A joint study between Yale University, King’s College Hospital in London and Doctors Without Borders found a single shot could be made for just 89 cents.
anybody who believes pharma costs are justified by materials is… well, let’s just call them uninformed. It’s not justified by R&D costs or production issues. It’s justified by the stock market, by the CEO having a race with other pharma CEOs for the biggest bonus, and by no other thing.
I work in med device, close to pharma, but a bit different. There is a lot of overhead. Beyond all the validations required for startup of each line, there is quite a lot of Sustaining work.
I’m not trying to defend this price, or the gouging that pharma does regularly. But I don’t think the $5 price includes all the overhead of the QMS.
It’s really cheap to make a book but that doesn’t stop publishers from selling them at a large markup. This is a pretty basic supply/demand scenario. The pharma company doesn’t owe anyone anything. They exist to make money. The best way to lower the cost is for a competing product to enter the market.
Well if the materials to make a pizza was 5 dollars and it was being sold at 1,000 dollars, saying “oh thats just necessary overhead” would lead me to wonder why the hell that level of inefficiency was tolerated.
Because each new type of pizza is made of brand-new ingredients, not just standard wheat flour, tomatoes, cheese, spices, etc. And they’re baked anew and taste-tested to make sure they’re not disgusting, or worse, have toxic effects.
Im not in charge of the checkbook, but I do place purchase requests. I also am in charge of reducing direct labor and know what our overhead numbers are. We are a small company though. It should be possible to reduce overhead in larger companies due to economies of scale, however, it is not always the case as the bureaucracies required to interface with the FDA are not trivial.
I was involved with a product transfer for a large company one time. Due to the small volume of the product and the complexity of Sustaining and reporting activities it had a 60% overhead. I did look at the books on that. While that’s an extreme case, I’ve also seen product launched with 40% yield. One device I worked on was a stapler for the heart. We had to load the tiny staples into the device, fire it, evaluate the staple formation, then reset and reload the staples. It had about 80-90% yield if I remember correctly.
These aren’t roast beef sandwiches. People die if you fuck up.
…and you are shit-canning someone else’s input because they don’t know everything based on your even more limited experience, suspect knowledge, and a heavily biased opinion of how you think the world should work. Lay out your superior knowledge or admit you’re just spewing a party line for the upvotes because it sure sounds like they know a hell of a lot more about the subject than you do.
The R&D is often publicly funded by research grants, with free labor by grad students. Our tax dollars are paying for extortion over our health in this completely broken system.
As you pointed out, this is literally just sociopathic CEOs doing what capitalism demands of them.
Normally you can think of these prices as the reward to taking a risk. The chance of developing a drug and bringing it to market is usually small, and the reward should accordingly be high. However, in the particular case of Ozempic, the company attempted to develop a diabetes drug, and accidentally found that the drug works against obesity. That means that the reward in this case outweighs the risk by an obscene amount.
Most of the research on drugs is done by universities with grant money or government labs and then the production is sold to private companies. They aren’t taking nearly the amount of risk you are claiming.
obviously
anybody who believes pharma costs are justified by materials is… well, let’s just call them uninformed. It’s not justified by R&D costs or production issues. It’s justified by the stock market, by the CEO having a race with other pharma CEOs for the biggest bonus, and by no other thing.
I work in med device, close to pharma, but a bit different. There is a lot of overhead. Beyond all the validations required for startup of each line, there is quite a lot of Sustaining work.
I’m not trying to defend this price, or the gouging that pharma does regularly. But I don’t think the $5 price includes all the overhead of the QMS.
It’s like taking the price of the ingredients for a pizza and saying it’s what it should cost.
deleted by creator
It’s really cheap to make a book but that doesn’t stop publishers from selling them at a large markup. This is a pretty basic supply/demand scenario. The pharma company doesn’t owe anyone anything. They exist to make money. The best way to lower the cost is for a competing product to enter the market.
Well if the materials to make a pizza was 5 dollars and it was being sold at 1,000 dollars, saying “oh thats just necessary overhead” would lead me to wonder why the hell that level of inefficiency was tolerated.
Patents, e.g. legal monopolies.
Maybe fines and penalties for undercutting someone who holds a patent should be scrapped for nonprofit manufacturers of generics.
Maybe profit should come second to the betterment of humanity.
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Because each new type of pizza is made of brand-new ingredients, not just standard wheat flour, tomatoes, cheese, spices, etc. And they’re baked anew and taste-tested to make sure they’re not disgusting, or worse, have toxic effects.
deleted by creator
Im not in charge of the checkbook, but I do place purchase requests. I also am in charge of reducing direct labor and know what our overhead numbers are. We are a small company though. It should be possible to reduce overhead in larger companies due to economies of scale, however, it is not always the case as the bureaucracies required to interface with the FDA are not trivial.
I was involved with a product transfer for a large company one time. Due to the small volume of the product and the complexity of Sustaining and reporting activities it had a 60% overhead. I did look at the books on that. While that’s an extreme case, I’ve also seen product launched with 40% yield. One device I worked on was a stapler for the heart. We had to load the tiny staples into the device, fire it, evaluate the staple formation, then reset and reload the staples. It had about 80-90% yield if I remember correctly.
These aren’t roast beef sandwiches. People die if you fuck up.
deleted by creator
…and you are shit-canning someone else’s input because they don’t know everything based on your even more limited experience, suspect knowledge, and a heavily biased opinion of how you think the world should work. Lay out your superior knowledge or admit you’re just spewing a party line for the upvotes because it sure sounds like they know a hell of a lot more about the subject than you do.
Them:
You:
Well done.
It’s justified by asking “how much money can we suck out of the people it helps?”
I’m sure there are some costs associated with developing drugs, and I’m sure it’s not cheap.
The problem still stands, though, and the solution is capping executive pay in public companies.
Novo Nordisk’s CEO was paid $9.8 million last year, inclusive of bonus and benefits.
The R&D is often publicly funded by research grants, with free labor by grad students. Our tax dollars are paying for extortion over our health in this completely broken system.
As you pointed out, this is literally just sociopathic CEOs doing what capitalism demands of them.
Normally you can think of these prices as the reward to taking a risk. The chance of developing a drug and bringing it to market is usually small, and the reward should accordingly be high. However, in the particular case of Ozempic, the company attempted to develop a diabetes drug, and accidentally found that the drug works against obesity. That means that the reward in this case outweighs the risk by an obscene amount.
Most of the research on drugs is done by universities with grant money or government labs and then the production is sold to private companies. They aren’t taking nearly the amount of risk you are claiming.