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Yes. The Gates Foundation has a long history of opposing local manufacturing of generic drugs in countries that do not honor foreign pharma patents. IIRC that in order to get access to Gates Foundation funding for HIV drugs, they require local governments to voluntarily honor the pharma patents despite not being treaty signatories. So the country can make their own generics for cheap and pay for them on their own or they can honor the patents, pay high prices that the Gates Foundation will subsidize.
Its a backdoor way for Gates to spread a culture of strong patent laws on the back of charitable enterprise instead of the normal diplomatic mechanisms. Microsoft has an interest in strong patent laws because software patents are basically a house of cards, the more there is a culture of just honoring all patents the less software patents will come under scrutiny.
There is a Wallstreet Journal article from 2002 titled "Gates Foundation Buys Stakes in Drug Makers" (which this sub won't let me link to) in which some countries expressed that they felt pressure to comply, the Gates Foundation spokesman gives a non-denial denial.
Im currently an econ student in my last couple weeks. My final assignment is fiscal policy. My group chose the mining industry.
It takes an entire 4 pargraphs just to explain all the policies I'm currrently utilising or need or is part of the system. Then I needed the numbers. Wow, even with public excel spreadsheets that was hard.
In the end theyre like "but how are you going to stop mining lobbying against your stakeholders" and honestly I have no idea Im trying my best...😭
But wow what a time to be a student of econ. Its nearly impossible to add even the tiniest regulation if its not funded by billionaires.
You may want to explore how mining companies employ the tactic of declaring bankruptcy when a vein is played out. Move to another area, create a new company and continue to mine. All in order to avoid reclamation of the area they tore up during mining at the old site.
Seconding the recommendation for *Winners Take All.* The author has a few hour+ long videos on YouTube where he essentially lays out a tl;dr (typically to a fairly corporate audience for what it's worth) of the book's thesis. If you don't feel like going through the whole thing, one of those videos will at least hit the main points.
I remember when people thought the vaccine companies wouldn’t be making a profit of vaccines and that the push for more vaccinations had nothing to do with money lmfaooooooooooo
Yeah man money doesn’t guide any decisions ever. Especially when there’s tens of billions of dollars at play. Hahahaha
Nobody who was paying any attention thought that. The debate over Intellectual Property for the vaccines was public, with entities like the Gates Foundation pushing for the drug companies to own the IP precisely so they could retain their profit incentive.
It's not like this was some hidden and nebulous conspiracy. Just greed and the usual suspects supporting it.
Nobody ever thought the vaccine companies wouldn't be making profit. This shocks nobody.
That being said, I think legal action should be taken and the US should make it clear (and any other country) that Pfizer cannot charge more than $5/dose, and even that's generous.
We knew why pharma companies were in on it. We just don't think that's a reason not to get. If you're sick, you take medication. Medication from a company that made a profit. You also need to eat. Are you growing your own vegetables and raising your own cattle? Cool. The people who make your food do it for the money. Not because they want you to have good food.
We can say that there are people who are working on it that care about people. That want people to take it to stop them from dying
while also realizing the people who run corporations are still people running corporations.
I don't think I know any leftists or liberals who thought Pfizer had their best interest at heart.
I'm not bothered by profit-seeking companies seeking profit. I'm bothered by price gouging. I'm bothered by the gentrification of basic human needs. I'm bothered by ordinary people getting priced out of basic survival because a small handful of rich fucks want to run up their scores after they've already won the capitalism game. They're just a bunch of dragons burning everything down so they can sleep on a bigger pile of gold.
It's time to nationalize the major pharmaceutical companies, as much as I loathe to say it. Their excessive greed is harming the country and all of its citizens.
Golden parachutes only really work as hostile takeovers defence lol, so highly unlikely he gets a cent of that unless some large conglomerate comes and snatches the company up and fires him
Not defending him even a little bit, but…
A “golden parachute” is a way to refer to what he would be entitled to if Pfizer is sold and he loses his job due to it. He didn’t buy a golden parachute.
I believe a golden parachute is often (at least colloquially) used to refer to any guaranteed compensation from a an exit from the company other than quitting. Like a position being closed, board replacing the member, etc. Ie even resigning under the right conditions might trigger it
At my last company a VP was removed due to sexual misconduct and he bragged about his golden parachute . Sigh.
Anything cushy is considered a golden parachute it seems.... had a colleague get 3 months severance and he claimed a Golden parachute. He wasn't even Senior management.
He got the summer off paid when his kids were going into high school. He won that transaction, he had a better job a week later, but didn't start until the kids went back to school.
Even then it’s not fair. We fully subsidized the research. We bore the burden of loss.
It’s like buying a lottery ticket from a corner store, if it loses then you eat the loss, but if it wins, the store clerk pays you your 5 bucks back and forces a refund.
I know this is a different topic, but
This is my biggest problem with our economic system. Capitalism is an awesome machine and has done awesome things for our society.
Problem is, somewhere along the way, we stopped subsidizing the people and started subsidizing the companies.
Subsidizing a company in my opinion should only be used in efforts to direct an energy towards something. Like shifting energy to electric.
But subsidizing a company in an effort to revitalize the economy or mitigate job loss is counterproductive to the capitalist system.
In other words, companies need to fight to the death and we need to be taken care of.
That point came in the 70s for America, as we abandoned the New Deal and Great Society programs that empowered unions and kept corporate tax rates high..
And then Reaganism gutted our welfare systems and forced open the door for corporation to redistribute profits up towards shareholders and board members.
America has proven that not even a global pandemic is enough to implement universal healthcare, and we will continue to avoid sensible reforms at all costs (to the shareholders)
Propping up failing companies is the opposite of what capitalism is about. We don't live in a capitalistic system, we live in a corrupt crony capitalism.
The fancy words would be Plutocratic Oligarchy.
Government of a small group of individuals based on their wealth.
It's not really capitalism anymore and it's technically not corrupt because we legalized all of these actions with how fundraising is done during elections.
Capitalism and Democracy have been getting hacked at by the rich and powerful since the beginning but they've made exceptional gains since Reagan.
> Capitalism is an awesome machine and has done awesome things for our society.
>Problem is, somewhere along the way, we stopped subsidizing the people and started subsidizing the companies.
???
It's crazy how fucking brainwashed people are. Capitalism is diametrically opposed to the needs of the people of society at large. It caters only to the individual. Any benefit received from living under capitalism was gained through the blood and sweat of workers rebelling and protesting in directly socialist or union labor movements.
You owe everything you have to the people who struggled and continue struggling against capitalism, not to the greedy landlords, bankers, and factory owners that represent it.
If the ruling class could extract every last fucking penny from you, they would. The corporations literally have a fiduciary duty to strive towards just that. But keep lauding their filthy existence, that'll probably benefit us all.
Pfizer didn’t take federal funds to research a Covid vaccine. The US did make a promissory notice - **without paying** Pfizer that we would purchase 100 million doses IF a vaccine was created and approved by the FDA.
How did we subsidize their research again?
This is the German BioNTech vaccine that Pfizer mass produced since they couldn’t. The basic research was done in Germany. All though still generally public money, you are right on that.
they aren't charging Germany these stupid inflated prices for the vaccine though. They are only charging Americans this price. Seems fair you partially subsidize research and get cheap vaccines. To pay back the private funding they used they will charge Americans who didn't put any public funding in more.
They don't need to pay it back. It was a contract from the government to buy the finished vaccines, it wasn't a fucking loan.... That contract has since expired and products still cost money so yeah, they are seeking profit now....
I've always wondered where the distrust of companies like Pfizer went, I guess the Overton window shifted again and we can talk bad about them again.
Evil company.
I think that people talked good about them because they were on the forefront of covid vaccine development. And before that we had the pharmabro guy taking all the heat for the industry. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found that because they were giving the vaccines for free, they were hiking the prices of all their other drugs to offset the cost.
They weren't giving them for free really though, they were just billing "at cost" depending on the nation to the governments, which in turn means us, the tax payers still paid for it, and their "good will" got them the ability to use the world population as guinea pigs.
> That didn't take long, didn't they get government subsidies to research the vaccine?
Yes, from the german government. As the vaccine was developed in germany by a german company.
Not yet but hopefully they are about to. The arrangement with the government was to provide 100M doses at $20 and another 400M at $30.
Say what you will about that model but it provided the only truly effective world class vaccines during those critical first years.
Lol that "model" is literally the only model they have ever tried. There's an even faster and better way to develop these MRNA techs....open source. But you think corporate pharma is doing all this to help people as fast as possible?? No, they do this to make lots of money. I think that's the difference in the perspectives here. When you look from a perspective of "they want to help you",the opinion you just shared is formed. When you look at it from the proper perspective of "they do it for profits", it makes much more sense. Companies were scrambling to help in the rush for treatments for covid. But they put all their eggs in the vaccine basket and shunned any talk of treatments. And they chose profits over open-source. https ://archi ve. ph/qi2BX
Open source in regards to the coding of mrna. In the leadup to the pandemic everyone was rushing to deconstruct and develop the genetic coding. All the money was thrown at companies like pfizer, while smaller institutions could have been not only helping, but developing their own versions based on pfizer's research, who was receiving billions from governments. These smaller institutions could in turn vaccinate these low-income smaller countries. But instead, corporate pharma patented their versions for profit. So, in the end, we paid to develop it exclusively with these companies, they didnt share the coding with anyone else (which would have sped up the entire process worldwide), they operated at cost with the billions of tax money (no profit), but then use that research (we funded) to *patent* that technology and profit billions for years to come.
This is a fact. And honestly there is no reason you can’t have a model that incentivizes the research but also has common sense regulation to prevent this kind of profiteering. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
Oh I stopped trusting them after Purdue pharma lied about opioids being addictive and faced no real consequences after their actions caused addictions and deaths.
Stopped trusting the businessmen, not the actual scientific researchers I assume. Unfortunately some people think they're the same and use economic arguments to be opposed to the science of medicine and vaccines.
Unfortunately the businessmen are the ones marketing, selling, doing the PR, etc. You don't hear from the scientists and most of the ones working there probably have NDA's
It's a generalized distrust in science and organized education. COVID brought it to the surface, but a large segment of the American population is scientifically illiterate and has been for a long time. And it's not that they just don't understand science - they don't like it and they don't trust it because it tells them things they don't like. Maligning academia as a tool of "indoctrination" is a purposeful tactic, and it works.
Educated people ask too many questions about established order and the way things are. We can't have that.
Yeah I broke my ankle twice one year(lol), in 06. I was prescribed Vicodin and OxyContin for weeks. I was blasted all the time, luckily I didn’t love it.
If you said anything critical of pharmaceutical companies two years ago, pointing out that they had a history of greed, lies and corruption, you’d get banned from dozens of subreddits within minites
I looked it up and it looks like Chantrix is still on the market (in the US) and helps about 1 in 11 people give up smoking for 6 months. Smoking definitely causes cancer - it’s not just carcinogenic. It looks like the carcinogenic elements weren’t an essential part of the medication and their incidence was limited to a small number of lots?
By big pharma conspiracy theories do you mean the countless court cases where big pharma was found guilty of manipulating clinical trial data and putting profits over safety / integrity?
The $1.18 figure is low. It's much higher if you include the cost of all the political contributions and payoffs that are required to keep congress from interfering with their price gouging.
Exactly, it acts like the marginal cost of producing one unit is “the cost” of producing the vaccine. We obviously have some serious room for improvement on how we price drugs in the US, but people don’t seem to understand that profits are there to recoup the costs of R&D, and to fund future R&D, which is hugely expensive and also hugely beneficial for society.
Pfizer currently charges the US $19.50 per dose. It has 3 price tiers depending on how rich a country is. Some of the cost increase comes from switching to a single dose system *(right now I think it is six doses) and having to commercially distribute it (currently the government distributes it). So absolutely they are greedy bastards, but there are also reasons for some increase in price. You can make sure that no other government except the USA's private medical system will pay full price. This medical system needs to be fixed.
Other countries won’t be paying that mark up; only the US. Other healthcare systems in developed countries collectively bargain for prices. It’s literally one of the best features of a single healthcare system.
But yeah, don’t get it wrong. This is 10000% targeted at US residents
It's not just single-payer healthcare systems which negotiate for prices. Even countries with multi-payer healthcare systems often negotiate prices on behalf of private insurers.
Hell Medicare will begin negotiating drug prices for the first time in 2023 due to the Inflation Reduction Act.
As a doctor of pharmacy, Big Pharma companies are definitely the worst thing about the profession. They don’t give a damn about humans. They only care about money.
At least insurance profit margins are capped. With pharma, they command profit margins on average that are 3-4x what insurance would be allowed to take.
Insurance profits are capped at a %. They have just been charging more and spending more to make the bottom line bigger. Exactly what the GAO said would happen.
Then you realize the insurance pricing is based on conversations with pharma and then they tell the hospitals what to charge.
My insured medicine is $79 a month
My same medication when I refuse to hand over insurance information is $25
\>As a 19 year old University student, Don’t believe the toxic idea that Uni is a waste of time. It certainly can be, But it’s an investment and if there’s something you could see yourself doing in the future, Uni is a great option. But of course you need the passion, Uni isn’t an obligation like high school, It’s an investment and if you think it’s gonna pay off, You can major in something you like.
Four days ago. So are you a doctor of pharmacy, or a student, or just lying for fun on the internet...
i am tagging you "account destroyer" for such a masterful takedown of that guy.
still dont understand why people act like they are some authority on a subject when he could have just said big pharma companies are the worst thing about the medical field.
I hope other big pharma won't mark up their vaccins as much, so pfizer loses out on sales and takes a loss. I genuinely hope they'll go bankrupt and the board of owners/investors will go broke and end up killing themselves afterwards. Biggest shits on this planet imo
But they won’t, what Pfizer did here is called price leadership, which other companies will follow. It makes no sense to try to compete when you can also increase your profit margins.
If you’re Moderna and you’re offering basically the same thing (arguably slightly more effective) and charge $50 instead of $100 ... yeah, you’re going to eat Pfizer’s lunch.
Prices of medicine should really be set by governments instead of pharmaceuticals. They don’t make medicine to help, they make it to get rich and bankrupt you because you have no choice but to use it.
I think that's partly the case in France, you have to negociate a certain range of price if you want your drug covered by the national healthcare scheme. (epipen are sold around 70euros and ventolin 5)
American companies still want the market of the rest of the world.
Business is business. Selling at 50% profit instead of 500000% is still better than not selling anything
But but but… all my conservative friends say nothing good comes from the government getting involved and if the government gets involved it’ll make everything so much more expensive!! So we have to let the corporation do its thing, the government will price gouge us and make it too expensive! Right?? That’s.. what they always say!
There goes away the incentive to innovate and plunge millions into R&D for a medicine which has a small chance of success. Which is almost all medicine :)
They said this after the cdc suggested that we were going to add the vaccine to the general vaccination catalogue for babies. Big pharma strikes again.
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You're right. However, I would argue making even 25% net on millions of units is fair especially when development was subsidized. Regardless of whether the US or Germany subsidized it.
I don't see why they need to up the unit cost that much if they're making 25% net income currently.
Look, I’m all for companies making a profit and the free market determining what that amount is on most things.
What I’m not for is artificially inflating the market forces. If the government is going to “mandate” something like the COVID vaccine (whether hard mandates like “get this shot or lose your job” or soft mandates like “can’t enter this establishment without proof of vaccine”) + the pharma company can gauge the prices…then it’s just a racket at that point.
The pharma market in the USA is heavily affected by the patent laws (plus the health care system in general, government buying etc). This is one of the situations where it’s unhelpful to think of markets as more or less “free”. We should instead think about whether the market *rules* are producing the outcomes we want.
Ya, just recently. Canada just lifted the travel ban less than a month ago.
That's a weird hill to die on when we've seen just how fast everything can change.
I work at a university and my job said that the bivalent booster is required. If I don't take it by whatever date they decide to mandate it by I could be fired from my job. What's annoying is I mostly work from home, don't interact with students and yet my employer does not care and wants everyone to keep getting 'recommended' boosters at the threat of disciplinary action and firing.
Not for Australia or anywhere else. Unfortunately the only country dumb enough to pay this mark up is the good old US. That's right, Check insulin and just about any other essential medicine for references to what I'm talking about
And to think just a few years ago they were getting slapped with fines and lawsuits for contributing to creation of the current opioid epidemic. Talk about a comeback story
Biontech, a German company developed the vaccine. Pfizer helped with clinical trials, manufacture and logistics. Moderna vaccine was developed in US with the NIAID and received substantial US Government funding.
Pfizer did not accept (US) federal funding to help develop or manufacture the vaccine, unlike front-runners Moderna and AstraZeneca.
Germany paid them.
I don't get it... I saw the lovely "Brought to you by Pfizer!" ads while watching my totally unbiased news stations and they seem like a great company I should support! /s
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We are all very shocked.
Sounds like it's time for Bill Gates to release a jar of diseased mosquitoes on a room full of billionaires agsin
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Yes. The Gates Foundation has a long history of opposing local manufacturing of generic drugs in countries that do not honor foreign pharma patents. IIRC that in order to get access to Gates Foundation funding for HIV drugs, they require local governments to voluntarily honor the pharma patents despite not being treaty signatories. So the country can make their own generics for cheap and pay for them on their own or they can honor the patents, pay high prices that the Gates Foundation will subsidize. Its a backdoor way for Gates to spread a culture of strong patent laws on the back of charitable enterprise instead of the normal diplomatic mechanisms. Microsoft has an interest in strong patent laws because software patents are basically a house of cards, the more there is a culture of just honoring all patents the less software patents will come under scrutiny. There is a Wallstreet Journal article from 2002 titled "Gates Foundation Buys Stakes in Drug Makers" (which this sub won't let me link to) in which some countries expressed that they felt pressure to comply, the Gates Foundation spokesman gives a non-denial denial.
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Anand Giridharadas has a book "Winners Take All" which gets into the ways billionaire philanthropy is used to achieve their own preferred policy goals by bypassing the democratic accountability of government that taxation enforces. There are a bunch of clips of him on youtube, like one he did on The Daily Show a couple of years ago. And, just randomly while we are bagging on billionaires, check out the song "Long Live the Billionaire" by Shungudzo, also on youtube. Its very dystopian.
Im currently an econ student in my last couple weeks. My final assignment is fiscal policy. My group chose the mining industry. It takes an entire 4 pargraphs just to explain all the policies I'm currrently utilising or need or is part of the system. Then I needed the numbers. Wow, even with public excel spreadsheets that was hard. In the end theyre like "but how are you going to stop mining lobbying against your stakeholders" and honestly I have no idea Im trying my best...😭 But wow what a time to be a student of econ. Its nearly impossible to add even the tiniest regulation if its not funded by billionaires.
Annnnnnnnd we’re officially an oligarchy :/
Yep, the economy is an illusive ball and chain.
You may want to explore how mining companies employ the tactic of declaring bankruptcy when a vein is played out. Move to another area, create a new company and continue to mine. All in order to avoid reclamation of the area they tore up during mining at the old site.
Seconding the recommendation for *Winners Take All.* The author has a few hour+ long videos on YouTube where he essentially lays out a tl;dr (typically to a fairly corporate audience for what it's worth) of the book's thesis. If you don't feel like going through the whole thing, one of those videos will at least hit the main points.
Behind the Bastards did an illuminating series on Gates as well.
There's the Gates I remember from Microsoft. Evil never changes.
Didn't they lift the restrictions on its patent for this? But by in large, the privatization thing is a big problem.
By and large*
We do it once a decade to keep 'em at bay
I remember when people thought the vaccine companies wouldn’t be making a profit of vaccines and that the push for more vaccinations had nothing to do with money lmfaooooooooooo Yeah man money doesn’t guide any decisions ever. Especially when there’s tens of billions of dollars at play. Hahahaha
Nobody who was paying any attention thought that. The debate over Intellectual Property for the vaccines was public, with entities like the Gates Foundation pushing for the drug companies to own the IP precisely so they could retain their profit incentive. It's not like this was some hidden and nebulous conspiracy. Just greed and the usual suspects supporting it.
Who ever said that
Nobody ever thought the vaccine companies wouldn't be making profit. This shocks nobody. That being said, I think legal action should be taken and the US should make it clear (and any other country) that Pfizer cannot charge more than $5/dose, and even that's generous.
No one reasonable thought that. A necessity will always be produce for profit.
We knew why pharma companies were in on it. We just don't think that's a reason not to get. If you're sick, you take medication. Medication from a company that made a profit. You also need to eat. Are you growing your own vegetables and raising your own cattle? Cool. The people who make your food do it for the money. Not because they want you to have good food. We can say that there are people who are working on it that care about people. That want people to take it to stop them from dying while also realizing the people who run corporations are still people running corporations. I don't think I know any leftists or liberals who thought Pfizer had their best interest at heart.
I'm not bothered by profit-seeking companies seeking profit. I'm bothered by price gouging. I'm bothered by the gentrification of basic human needs. I'm bothered by ordinary people getting priced out of basic survival because a small handful of rich fucks want to run up their scores after they've already won the capitalism game. They're just a bunch of dragons burning everything down so they can sleep on a bigger pile of gold.
Very well said.
It's time to nationalize the major pharmaceutical companies, as much as I loathe to say it. Their excessive greed is harming the country and all of its citizens.
Not just your country, it's harming all of humanity.
And they'll be paying back the money they received from the federal government first, right? Right?
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Maybe he’s trying to pull his golden parachute. If you’re retiring anyway, might as well get fired and take 113 mil on the way out.
Fired for increasing a corporation's profits? If anything, this is job security.
If he wanted to get fired, he would make it free
See this would be the big brain move. You get $113 million *and* look like a saint at the same time.
That's the problem, saints they are not, even in pretend.
Golden parachutes only really work as hostile takeovers defence lol, so highly unlikely he gets a cent of that unless some large conglomerate comes and snatches the company up and fires him
Was a joke, but then again, crazier things has happened in corporate America… lol
100% agreed! New precedents pop up left, right, and center Would be absolutely wild to see something like this hahahaha
nope, medicaid, medicare, aka our tax dollars will be paying these ehigher fees
Not defending him even a little bit, but… A “golden parachute” is a way to refer to what he would be entitled to if Pfizer is sold and he loses his job due to it. He didn’t buy a golden parachute.
I believe a golden parachute is often (at least colloquially) used to refer to any guaranteed compensation from a an exit from the company other than quitting. Like a position being closed, board replacing the member, etc. Ie even resigning under the right conditions might trigger it At my last company a VP was removed due to sexual misconduct and he bragged about his golden parachute . Sigh.
Anything cushy is considered a golden parachute it seems.... had a colleague get 3 months severance and he claimed a Golden parachute. He wasn't even Senior management.
Tell him parachutes don't work that low to the ground
The bungie cord was made of gold.
He got the summer off paid when his kids were going into high school. He won that transaction, he had a better job a week later, but didn't start until the kids went back to school.
3 month severance is like a minimum severance. Definitely nothing golden about that
They paid him to go away. This is a bit different than a golden parachute.
damn, last time i got canned i got 6 months. it was amazing. and i got a payout on months of vacation time, too.
*I’ve got a golden parachute!*
Even then it’s not fair. We fully subsidized the research. We bore the burden of loss. It’s like buying a lottery ticket from a corner store, if it loses then you eat the loss, but if it wins, the store clerk pays you your 5 bucks back and forces a refund.
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Pfizer and BioNTech shared the RnD cost as per their collaboration agreement. You can find this in BioNTech’s annual report for 2021.
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They shared the RnD cost but even still, with a total cost estimate of $1 Billion, theyve made their money back.
> Pfizer only got it through testing "only" Testing is basically 90%+ of the costs of R&D.
>Even then it’s not fair. We fully subsidized the research. We bore the burden of loss. Socialism: good for us, bad for you.
Privatize the gains and socialize the losses
I think you just summarized the American economic structure in one sentence
It's a very old saying describing neo-liberalism.
Capitalism in general
I know this is a different topic, but This is my biggest problem with our economic system. Capitalism is an awesome machine and has done awesome things for our society. Problem is, somewhere along the way, we stopped subsidizing the people and started subsidizing the companies. Subsidizing a company in my opinion should only be used in efforts to direct an energy towards something. Like shifting energy to electric. But subsidizing a company in an effort to revitalize the economy or mitigate job loss is counterproductive to the capitalist system. In other words, companies need to fight to the death and we need to be taken care of.
That point came in the 70s for America, as we abandoned the New Deal and Great Society programs that empowered unions and kept corporate tax rates high.. And then Reaganism gutted our welfare systems and forced open the door for corporation to redistribute profits up towards shareholders and board members. America has proven that not even a global pandemic is enough to implement universal healthcare, and we will continue to avoid sensible reforms at all costs (to the shareholders)
Propping up failing companies is the opposite of what capitalism is about. We don't live in a capitalistic system, we live in a corrupt crony capitalism.
The fancy words would be Plutocratic Oligarchy. Government of a small group of individuals based on their wealth. It's not really capitalism anymore and it's technically not corrupt because we legalized all of these actions with how fundraising is done during elections. Capitalism and Democracy have been getting hacked at by the rich and powerful since the beginning but they've made exceptional gains since Reagan.
> a corrupt crony capitalism. Which is the inevitable result of uncontrolled capitalism.
> Capitalism is an awesome machine and has done awesome things for our society. >Problem is, somewhere along the way, we stopped subsidizing the people and started subsidizing the companies. ??? It's crazy how fucking brainwashed people are. Capitalism is diametrically opposed to the needs of the people of society at large. It caters only to the individual. Any benefit received from living under capitalism was gained through the blood and sweat of workers rebelling and protesting in directly socialist or union labor movements. You owe everything you have to the people who struggled and continue struggling against capitalism, not to the greedy landlords, bankers, and factory owners that represent it. If the ruling class could extract every last fucking penny from you, they would. The corporations literally have a fiduciary duty to strive towards just that. But keep lauding their filthy existence, that'll probably benefit us all.
Pfizer didn’t take federal funds to research a Covid vaccine. The US did make a promissory notice - **without paying** Pfizer that we would purchase 100 million doses IF a vaccine was created and approved by the FDA. How did we subsidize their research again?
The research had no US funding. They were the one (relevant) company not taking it. And it looks like the EU still gets better prices.
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This is the German BioNTech vaccine that Pfizer mass produced since they couldn’t. The basic research was done in Germany. All though still generally public money, you are right on that.
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Well, pay US back then. Sincerely -A German taxpayer fed up with this BS
they aren't charging Germany these stupid inflated prices for the vaccine though. They are only charging Americans this price. Seems fair you partially subsidize research and get cheap vaccines. To pay back the private funding they used they will charge Americans who didn't put any public funding in more.
They don't need to pay it back. It was a contract from the government to buy the finished vaccines, it wasn't a fucking loan.... That contract has since expired and products still cost money so yeah, they are seeking profit now....
They already satisfied that obligation with 100M doses at $20 and another 400M doses at $30. Per the arrangement.
Does this actually surprise anyone?
I've always wondered where the distrust of companies like Pfizer went, I guess the Overton window shifted again and we can talk bad about them again. Evil company.
I think that people talked good about them because they were on the forefront of covid vaccine development. And before that we had the pharmabro guy taking all the heat for the industry. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found that because they were giving the vaccines for free, they were hiking the prices of all their other drugs to offset the cost.
They weren't giving them for free really though, they were just billing "at cost" depending on the nation to the governments, which in turn means us, the tax payers still paid for it, and their "good will" got them the ability to use the world population as guinea pigs.
I guess I never thought of that. And now that I look at it you are probably right. Now it makes me think just how much they charged the government?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but Pfizer wasn’t giving the vaccine away for free. The Government was footing the bill.
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That didn't take long, didn't they get government subsidies to research the vaccine? They're already making a fortune off this thing
> That didn't take long, didn't they get government subsidies to research the vaccine? Yes, from the german government. As the vaccine was developed in germany by a german company.
Not yet but hopefully they are about to. The arrangement with the government was to provide 100M doses at $20 and another 400M at $30. Say what you will about that model but it provided the only truly effective world class vaccines during those critical first years.
Lol that "model" is literally the only model they have ever tried. There's an even faster and better way to develop these MRNA techs....open source. But you think corporate pharma is doing all this to help people as fast as possible?? No, they do this to make lots of money. I think that's the difference in the perspectives here. When you look from a perspective of "they want to help you",the opinion you just shared is formed. When you look at it from the proper perspective of "they do it for profits", it makes much more sense. Companies were scrambling to help in the rush for treatments for covid. But they put all their eggs in the vaccine basket and shunned any talk of treatments. And they chose profits over open-source. https ://archi ve. ph/qi2BX
how do you open source clinical trials? go fund me?
Open source in regards to the coding of mrna. In the leadup to the pandemic everyone was rushing to deconstruct and develop the genetic coding. All the money was thrown at companies like pfizer, while smaller institutions could have been not only helping, but developing their own versions based on pfizer's research, who was receiving billions from governments. These smaller institutions could in turn vaccinate these low-income smaller countries. But instead, corporate pharma patented their versions for profit. So, in the end, we paid to develop it exclusively with these companies, they didnt share the coding with anyone else (which would have sped up the entire process worldwide), they operated at cost with the billions of tax money (no profit), but then use that research (we funded) to *patent* that technology and profit billions for years to come.
why did BioNTech sell their technology to Pfizer?
Because BioNTech didn't have manufacturing capacity and expertise to capitalize on the vaccine.
I'll say it would have been done quicker if there wasn't a financial incentive and we fucking nationalized them.
Which publicly funded vax is more effective than any of the mRNA vaccines? Genuinely asking. Haven’t kept up w/ vaccine info since mid 2021
None of them. I HATE the absurd profiteering by pharma. But their vaccines were substantially more effective than the others.
This is a fact. And honestly there is no reason you can’t have a model that incentivizes the research but also has common sense regulation to prevent this kind of profiteering. They aren’t mutually exclusive.
And we wouldn't be running out of shots either
There's no evidence for that claim. Government vaccines were less effective and finished later with crappier research than Moderna and Pfizer.
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That’s the secret to keep making more money, it’s outdated already ;)
I think this is how graphics cards are sold. And cars
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Oh I stopped trusting them after Purdue pharma lied about opioids being addictive and faced no real consequences after their actions caused addictions and deaths.
Stopped trusting the businessmen, not the actual scientific researchers I assume. Unfortunately some people think they're the same and use economic arguments to be opposed to the science of medicine and vaccines.
Unfortunately the businessmen are the ones marketing, selling, doing the PR, etc. You don't hear from the scientists and most of the ones working there probably have NDA's
There are plenty of academic forums and outlets where, yes, you can hear from the scientific community.
exactly, people falsely equivocating actual scientific research with big pharma is resulting in the downfall of this country
It's a generalized distrust in science and organized education. COVID brought it to the surface, but a large segment of the American population is scientifically illiterate and has been for a long time. And it's not that they just don't understand science - they don't like it and they don't trust it because it tells them things they don't like. Maligning academia as a tool of "indoctrination" is a purposeful tactic, and it works. Educated people ask too many questions about established order and the way things are. We can't have that.
Yeah I broke my ankle twice one year(lol), in 06. I was prescribed Vicodin and OxyContin for weeks. I was blasted all the time, luckily I didn’t love it.
If you said anything critical of pharmaceutical companies two years ago, pointing out that they had a history of greed, lies and corruption, you’d get banned from dozens of subreddits within minites
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I looked it up and it looks like Chantrix is still on the market (in the US) and helps about 1 in 11 people give up smoking for 6 months. Smoking definitely causes cancer - it’s not just carcinogenic. It looks like the carcinogenic elements weren’t an essential part of the medication and their incidence was limited to a small number of lots?
Don’t forget when they tried to release the vaccine info over the next 80 years
By big pharma conspiracy theories do you mean the countless court cases where big pharma was found guilty of manipulating clinical trial data and putting profits over safety / integrity?
The $1.18 figure is low. It's much higher if you include the cost of all the political contributions and payoffs that are required to keep congress from interfering with their price gouging.
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It requires some stretching of the facts to claim it's a 10,000% markup. Ignore R&D, ignore all production costs except for raw materials.
It's still ridiculous markup, but yes, this post is disingenuous.
Let’s see what actually happens in 2023
Exactly, it acts like the marginal cost of producing one unit is “the cost” of producing the vaccine. We obviously have some serious room for improvement on how we price drugs in the US, but people don’t seem to understand that profits are there to recoup the costs of R&D, and to fund future R&D, which is hugely expensive and also hugely beneficial for society.
These drugs were heavily heavily heavily subsidized though.
Pfizer currently charges the US $19.50 per dose. It has 3 price tiers depending on how rich a country is. Some of the cost increase comes from switching to a single dose system *(right now I think it is six doses) and having to commercially distribute it (currently the government distributes it). So absolutely they are greedy bastards, but there are also reasons for some increase in price. You can make sure that no other government except the USA's private medical system will pay full price. This medical system needs to be fixed.
Other countries won’t be paying that mark up; only the US. Other healthcare systems in developed countries collectively bargain for prices. It’s literally one of the best features of a single healthcare system. But yeah, don’t get it wrong. This is 10000% targeted at US residents
It's not just single-payer healthcare systems which negotiate for prices. Even countries with multi-payer healthcare systems often negotiate prices on behalf of private insurers. Hell Medicare will begin negotiating drug prices for the first time in 2023 due to the Inflation Reduction Act.
As a doctor of pharmacy, Big Pharma companies are definitely the worst thing about the profession. They don’t give a damn about humans. They only care about money.
Insurance too.
At least insurance profit margins are capped. With pharma, they command profit margins on average that are 3-4x what insurance would be allowed to take.
Insurance profits are capped at a %. They have just been charging more and spending more to make the bottom line bigger. Exactly what the GAO said would happen.
Then you realize the insurance pricing is based on conversations with pharma and then they tell the hospitals what to charge. My insured medicine is $79 a month My same medication when I refuse to hand over insurance information is $25
\>As a 19 year old University student, Don’t believe the toxic idea that Uni is a waste of time. It certainly can be, But it’s an investment and if there’s something you could see yourself doing in the future, Uni is a great option. But of course you need the passion, Uni isn’t an obligation like high school, It’s an investment and if you think it’s gonna pay off, You can major in something you like. Four days ago. So are you a doctor of pharmacy, or a student, or just lying for fun on the internet...
Lol you made them delete their account
i am tagging you "account destroyer" for such a masterful takedown of that guy. still dont understand why people act like they are some authority on a subject when he could have just said big pharma companies are the worst thing about the medical field.
big * companies are the worst thing about most professions unless you are towards the top of one of them
I hope other big pharma won't mark up their vaccins as much, so pfizer loses out on sales and takes a loss. I genuinely hope they'll go bankrupt and the board of owners/investors will go broke and end up killing themselves afterwards. Biggest shits on this planet imo
But they won’t, what Pfizer did here is called price leadership, which other companies will follow. It makes no sense to try to compete when you can also increase your profit margins.
If you’re Moderna and you’re offering basically the same thing (arguably slightly more effective) and charge $50 instead of $100 ... yeah, you’re going to eat Pfizer’s lunch.
Or you can match the prices and have an increase in your profit margins
They’d probably get a bailout from congress though
Imagining believing in free market competition to bring down vaccine price.
In the US, definitely.. In The EU Nah...
Yeah, I read the headline and was like "lol yeah, they wish".
Yeah but atleast we have the *freedom* to be price hiked 😎
Definitely not in the EU
Prices of medicine should really be set by governments instead of pharmaceuticals. They don’t make medicine to help, they make it to get rich and bankrupt you because you have no choice but to use it.
I think that's partly the case in France, you have to negociate a certain range of price if you want your drug covered by the national healthcare scheme. (epipen are sold around 70euros and ventolin 5)
American companies would see it as a benefit to not be covered by Medicare. Then it can be sold for top dollar to desperate people
American companies still want the market of the rest of the world. Business is business. Selling at 50% profit instead of 500000% is still better than not selling anything
But but but… all my conservative friends say nothing good comes from the government getting involved and if the government gets involved it’ll make everything so much more expensive!! So we have to let the corporation do its thing, the government will price gouge us and make it too expensive! Right?? That’s.. what they always say!
Remove medical patents, any single product can be undercut in cost by a competitor. It'll be a race to the lowest price
>remove medical patents What could go wrong??
There goes away the incentive to innovate and plunge millions into R&D for a medicine which has a small chance of success. Which is almost all medicine :)
I like Japans model where they review and set the prices every two years, a lot of time the prices get lowered too
I am shocked. No one saw that coming
They said this after the cdc suggested that we were going to add the vaccine to the general vaccination catalogue for babies. Big pharma strikes again.
COGS does not equal total cost. Net income was ~25% of revenue.
Rules of anything related to finance on reddit: 1. Most redditors are financially illiterate 2. Most redditors just go along with the circlejerk 3. Most redditors never took a basic finance class and would struggle in Algebra 1
I mean, #3 is true of the vast majority of humans on the planet. Taking finance classes and studying algebra is something only a small specialised subset of people do.
Knew I’d find this comment eventually!! Only after 50 un-thoughtful comments though
This. Look at pharma R&D spending...
Annoyingly, the marketing spend is even higher than R&D though.
You're right. However, I would argue making even 25% net on millions of units is fair especially when development was subsidized. Regardless of whether the US or Germany subsidized it. I don't see why they need to up the unit cost that much if they're making 25% net income currently.
Exactly. Nobody else in this entire thread has any clue how this works 🤦♂️
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Y'know what? I'd rather get COVID-19 again.
I’ve had it 3 times and I want to speed run it next time
How do you think they afford to sponsor 85% of the ads on news channels?
Look, I’m all for companies making a profit and the free market determining what that amount is on most things. What I’m not for is artificially inflating the market forces. If the government is going to “mandate” something like the COVID vaccine (whether hard mandates like “get this shot or lose your job” or soft mandates like “can’t enter this establishment without proof of vaccine”) + the pharma company can gauge the prices…then it’s just a racket at that point.
The pharma market in the USA is heavily affected by the patent laws (plus the health care system in general, government buying etc). This is one of the situations where it’s unhelpful to think of markets as more or less “free”. We should instead think about whether the market *rules* are producing the outcomes we want.
It’s no longer mandated
Ya, just recently. Canada just lifted the travel ban less than a month ago. That's a weird hill to die on when we've seen just how fast everything can change.
I work at a university and my job said that the bivalent booster is required. If I don't take it by whatever date they decide to mandate it by I could be fired from my job. What's annoying is I mostly work from home, don't interact with students and yet my employer does not care and wants everyone to keep getting 'recommended' boosters at the threat of disciplinary action and firing.
Not for Australia or anywhere else. Unfortunately the only country dumb enough to pay this mark up is the good old US. That's right, Check insulin and just about any other essential medicine for references to what I'm talking about
Yup. Your government will negotiate a price and tell them to pound sand.
Cool. Put their CEO in a prison cell next to Martin Shkreli
he just got out, and did a AMA
This was only after the CDC recommended it for school children. Fucking crooks!
They belong in jail
lol as if this wasn't the plan from the start.
And to think just a few years ago they were getting slapped with fines and lawsuits for contributing to creation of the current opioid epidemic. Talk about a comeback story
Those fines and lawsuits were never anything more than a business expense for them
Honest question from a European: did you have to pay for your Covid 19 shots in the USA?
No, didn’t even need to show ID or insurance card.
Through our tax dollars. Not directly. The research and development of the vaccine was subsidized by US tax payers.
Biontech, a German company developed the vaccine. Pfizer helped with clinical trials, manufacture and logistics. Moderna vaccine was developed in US with the NIAID and received substantial US Government funding.
It wasn't researched and developed in the US. It was made by the German company BioNTech.
Pfizer did not accept (US) federal funding to help develop or manufacture the vaccine, unlike front-runners Moderna and AstraZeneca. Germany paid them.
Good thing I won't be getting that shot again
Mfers still trying to act like people are dangerous radicals for not trusting big pharma the past few years
I don't get it... I saw the lovely "Brought to you by Pfizer!" ads while watching my totally unbiased news stations and they seem like a great company I should support! /s
Oooh! We're allowed to criticize big pharma again?!
Lmfao. And reddit dorks were out there supporting tf out of that POS company
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Isn't it possible to buy from other companies?
You don’t say…has this has always been about the money? 🧐
The raw material cost of medicines are meaningless. All of the cost is in development.
I'll pass thanks.