1y ago

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 Dr. Lucky Tran :verified: (@luckytran@med-mastodon.com)

Attached: 2 images 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.

294 comments

my dad is refusing to take vaccines because he thinks taking it will automatically make him vote dem because of nano-machine in them.
he also thinks vaccines are kind of HRT.
anyways how's your day?
- sorry for your loss
  
  | ||
  || |_
- I hope you are an adult and no longer live with your parents.
  If that is the case remember this. If you cannot have pleasant encounters with him, you are under no obligation to have them at all.
  
  No obligation to keep seeing them, would be kind of hard not to have parents 😛
- Ah so that explains my D cups
  
  It's all that government big pharma stuff that have given me moobs, things like:
  Covid-19 vaccines;
  Fluoride in toothpaste and tapwater;
  Chemtrails;
  a horrendous diet and little exercise;
  pride flags
  
  RIP your inbox.
- Block his router of the content
- I watched birds are not real Ted talk the other day, I think it was awesome to give a perspective on the conspiracy stuff and how people run with it.
  If it flies, it spies. 🐣
- Sorry you are going through that. Same thing happened to me, it really sucks :(
- you should introduce him to the library
  
  Gives a whole new meaning to the term "parental controls."
- Is your father a senator?
  Nano machines son
- If you have some disposable cash and you're running into the "watch this video about antivax stuff". I recently discovered Kagi's summarizer works on as many YouTube videos as you want (seemingly by processing the audio itself).
  It's been a bit since I've received a video like that, but I think it'll be a huge time saver for the next one... Or the next similar one...

While I'm sure there is a crazy markup, it's important to note the cost to produce - as in manufacture - does not include the cost of drug discovery, which is extremely expensive and involves a good amount of risk over a long period of time.
You can't just compare the cost of discovering a new drug vs. cost of producing a generic without any research like that.
- 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.
  
  Pfizer COVID vaccine wasn't researched or developed by them. It was developed by the German BioNTech.
  Still, bringing it to market at the required volumes requires extreme amounts of capital, there's a reason no one can enter the club.
  
  I like Lemmy for exactly this - whenever someone incorrect makes a statement they're factchecked.
  Thank you kind person for finding and sharing that source.
  
  Most excellent fact checking 👍
- R&D on drugs is insanely expensive, but the protections put in place with the pricing are also a bit absurd. Most drug companies will lock down the formula for a period of time and price the drug aggressively for a short time (like a few years) and then open the formula up to generics who buy it and sell the same damn thing for a fraction of the cost.
  For clarity I’m agreeing with you that the price is largely due to non-manufacturing costs and the article is misleading as a result, but I also wanted to say that the whole industry is a testament to capital over humanity.
- Fuck off with the big pharma apologetics.
  Boo hoo the corporation got millions in taxpayer money to develop a vaccine and now they have to profit off of it. I feel so bad for them.
  This is subtle astroturfing.
  
  By that same logic: it costs a couple of cents to burn a dvd or to transfer a few gigabytes, yet games costs $60.
  All the commenter above you is saying is don't mix up the cost to develop with the cost to mass produce,
  
  Guess this comment of mine will also get deleted but here goes nothing.
  The article is about antiviral medicine, not a vaccine. So you are getting angry at the wrong thing.
  
  Are we talking about the vaccine here? Sounds like a post-exposure drug to me
- That's just an excuse because many drugs are sold at prices much lower what they are sold in the US. They are not selling them at loss in other countries.
  
  Definitely not at a loss to produce no, but maybe a loss overall.
  My bet is that the US subsidizes R&D by paying obscene amounts for the drugs and the EU and others just serve as extra income
- I don't think it takes 1.4k to move anything anywhere.
- Yes we can. It’s just doesn’t give a good faith assessment of the situation. And why would I want to do that if it’s counter to my rigid world view? sigh better add an /s
- It costs $13 to produce paxlovid…
  Experts at Harvard University have estimated that the cost of producing a five-day course of nirmatrelvir-ritonavir is $13.
  https://www.commondreams.org/newswire/pfizer-spikes-paxlovid-prices-to-100-times-cost-of-production

Intellectual property is a scam. A commonly heard defense of intellectual property is that it is needed for companies to fund their R&D. However pharmaceutical companies typically spent a lot more money on marketing & sales than they do on R&D. Big Pharma spending money on marketing and sales is harmful to our health. Apparently it's a lot more lucrative to get people drugged up on painkillers or whatever than to discover new medicine. If we didn't have intellectual property then we would have competition resulting in the lowest possible medicine prices. Companies would have no money for marketing so medicine would be judged on their actual properties, only the best would be given to patients, not the best marketed, but best health-wise. Companies would have no money for R&D either, but the government could fund R&D We shouldn't blame the players, we created a system that produces these bad actors. Let's change the system so that these bad actors couldn't exist. Intellectual property is a international problem, join the pirate party of your country and let's make it happen!
- AFAIK some US agency did R&D for COVID, they just ~~bribed~~ sponsored Right People

The eu:
€20 take it or leave it
- Scandinavian countries:
  Free, take it or leave it
  
  I don't think he meant to the consumer. EU countries can negotiate for the price with pharmaceutical companies, so they can lower the price.
  In the US insurance companies can try to negotiate, but their weight is quite low, and the federal government (medicaid, medicare) is forbidden by law to negotiate. Whichever price pharma sets, it's that.
  
  United States countries:
  I guess I'll die then

From the bottom of my heart, fuck you Pfizer. I have had Covid twice, had my blood oxygen drop as low as 79, and I would still rather die a miserable covid death than suffer the injustice of being greed raped by the absolute worst caricature of capitalist pigs that actually came to life. I hope that money makes your board members miserable and can't do much to treat the uncurable, flesh eating disease your evil pig carcasses should be justifiably riddled with by karma, leaving your kids to donate your disgustingly afforded estate to charity to cleanse themselves of the nasty aftertaste of human suffering, the faint stink of people who are trying to take paxlovid and recover from a major virus in the rain and vulnerable cold because they can't afford both rent and medicine, after your death. Burn in hell, you uncaring scum.
EDIT: I realize this is a lot of vitrol to throw out into the universe, but they likely won’t ever see this on Lemmy, and to make matters worse they clearly won’t care anyway. It's just my own version of catharsis, I guess
- Much better strategy: you take the medicine... survive... and refuse to pay in protest. Sure, you might get sued for non-payment of bills... then a bunch of people can fight a class action lawsuit against pfizer.
  
  and they lose $13. its a no win situation :/
- had my blood oxygen drop as low as 79
  Oh, my aunt's husband was in this situation. And they live in Armenia, where normal Covid treatment was, is and will be virtually nonexistent.
  He's thankfully alive and didn't lose any of his wits.
- I get the anger. We really need to fully socialize these medical development centers. But on the other hand, they did most of the work. They didn't have to.
  
  I'm sure the research was publicly funded, and the profit will be private as is tradition.
  
  Yep, that Pfizer for you, using taxpayer money to R&D drugs they will use to price gouge the public who paid for it, out of the kindness of their hearts.
  
  They didn't do most of the work. Not even close.

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.
- 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.
- That is almost always the case. Pharma companies are mostly just advertising firms
- 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.

Paxlovid kept me alive when I had COVID. This makes me really upset. People will actually die without this.
- If you don't mind my asking, how much did you pay when you used it?
  
  Mine was free.

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.

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.
  
  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.
- 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!"?
- 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.

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! 😉

The amount of Pfizer boot lickers here is astounding
- Bots and shills.
  
  Bots and shills.
  Wish the admins could do something about them (bots at least).
  It's like someone urinating in the swimming pool, so that nobody else wants to swim in it.
- You have to consider all the R&D they put into it.
  (Didn't the government pay for most of that?)
  
  Right?
  In a just world, "the people" would see this pricing, realize that they were the ones who paid for the development of it, and simply seize the company.
  Whether that took the form of government litigation to force the company to offer this at a reasonable price, or simply a mob of people forcing the company's hand or else they burn it to the ground, either way, there needs to be a stick of fear to go along with the carrot of profit.
  I'm not saying they should make no profit, but this is ridiculous.
  
  Their R&D was releasing it to the public.

Seriously, people are acting like this is new. There is no sense in shaming them we've had it brought to the mainstream by people like Martin Skhreli and nothing has been done. Martin Skhreli himself is only in jail because of his ponzi schemes, a.k.a. screwing other rich people out of their money. The only reason Pfizer was praised was because it was needed in a time of need and because they hired plenty of lobbyists.
- Ive accepted this behavior as typical and standard issue human nature.
  That is why i am mot having kids, seeing that extinction is the best future for humans. Evolution puts any other intelligence in the universe at risk.

I was given (free) Paxlovid when I finally contracted covid this year. We need laws regulating price increases. If you can't demonstrate that your costs for a product or service went up, you can't increase by more than x%. I don't know how you do this without encouraging higher introductory prices because it's not a problem that I've thought about in depth, but something like this needs to happen with further consideration.
Another thing I'd like to see is robber barons getting prosecuted for crimes against humanity, but that's not realistic.
- Biden took the first steps towards combating this in the US with the Inflation Reduction Act: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/03/15/hhs-releases-initial-guidance-historic-medicare-drug-price-negotiation-program-price-applicability-year-2026.html
  Medicare is now able to negotiate with drug companies on drug prices. Now we just need to bring it home by electing enough politicians (that are open to the idea of course ... so Democrats and likely more progressive Democrats), that a Medicare for all option is also added.
- Yeah, that doesn't really work. Because they will always find a way to make costs go up, and then demonstrate it. Auditing such things would benearly impossible. The only real solution is for certain industries to be nonprofits. Healthcare really shouldn't be about profit, it should ge about care.
- Just get rid of copyright, let the person who can create your product the cheapest make money off it
  Or would that be too capitalist for the US
  
  Drugs aren't protected by copyright. They're protected by patents.
  In either case that would be an extreme move and I would not support getting rid of patents or copyright as they're genuinely useful concepts.
  Copyright in particular doesn't just protect the money hungry. Lemmy, Linux, and many other open source projects are protected from those who would prefer to use their source code to make a closed source proprietary application and contribute nothing back.
  
  I think you're thinking of patents rather than copyright. I was about to ask something snarky like "without the ability to patent their discoveries what would cause these drug companies to pay for r&d up front?" but honestly, this one was paid for by government grants anyway and that's really where my problem comes in. We seem to have developed this amazing worst of both worlds where the public bears all the up front expense of r&d and then the government just gives away what we bought for ourselves so that they can raise the price to 100x what the medication actually costs.
  
  So you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating and testing a new drug to cure something. Then another company can come along and undercut you since they didn't spend the upfront money. And now you go bankrupt? How is that fair? I'm not saying Big Pharma isn't an issue but as always, the solution is somewhere in the middle.

13$ to produce including all the R&D behind it?
I'm not a fan of big pharma, quite the contrary, but I'd be curious to know where this number comes from...
- I bet they got a lot of grants and other funding. They aren't disclosing their costs so you can assume it's less that you imagine.
- As if they'll lower the price once they've recouped the R&D costs ten times over.
- Who paid for the R&D?
  
  That would be the us government soooo.... The citizens of the usa

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.

And who is in charge of making sure this kind of immoral illegal thing doesn't happen? People who are still somehow allowed to collect kickbacks in exchange for looking the other way.
- 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.
  
  Wasn't COVID research funded by taxpayers under form of grants/emergency funds to pharma companies during the pandemic?
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  Even if R&D cost $100m for this, they'd still only need to sell roughly 80000 doses to make their money back.
  
  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.

Ok who let Martin shkreli out of jail?
- I think he was released last year.

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.
  
  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.
  
  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

That's called freedom! Go to Russia if you don't like it! /s
- Literally

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.

Isn't it just this expensive because the government can't negotiate prices? So the insurances will pay a normal price but when the government is paying it'll cost more
- That's Medicare that you're thinking of, and they can now negotiate prices. The big one is EpiPen-type products.
- No, it’s expensive because the value it provides.
  They’re positioning it based on the length of hospital stay it prevents. In that perspective, this is an absolute bargain. For the most part, they’re selling insurance that $1.4k is far cheaper than even one additional night in the hospital. Insurance is willing to pay because it saves them loads of money. For uninsured and underinsured, it sounds like they’re basically not charging.
  
  Only point I'd add is drugs cost more than they are to produce because of R&D costs, which must be recuperated. If costs are high, and volume is low, it means larger markup over the cost to manufacture.

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.

They can treat deez nuts

This is the nature of providers vs insurers in the negotiation war. And those without insurance are the losers of this war.
- Or you live in a civilized nation with universal health care lol
  I can't even fathom thinking like you do, fucking god what a horrible nation you live in
  
  It's not a matter of thinking like that. It's the truth of what happens. I didn't say I'm ok with the system.

Shocked Pikachu Face

Pfizers R&D budget is 11 billion per year. That money comes from products from the market.
- They made 100 billion in profit and spent 11 on research. They can afford to sell things much much cheaper and still have both profits and research money.
  
  But mah greed!!
  
  Never mind all the government subsidy which of course comes from the tax pot
  
  Their ceo will get fired for transforming a publicly traded company into a welfare organization. If you don’t like that, change our economic system. I would be on board as the same system kills people and environment.
- Average retail net margins (profit margin as share of revenue) are about 3% on a good year. Pfizer's was something like 30% last year. They cleared 100 billion in revenue, meaning 30 billion in straight profit (the 11 billion came out of the other 60-odd percent, because it's not an even 30). In one year, they made almost enough money to buy Twitter. They made enough profit to cover Kansas and Oklahoma's entire 2022 FY budgets. I'm trying to drive home the absolute ridiculous enormity of those profits, because it's not easy to really grasp. The point is, it's not like they don't have a lot of room to breathe.
  Some other things to consider:
  -Of that 11 billion, how much is government funding and grants? IIRC, Uncle Sam pays for the development of a whole lot of what ends up being private products in healthcare.
  -Of their 60-odd billion in costs, how much was advertising? Look, I know you gotta sell to make money, but advertising to patients is annoying, expensive, and (in terms of medical ethics) icky. It's not like they can't save some money there to do R&D.
  The point is: Pfizer could easily cut their prices on life-saving medicine and still have tidy profits.
  
  All your questions are good questions that can easily be answered. None of those are valid to justify novel drugs pricing at production costs.
- Quoting one figure is pretty useless to make a point as it exists only as "A big number" with nothing to compare it to.
  Since you know their financials enough to quote one figure here:
  What is their annual revenue?
  What is their annual profit?
  
  They're a publicly traded company. All that info is published in their annual financial report
  
  Like quoting the production cost without any evidence or considering any R&D costs? I did not start the bullshit.
- 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.
  
  The clinical trials are the most costly and most risky part of development.

Isn't Pfizer going to offer Paxlovid free of charge till 2028 if your uninsured or underinsured?
https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/pfizer-amends-us-government-paxlovid-supply-agreement-and
Who would be the people affected by this?
- Anyone with insurance. If they're charging your insurance provider $1,400, then you'll either see that cost passed directly on to you when you get COVID, or see it as an increase in everyone's monthly insurance cost as they spread out what they're paying across their whole customer base. The money's got to come from somewhere. Granted, insurance companies will likely negotiate on the price and not pay that full amount, but it's not exactly a good-faith negotiation if their starting offer is a 10,000% markup.
  Also, 2028 is less than 5 years away and COVID is set to be a persistent staple of society like the yearly flu indefinitely. They're basically saying that anyone who gets it while committing the heinous crime of being poor is SOL, even though it costs them almost nothing to produce and was developed using our tax dollars to start with.
- Are they going to claim that as a $13 write off or a $1400 write off?
- Is this a serious question?

The left and right both hate Big Pharma, especially over the pandemic response.
- The difference is the left hate them because they profit by exploiting the misfortune of I'll people and essentially hold their lives to ransom.
  The right hate them because they use actual science instead of "alternative facts"

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?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bourla
- credited with helping the development of Improvac, which eradicates boar taint
  
  Doesn't...doesn't that...if an animal doesn't have taint, doesn't that make it a bird?

For muh profit$.

Give it a couple of days, the Pfizer CEO will be telling everyone how desperately important it is that they get vaccinated.
Because he needs more money, obviously.
- This is treatment, not the vaccine
  
  My point still applies.

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.

ahh now it makes more sense why governments let it turn into an endemic virus

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.
  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.

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?

Just don't take the damn Vax. We now know that people who never got vaxed have better immunity than those who did. Studies prove it
So no point getting this crap just to make Pfizer rich

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.

$1400 is ridiculous but this post is ridiculous too. Hey OP, I want a vaccine to cure cancer. It’ll cost $13 to produce. Make it for me, test it, go through the approval process and I’ll sell it for $30. P.S. If I get sued, that’s on you too.

I've been saying for years that universal healthcare won't solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control. If they can regulate medical related industries, such as pharma, the need for universal healthcare can be reduced or eliminated. As an added bonus, it would help keep the cost (ie. taxes) for universal healthcare a lot lower. This is pretty common for pharma companies to make insane profits like this, and it's extremely unethical.
- universal healthcare won't solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control.
  But universal healthcare would get prices under control. You're thinking completely backwards.
- universal healthcare won't solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control.
  But universal healthcare would get prices under control. You're thinking completely backwards.

Before I bought Pfizer stock, this type of news would upset me.

I think the COVID treatments probably create more problems health wise than the disease. At least for younger healthier individuals. After getting the first two immunizations my wife developed pots which she didn't have before.
Edit: It's interesting that people are down voting me for my personal experience with the vaccine. I don't fault them because we are all different and experienced the vaccine differently but since there was little to no clinical testing and the people who received the vaccine were the test subjects I don't understand why people would be so defensive about it. I also understand if people don't believe me and that's ok too.
- People are down voting you because your singular personal experience cannot possibly be extrapolated to the entire population who took the vaccine. No one is saying you're lying, or trying to delegitimize your wife's condition (I'm sorry that happened to her), but you don't cite any support for your opening statement
  I think the COVID treatments probably create more problems health wise than the disease
  other than your wife's ailment.
  
  I was just stating what happened in my family and due to that my perception on the vaccine is changed compared to before we had them. Unfortunately we may not know for quite some time or at all. NIH will probably never release statistics to gather data on since the vaccine was pushed by every government in the world.

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