse”, may not be the best example. I think China is a really good example of influence peddling outside a free market.
Well, China, when its ruling organization still had some consistent ideology, was a copy of Stalin’s USSR, bigger and weaker, give or take. Only it started later.
Its way off that track started with reforms like Kosygin’s reforms, would those not be neutered.
I’d say the reason in China this happened was exactly that it was bigger and weaker. It didn’t quite have anything like Soviet industrial establishment, and it had the issues of poverty, hunger etc.
Because “government research” doesn’t cover mass production and all of the supply chain management. Which is where anything bureaucratic really sucks.
(Unless you need to build things badly, but fast and on large scale, mobilization-style - see Khruschev-era mass construction in ex-USSR, or, for exotic stuff, older state-built housing in Israel which isn’t that much better).
Actual production rots very quickly, if centralized and bureaucratic.
I agree that research requires long-term investment and is in general a completely different thing.
There’s just so much wrong in your comment I can’t address it all…
But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?
We’re talking about patents right now.
The rest of what you said is still wrong, can’t stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about…
There’s just so much wrong in your comment I can’t address it all…
If you can’t then you’d better say nothing.
But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?
You said when talking about pharma companies as middlemen. You remove those middlemen - you have to do tasks they perform.
We’re talking about patents right now.
Yes, patent law should be abolished. That’s what I’m talking about while commenting in most threads blaming “capitalism”, because in like 2/3 cases patent law is to blame and not that.
The rest of what you said is still wrong, can’t stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about…
Thank you for your unsubstantiated opinion which I can beat with that of my own every time, so not sure why you’d even express it without details.
If you can’t then you’d better say nothing.
You’ve got a point, I should have said “won’t put the effort in”.
I looked at your profile, you wait till posts are really old, then spam a bunch of nonsensical replies in it.
I’m just gonna block you. Everyone wins.
I’m just gonna block you. Everyone wins.
Not the worst way to look at this, if you want my opinion.
Ah, trademark laws and patents are obviously governmental stuff. So - not present in some imagined absolute capitalism. And with those abolished (except for stealing authorship still being illegal), I suppose market mechanisms would do their job sufficiently well for this particular case.
Believing in capitalism is believing in humans making rational and moral choices, anyone to do that would be nuts. That’s a proactive answer to politically active people getting triggered by my comment and labeling me as a member of the other crowd.
People vote for it every two years and are shocked, just shocked when they get precisely what they voted for.
Do you think pfizer and other companies who spend hundreds of millions lobbying would be like “aww shucks! the public voted to curb our shitty behavior, let’s go home!”?
Didn’t the government fund the development? So… it’s not like they need so much to recover R&D right?
Welcome to the United States. Everything is subsidized, then turned around to fuck the average person.
The government did not for Pfizer. That was Moderns. Pfizer did spend billions of their own cash. This move is largely because the executive leadership way overestimated the amount of covid vaccine and drug treatment revenue for this year, and they are desperate to make up ground.
So they are raising prices and cutting across the board rather than admitting they didn’t know what they were doing in their projections. CEO isn’t taking a pay cut though. Morons got a winning lottery ticket in the pandemic and assumed they’d keep winning every year.
That is almost always the case. Pharma companies are mostly just advertising firms
I know they funded moderna - they basically built Moderna’s new plants including their cmo’s plant so that they could produce at scale. Govt built and funded the plants at risk - prior to fda approval - so that it massively sped up the process to getting the drug in people’s hands. Those plants are now used for other drugs.
I think - but not 100% sure - Pfizer did it on their own.
Still - 10,000% is shameful.
I’m fine with the public-private partnership but money like this needs to come with strings attached. We should’ve made an agreement to cap the price. We developed these drugs under the Trump administration so I really don’t think the impact to poor and middle class citizens has ever been a thought in his mind.
But isnt this just kind of a negotiation price? In reality insurance companies will negotiate and make deals with lower prices, and people will still be covered for the same insurance cost, right?
Disclaimer: Not from US and I dont understand much about your insurance based health care system.
Not sure why so many downvotes. Other than the last statement I don’t think you’re wrong. Insurance will negotiate with providers and drug manufacturers to get discounts on top of whatever amount they’re willing to pay. The result is that patients may get billed for anywhere from the full amount to zero. Regardless it kind of misses the point that US pharma companies are unregulated in their pricing and they are taking advantage of people in life threatening situations.
I almost had a similar issue with my son and a liquid medication that cost $600 for a 3 month supply. Thankfully he was old enough to take pills and the generic pill form was only $12.
Right. So insurance will cover parts of the cost, depending on the insurance. Thanks, I didnt know.
On the other hand the vaccine was free. What’s their target market, the antivaxers?
IIRC the vaccine was not free. Governments paid for it, so we all did pay for it.
Pfizer conducts research in various areas, including MS therapy. That costs a lot of money.
But I can’t complain anyway, here in Germany you can get Paxlovid free of charge because it’s prescribed by a doctor.
Pfizer conducts research in various areas, including MS therapy. That costs a lot of money.
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.
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.
It is shockingly easy to burn things.
I’m just going to leave that thought there.
And then they just rebuilt Arasaka tower and taxed the poor to do it.
Don’t ever think for a second that pharmaceutical companies did anything during Covid for our benefit. They were working their actuarial tables to figure out how they maximize their profits in the future against sick people dying.
They did save millions of lives, though, and allowed us to stop the constant quarantines months or even years early, whatever their motivations (and I’m not as cynical about that as you).
Meanwhile, all the Internet smartasses who love to criticize the drug industry non-stop did exactly jack shit.
There’s nothing wrong with the drugs these companies are developing.
But stopping production or halting research in curing diseases, just because it isn’t as “profitable” as selling drugs to treat the symptoms rather than the disease. That’s insane.
Selling drugs at insane markups, when it’s very clear they cost far less in the EU, and they still earn ton of money. That’s insane.
Patent medicin to keep it out of the hands of sick people, because your other not-as-good drug sells better. That’s insane.
They can treat deez nuts
Trust the science folks. There’s no reason why thes multinational pharma companies would do anything to hurt consumers.
2 things can be true at the same time. In this case the science is good and accurate, and since we live in a capitalist hellscape, corporations will take advantage of the science at every opportunity.
Do you think there is the financial incentive could perhaps skew the “science” in one direction?
Ok who let Martin shkreli out of jail?
I think he was released last year.
