Some people are saying that this is notable because Pfizer has a financial incentive to keep vaccine mandates.
That is not true. Pfizer is going to be making a lot more money from their COVID treatments than from the vaccine.
That is not true. Pfizer is going to be making a lot more money from their COVID treatments than from the vaccine.
Anyway, he may also well be thinking that the best policy is to have a history of assessments that turn out to be correct in hindsight. "Drop restrictions when the number of infections declines" is at least plausible.
It will soon be Pfizer's financial benefit to have as many infections as possible.
Also you can give the medicine to already vaccinated people that also have serious cases. So you still can sell it in a lower capacity. Also you can sell both vaccines and medicine to states in large batches which is great.
It's a big golden goose for the pharma industry.. let's never forget that.
Right now this isn't the case because there aren't enough to go around, but this is the premise of the trials, so this is how they will be sold.
People also get COVID more than once.
Now, I can imagine that not _all_ cases will be given the antiviral automatically. If you're a vaccinated 18 year old with no comorbidities, say, that is probably not going to be cost-effective (though, well, we'll see what happens with long covid); the chances of you landing in hospital are just very low. But if you're an overweight unvaccinated 60 year old, there's quite a good chance of you turning into a hideously expensive ICU case, and it probably makes sense to provide the treatment.
Can you stop complaining for one second about the price and acknowledge that it is amazing that they invented it?
It was invented for a cat coronavirus in 2018.
I'm not suggesting this is true, but it would need to be 100x-400x more profitable, and that includes cost to make and store as well as the price is charged.
Maybe making mRNA vaccines costs much more than a simpler molecule like Paxlovid [0], and hospitals generally seem to charge much more than the over the counter price for everything. You've seen horror stories about $25 aspirin [1] which is easily 400x more expensive than the penny per pill cost of 500 tablets in a $5 bottle [2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirmatrelvir
[1] https://www.healthcarefinancenews.com/blog/why-aspirin-taken...
[2] https://amazon.com/Basic-Care-Aspirin-Regular-Strength/dp/B0...
The implications of this phenomenon on Pfizer's business model are enormous. Pfizer & others would be foolish to not pay close attention to this and figure out a way to exploit it for further gains.
My trust in the system has been thoroughly shattered, I've gone from looking down at anti-vaxxers with disdain from before the pandemic- to now being labelled as part of that crowd because I am anti mandates. The whole timing of that terminology in and of itself is interesting as well- but that's probably going too deep down the rabbit hole.
The big question for this vaccine is why we rewarded this fully taxpayer-funded development and testing with a patent monopoly.
Well this is the first major global pandemic in a century, so that would stand to reason, no? Most of the world received the polio vaccine within a few years of its discovery btw
If you're saying it's false you should please post a source or at least some kind of napkin calculation. It's not intuitive at all. Otherwise it just sounds like you're beating the already dead "pharma companies sole motivation is money" horse.
The cost of a generic Paxlovid course of treatment is around 40$. The cost of treatment, negotiated down by the government (and thus higher for other parties) is around 600$. So the marginal profit from a course of treatment of Paxlovid is around 540$.
On the other hand, a vaccine dose costs 20$, and it is very difficult to manufacture. A reasonable estimate of profit is 10$ per dose. This is an overestimate, because Pfizer has to share a sizeable portion of the Profit with BioNTech and other companies.
Paxlovid is indicated to be taken as early as possible - and priced so that it makes financial sense for insurance companies to pay for it to avoid the cost of hospitalization. Therefore we can expect a sizeable proportion of people with COVID symptoms to take it.
Paxlovid reduces the symptomatic illness period, so there is also a very strong incentive for individuals to take it as it allows them to be less sick. For the less fortunate, it also means less sick days to take, which may be crucial to make ends meet.
If we're expecting everyone to take a vaccine dose every six months (which we all know will never happen), that's 20$/person.year from the vaccine.
If we expect everyone to have COVID symptoms every year (which is almost certainly an underestimate), at 540$/person.year, we only need to have a 3.7% take rate for Paxlovid in order for it to generate more profit than everyone taking two doses every year (which, again, will never even come close to happening).
So as long as 3.7% of the population takes one Paxlovid course of treatment every year, Pfizer will make more profit from Paxlovid than the vaccine.
So it is trivially true that widespread COVID infection (and low vaccination numbers) is going to be Pfizer's financial incentive.
Source? I'm seeing estimates closer to 20-35B when I google "Paxlovid revenue"
> the treatment of mild-to-moderate coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in adults and pediatric patients with positive results of direct SARS-CoV-2 testing, and who are at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death
It's not that everyone with a Covid infection will get the drug. That number should be far lower than 3.7% of the population, most of which will either be asymptomatic or likely won't require hospitalization due to low risk. I wonder what that means for your calculation.
(1) https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi...
Not if the vaccines don't work!
My point is that if we are going to act like everything they say is solely profit motivated, they should still support mandates.