So you are asserting they don't want to benefit from both?
Can we please stop trying to rationalize an irrational market. There is no reason to believe that the age of the drug has anything to do with it's profitability.
Also, it might be that some or all of the insulins are just naturally costly to manufacture, so that when competition is not prevented by patents, the price stays high. (This would be the case for example if the insulin must be extracted from pigs and if each pig yields only a few doses of insulin.) That doesn't contradict the fact that many drugs still under patent sell for 100s of times their cost of manufacture, then when the patent expires the sell price drops to close to the cost of manufacture.
I get that it makes sense as a narrative device to discredit Merck ("big pharma has acted against our interest in the past, so they are acting against our interest here"), but it does not make sense from Merck's point of view.
it's not like riverblindness is a first-world problem you can charge people more money for treating
I'm no proponent of big pharma, and it's possible executives at Merck convened and decided to bet it all on drug X and at the same time not to profit from ivermectin. I think it's very unlikely, because it doesn't make sense.
It only makes sense in a comic world where everything is black and white and the motive of the bad guy solves the mystery.
I'm very confused that Bret, who I respect, is falling for this simplistic ad-hominem argument.
It's against their financial incentive to have ivermectin, an out-of-patent drug, be authorized for treatment of covid. See https://twitter.com/BretWeinstein/status/1402647948371005441...
[1] https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/emerge...
Or are you saying Merck couldn't go for several EUAs for Covid at the same time?
Same thing for the mRNA vaccines. They're all under EUA. It would've been impossible to get them an EUA if we had found out Ivermectin worked.