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
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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 😛
You still have them, you just don’t have contact with them.
but then who will take care of them? they were there at my time of need, shouldn’t i also be there?
You sound like you have a good relationship with your parents, many don’t.
You can be there for them when they need you without putting up with the anti-vax ravings you mentioned. It is called setting boundaries.
You do what you think is right but also understand that is not a universal thing for all people.
You sound like you have a good relationship with your parents
not really.
i think it is best to minimize contact but not keep null, since these kind of people are self destructive.
that’s the only reason i stayed , for their health issues.
What about your health? Your mental health in particular.
Your parents raising you is not something you owe them for. You didn’t choose to exist; they chose that for you. Raising you is the bare minimum they can do after making a choice like that. And now that you are older, you can reflect on the manner in which you were raised and decide what your relationship with them needs to look like so you can keep your sanity.
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The “them” in that sentence refers to “encounters” not “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
pride flags
You weren’t supposed to eat them smh
Right, but if I stop now, how am I going to perform my magic flag butthole trick? checkmate
You shove them up your butt, otherwise you can only do it once. Duh.
But they look like sweets :/
Eating the frigging pride flags are making the frogs gay!
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.”
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.
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.
OP didn’t make an incorrect statement though. What they stated was an important part of the equation. I think a lot of people don’t take that type of thing into account and they will read what this post says and assume that Pfizer should be charging $13, or maybe something pretty close like 15 or 20. Clearly 1400 is far far too high, 13 is too low. A reasonable price allows the manufacturer to be successful while not gouging consumers lies somewhere in between, but much much closer to the low end than the high. To me that’s really what the person you are responding to is giving evidence for.
Thank you, this is exactly my point.
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,
I’m going to be unreasonable because I don’t like the ethics behind Pharma companies.
They should eat the loss; their research was healthily subsidised by the taxpayer
I’m personally of the opinion that all medical research should be tax funded. But given our current situation, if you tell these companies to ‘eat the loss’ they will simply stop producing new medicines.
Oh stop. The government should be running the pharaceutical industry then, not private companies.
Stop simping for evil corporations that don’t give a shit about you.
Oh no, whatever will we do if old dudes can’t have 6 different types of boner pills?
Pharma companies spend a majority of their time trying to make new unique drugs, they just fail most of the time. The ones that succeed tend to be ones that are similar to ones that succeeded in the last, which is why you get multiple drugs in the same class, but it’s not all they do. For example, we’ve essentially cured some types of cystic fibrosis, and there’s an effective vaccine for malaria now - all developed in the last 10 years.
I don’t want to pretend that the big pharma companies aren’t evil, but they do have incentives that align with improving human health.
It’s real easy to sit on the sidelines and spew hate. Not much of a life though.
All the commenter above you is saying is don’t mix up the cost to develop with the cost to mass produce,
That cost to develop was likely not borne by Pfizer in the first place.
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.
Game DVDs are not lifesaving drugs.
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
Your bet?
That’s because they’re getting some money back in those countries while they still have a patent, before generic prices make it impossible to recoup the cost. Certainly not as much as they’d like but it’s still not a loss. Those in first world countries subsidize the research- I’m okay with that. It’s like the one way the third world gets a break.
That’s what they make you believe. Why American still pay high prices for insulin? It doesn’t cost that much to produce. It just those companies are paying politicians to keep things in their advantages and give you those excuses.
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Well here you go again when people with no scientific education pull up literature as a gotcha. Thanks for giving me flashbacks to the high times of the pandemic. Sorry for the harsh reply but its posts like this that just funnel into misinformation around this already heavily polarized topic.
To explain, Paxlovid is not a vaccine, it is an actual medicine/treatment. So it was not funded by taxpayers as the article states. Unless there is some other info on how this specific medicine was also funded by taxpayers of course, I am not an expert on research funding. But the article only mentions vaccine research.
That said, I also do not think its a fair price necessarily. But it is true one should not equate production price as a fair price as R&D of drugs have high costs, mostly also because a lot of drug programs fail, making all prior investment to them a loss.
Paxlovid is not a COVID vaccine, it’s an antiviral.
Smh just use windows defender people
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
They have broken the social contract. It’s time to get the largest forks we can find with the largest torches we can.
Eat. The. Rich.
Tax them too: https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/
Torches would burn the bodies too much. You need a proper grill.
changes need to happen badly
Sounds good. In the meantime, I’m going to buy some Pfizer stock for my kids sake.
This comment is loaded with wishful thinking.
That’s optimistic tbh. More like my comment is the result of 2 decades of fighting the good fight only to watch those I’m trying to help dig a deeper hole. Time to tend my little patch of grass, build a sturdy fence, and hope for a renaissance.
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.
Sounds crazy they are but allowed to negotiate?
Is that the same for anything else the government buys? I can’t imagine the army buying 100 tanks and just paying the first price they get?
It’s a constitutional thing, government has to guarantee the companies’ freedom to set the price they want or something totally moronic like that…
In fact it’s the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
In fact it’s the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
Yes! That’s a great start 👌 especially if the negotiator is NOT getting a kickback from Pharma for negotiating a high price
… forbidden by law to negotiate.
Is that true? Is there a legitimate reason why they shouldn’t be able to?
It’s a constitutional thing, government has to guarantee the companies’ freedom to set the price they want or something totally moronic like that…
In fact it’s the first time the government will be able to negotiate with pharmaceutical companies!
How about updating the constitution to solve this specific problem, which is quite significant for the populace? After all, it’s the constitution’s job to serve the people.
That would require a constitutional amendment, which would require being ratified by 38 or more states. Which would require at least 38 states without significant corruption/obstruction, and a population not braindead/brainwashed enough to vote against their own interests.
So the chances of that happening are abysmally low.
United States countries:
I guess I’ll die then
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.
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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.
Who paid for the R&D?
That would be the us government soooo… The citizens of the usa
The government promised to purchase massive quantities of Pfizer manufactured it to guarantee a market, they didn’t directly fund R&D.
The government promised to purchase massive quantities of Pfizer manufactured it to guarantee a market, they didn’t directly fund R&D.
I’ve heard government grants were involved?
Either way, guaranteed funds is still one hell of a profit motive to do the R&D and produce the medicine.
Taxpayers, through the university system
As if they’ll lower the price once they’ve recouped the R&D costs ten times over.
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.
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!
They don’t do R&D; the university system does and they take the research, often without pay.
I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations
AFAIK some US agency did R&D for COVID, they just
bribedsponsored Right People
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.
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.
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.
Copyright needs to go back to 30 years. You have 30 years on a patent to make money off it. If you haven’t already made your money back, and a handsome profit in that time, you should have hired a business manager year 2.
Patents are either 14 or 20 years, depending on type. Copyright is absurdly long, but copyright also doesn’t apply to drugs, inventions, recipes, game rules, mathematical formulae - mostly just creative works.
Ok, 14 to 20 years on patents seems reasonable. I would still set copyright back to 30 years, since as you pointed out, it’s really only affecting the public domain.
I’d be okay with that, but acting like copyright doesn’t exist for a reason or ever do any good… Isn’t helping actually lead to a solution :)
In a world where you can’t protect your IP, how do you have close sourced?
Military tech is the bigger issue
You keep the source code, methods of operation or manufacturing methods private. Companies can already do this. Patents force companies to make their inventions public information (you can access the patent), in exchange for a limited exclusive right to use this technology.
For no trivial things patent legislation is a great benefit. Everyone can access the patent knowledge. For trivial iterative things patents only benefit the patentee who gets the exclusive rights.
Copyright means anything you produce that is easily to copy, you have legal control over how it’s copied and the revenue it may generate. This is for things like art work, books, news stories, code etc. Things that can be copy and pasted or printed.
Copyright is granted when you create the content. There’s no application. It ensures someone can make money from the copy they produce. Less people would write books, if Amazon could print and sell copies without paying the author.
Military tech would be private. Even with our current IP protection system. A hostile power doesn’t care about infringing IP, there’s very little consequence for do this. If you patent military technology, then that info would be public.
Very easily, you compile it.
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.
I was just being lazy and didn’t write patents and trademarks all together
I figured saying copyright would be enough for people to include the whole copyright office
Patents, trademarks and copyrights are three entirely different things. Patents cover products for sale, and give an inventor the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a given time. Trademarks cover branding, and allow the person registering the trademark to prevent anyone else from using it or something a reasonable person could confuse with it indefinitely. Copyright is exclusively for intellectual property and allows the copyright holder to stop anyone from making copies of their work, derivatives of their work or work that is substantially similar to their work.
This is very incorrect except for the very high level. Patents cover systems and methods and devices that are more than mere physical phenomena. Patent owners are granted an exclusive monopoly over the implementation of what the patent issued on (i.e., its eventual claims) that runs up to 20 years from the time of filing. They are an intellectual property right premised in property theory.
Trademarks cover designators of origin. Fundamentally, they are to reduce consumer confusion and are ultimately nothing more than a presumption once granted in favor of the owner in unfair competition disputes. They are also an intellectual property but are premised in totally different theories of law and can apply to literally anything that can be strongly associated with a company, more or less.
Copyright is an intellectual property, yes, but is limited to creative expression fixed in a tangible medium. This is a very short sentence but has some pretty serious depth to it. Copyright is ultimately a very specific type of right to, and this may shock you, copying a thing (fixed in a tangible medium…you do not have copyright on ideas).
That all said, pharma patents and, really, industry as a whole is super fucked and needs serious reimagining in the current era. But some form of IP absolutely is necessary to incentivize and enable drug creation of it is to persist in our free market capitalist economic structure.
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.
It’s fair because it helps people
Medicine is a service
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
Guess they’d be stuck with relying on research grants and finding cheaper ways to combat diseases
No, they would just keep everything trade secret and we’d have no idea how to replicate the medicine.
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
That would not be true if the government funded things.
I really wish we didn’t let Capitalism control vital to our living services.
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?
Yes, for vaccine research. I don’t know if this specifically was covered. Another thing on the list of things we need to know before we get angry.
Much of the research happened long before COVID–at a loss. There’s a reason this miraculous new mDNA vaccine technology appeared out of nowhere just in time for the pandemic: researchers had been working on it for years already, using investments and borrowed money. Government grants just went to finishing the vaccine and scaling up so quickly it was kinda mindboggling. They didn’t just get to stuff the cash in their pockets.
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.
That’s how it is anyway. Drug companies do very, very little hard research.
I would love that.
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.
I think you’re grossly underestimating how much things cost.
1400 * 8000 = 11.200.00, so you’re off by a factor of 10
Edit: Lol, downvoted for a fact
Haha, you got in there before I corrected my typo. The point still stands though! There’s a whole lot of people in the world, 80k doses is fuck all.
Average drug research costs are estimated at between 1-3 billion USD. That’s the average, so some are much more.
And I’d like to know if this stated price is the sticker price. Insurance companies negotiate much less than sticker price, I live in a country with a government drug department that negotiates much lower prices by doing a single contract for the whole country.
Is this that stupid thing where the sticker price is high but no one actually pays that, it’s just to make insurance companies feel like they are negotiating good deals?
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.
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.
That’s called freedom! Go to Russia if you don’t like it! /s
Literally
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.
