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.
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.
But mah greed!!
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.
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.
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.
From the passage I already quoted:
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.
That is not true. Small biotech usually cannot effort late stage development. They either just get buyed by big pharma. Or they licence the lead compound to big pharma and get royalties. Very few exemptions to this.
Edit: the link you provide cites this FT article as a source for this claim. However the article is about M&A and supports my point.
I’ll assume you know more about this than I do despite the lack of any citation.
I refuse to believe there’s an ethically acceptable business justification for this ridiculous markup.
The entire healthcare industry in the US is built on a foundation of corporate greed. This is just one obvious example.
At least they loose exclusivity after 15 -20 years and generics are usually much cheaper.
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.
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.
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.
Sorry, I think i was grumpy that morning and a little more attack oriented then my usually aggressive self.
I hear you and I sympathize.
That is a fact. 80 years of screaming “FREEDOOOOM!!!” was a goddamn baldfaced lie. Glad the world is seeing it finally.
“The world is seeing it”? Did you think the world didn’t see it?
It’s the US that needs to see it.
The world used to think the US was cool. Mainstream public opinion changed roughly around the bush (W) era.
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.
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
Drug research is overwhelmingly publicly funded. Private R&D is a PR myth we were fed to justify high prices.
I never said wasn’t. What I said is still true.
No. Those two statements don’t go together like that. They aren’t making big new drugs. At most they are looking for ways to adjust the formula so they can extend patents. There is no amount of profit that makes them willing to do more R&D.
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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?
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AFAIK some US agency did R&D for COVID, they just
bribedsponsored Right PeopleThey don’t do R&D; the university system does and they take the research, often without pay.
There is some level of R&D they do to productize it, manufacturability and scaling. And running drug safety trials cannot be cheap, especially the liability insurance.
That all said, I think it’s criminal that the university labs pay so little. PhD students barely make over $40k, set by the NIH. Not adjusted for CoL either.
I think I have more of an issue with the for-profit nature of pharma companies. Shareholders shouldn’t be involved in medicine.
Who wants unpaid internships!
I’m always curious about the actual numbers. Here’s their R&D budget by year:
And their overall revenue:
In 2020, their revenue was about $40B on $8.5B in R&D cost. They had a huge revenue increase the last few years, with 2022 being $100B, but R&D only increased to about $11B.
So they do have R&D, but it’s not that big compared to the money they’re bringing in. Their net income has increased substantially, as well.
In addition to that, I’ve heard that a large portion of that R&D spending is on iterating drugs they already own so that when the patent runs out they can patent a new version and lobby the old one to be made obsolete so generics can’t be made.
Thank you for finding the numbers
In the bio industries R&D has almost exclusively become just the D. We like to think that there are a bunch of scientists doing lifelong, painstaking research to develop new drugs or treatments within the labs at Pfizer, Merk, Lilly, or whatever, but a significant portion of the research is done at small independent or school funded labs.
Once one of those small labs creates a decent treatment that will likely pass government testing, a large corp will buy it and say “We just made this brand new thing!”. Really though, their R&D budget is spent on acquisition, production, supply chain development, and marketing.
Working in R&D in a few different positions in my career and this is absolutely the case. Hell some of them you could equate to white label SaaS products. Using research from universities putting it in a neat package and selling it.
The corporate bio industry is so fucked up I can’t even begin to describe it. I tell my friends and family stories, but I sound like an insane person to them. The scale at which money is thrown around is just too large for most people to imagine.
Like this: imagine a worker that makes less than $35k per year processes, and is soley responsible for $20M in products, per month. Product that people all around the world not only use, but ingest. Now imagine that that one worker is the only one in the world who knows how that product is processed. That’s how bio manufacturers work.
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
The woman who got the nobel prize for the mRNA research that led to the Pfizer vaccine did a lot of it while employed at Pennsylvania University before they fired her because they didn’t see the research leading to making them money. Then she moved on to Biontech where she continued the research.
I’m not sure how much was done at the university but it was probably not insignificant and then biontech got lucky and snapped it up for basically free.
That is nauseating
They can treat deez nuts
ahh now it makes more sense why governments let it turn into an endemic virus
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changes need to happen badly
Torches would burn the bodies too much. You need a proper grill.
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.
Tax them too: https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/
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 :/
If your scenario had more molotov cocktails, i think there’d be a winning 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.
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.
I’m sure the research was publicly funded, and the profit will be private as is tradition.
They didn’t do most of the work. Not even close.
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.
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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.
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.
Most excellent fact checking 👍
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.
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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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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?
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
I don’t think it takes 1.4k to move anything anywhere.
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
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,
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.
…and the video game industry makes more money than any other entertainment industry. Yes, these things should cost more than just their production cost, but there is currently an obscene amount of money being made by the people at the top of these industries - y’know, the ones whose main role in making and distributing the product is just already being obscenely wealthy. And while I don’t really care if AAA games are overpriced if they’re only $60, I do care if life-saving meds are being held for ransom.
Do y’all need reminded that insulin, a life-or-death drug that’s been around since the fucking 1920s, only costs at most $10 to make but currently retails for up to $300 a vial? It does not fucking matter whether or not this particular treatment should cost $13 or $90, the markup on any life saving drug being over 1,000% is blatant price gauging at the expense of human life, and the fact that the pharmaceutical industry does this all the time is common fucking knowledge. Anything approaching a defense of this shit either is in fact astroturfing or is so braindead as to call it a necessity that a publicly traded company demand the sick either choose debt or the grave.
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.
Reading comprehension is tough I know. I indeed believe essential services including medical research should be government run.
But since that is not the case right now you can’t expect companies to operate on a non profit basis. If stating obvious facts is simping then I guess you can call me a simp.
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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.
Game DVDs are not lifesaving drugs.
Are we talking about the vaccine here? Sounds like a post-exposure drug to me
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.
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Paxlovid is not a COVID vaccine, it’s an antiviral.
Smh just use windows defender people
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.
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.
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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?
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. 🐣
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
But they look like sweets :/
Eating the frigging pride flags are making the frogs gay!
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.
Technically you could do it again but it’s even less recommended than the original
RIP your inbox.
I’ll show my man boobs to anyone who wants to see them. Usually people tell me to stop showing them and say things like “gross” and call me bear tits but that hasn’t stopped me from whipping them out on every occasion and non occasion
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 😛
The “them” in that sentence refers to “encounters” not “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?
Nope they chose to get a child. You dont have to Do anything for them.
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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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…
you should introduce him to the library
Gives a whole new meaning to the term “parental controls.”
Sorry you are going through that. Same thing happened to me, it really sucks :(
sorry for your loss
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What is this??
TIL! Thank you for the useful link.
Is your father a senator?
Nano machines son
Block his router of the content
