Here's a 2019 article that came up in a Google search: Taxpayers funded this HIV research. The government patented it. Now a company profits https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-gilead-sciences-truva...
Of course, the people who worked to commercialize it deserve pay for their work, so the question is exactly how much.
Or an argument against exclusive rights being in private hands.
Subsidies for oil, not so much.
Your bend over backwards justification of greed over human life is rather insane.
Further: omit things like your last sentence from your comments; they hurt your case.
It hurts people more to deny them medical care, and that is what makes it so enraging, I would say reasonably so. Becoming angry at such absurdity is a reasonable response. I toned it down from something much harsher. It is a truly deranged position to advocate for denying access to health care breakthroughs, and then act like that's doing people favors, calling it expanding access when you want to deny it.
It makes little sense to me to advocate an explicitly inhumane action, then say I'm doing an ad hominem when I call it what it is. What do you call an opposing view which happens to be ad hominem to humanity in general? Misanthropic, I guess. Your sibling comment says hey now, I didn't say any of that, after having said all of that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
>You can reasonably argue they they should get more
>Like I said, it is reasonable to argue that the public deserves more return
>it is reasonable to argue that people should receive more benefit for their tax money
That brings us to six. Can I just add that I think a reasonable argument might be made that the public is entitled to a greater benefit from their contribution to drug research? Or is it supposed to be 77 times 7 times?
It certainly has gone off the rails, but I am entitled to defend myself at least as much as you are entitled to tell me to stop. I haven't done anything wrong. I am finished now though
Pardon the snark, but come on. Before you get to the point of throwing insults, take a moment and determine whether I've actually argued for the positions that you believe would make me weird and/or insane. And then don't do it regardless, but definitely don't do it if I've only ever said a very specific thing very precisely and very explicitly.
Just a reminder that on-patent Truvada cost $4,500 for a 30 day supply of a drug that needs to be taken every day.
If the R&D cost (including amortised failures and whatever) for some hypothetical drug is $1B and the manufacturing cost is $100M for 100M doses. The drug should cost about $11 + a reasonable markup in a fully private system.
If the R&D costs are fully funded by taxpayers, it should cost $1 + a reasonable markup.
The public doesn't "get" anything if it still costs $11 (+markup) and a company is allowed to take a 1000% profit margin because they're only risking the $100M for the manufacturing.
As soon as you move into humans you can add another 2 or 3 zeros to your burn rate.
It is not politically feasible for the public sector to fund later stages. The numbers are just too big. Just think of the campaign ads that would run around $200M late stage failure funded by the government.
The reason why mega giant pharma companies exist is because they make enough money and are capitalized enough to withstand multiple $100M failures without going belly up.
Debatable.
> according to these firms' annual reports, 16 percent of revenues was taken as profit, and • 31 percent went for marketing and administration. That's nearly three times as much as their R&D spending.
https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketin...
Maybe doctors should be able to send out email blasts to people, but I'm guessing that's not HIPAA friendly. Also, I've had online ads aimed at oncologists served to me for different medications.
I think the fact that there are both TV ads for cancer medications and online ads aimed at oncologists says a lot about the fact that a ton of doctor's aren't keeping up with what's new, even in something as critical and limited in scope as specific cancers are.
Their only contribution was that they donated the actual pills used in the trials - in other words, the unit price of 30 pills per person for the duration of the trial.
PrEP has been pure, risk-free profit for Gilead.
I just want to point out that the government has assumed the role of telling everyone how to take risks for its economy, and literally all you have to do is do that, successfully, and it will privilege your rewards by reducing risk on profits or reducing taxes
This is not controversial when you look at the state’s role in these outcomes
And even then it's a dishonest claim. Half of that $1.1 billion is the amount of money they paid to acquire another biotech company in a firesale. It's beyond disingenuous for them to claim all of that towards the amount they spent developing Truvada, since they received way more assets in that sale than just the patent for one drug.
You are quoting a corporate press release that was written in response to an editorial criticizing Gilead, which was based on my colleagues' work.
This is a great example of how easy it is to fall for propaganda, because not a single thing in your link refutes what I said! They spent money developing Truvada as a treatment for HIV, then made that money back in record profits for nearly a decade. Only then did clinical trials for PrEP begin, and for those, Gilead donated only the production costs of Truvada (which are minimal). They did not spend any money in actually conducting the trials - which, as pharmaceutical companies are generally very quick to point out - is where most of the costs of bringing a drug to market are.
Gilead is claiming that, when it spent half a billion dollars to acquire a biotech company that went bankrupt, 100% of the money in that transaction should as "R&D related to Truvada". This is preposterous. Neither the SEC nor the IRS would endorse that accounting, which is why you're seeing it in a press release and not their 10-K.
That's a ridiculous claim even when you're talking about the development of Truvada, but that's not even the question at hand. The actual topic is how much was paid for the development of PrEP, which came nearly a decade later, and for which Gilead paid nothing but the per-unit costs of production.
If we’re not willing to question the degree to which big pharma ought to profit off of controlling access to scientific miracles, the least we could do is use taxes to subsidize the cost - “I can’t afford it” should not be a reason to not be on PrEP.
Anyone should be able to walk into a CVS and walk out with 2-1-1 dose, as easily as they’d pick up the morning after pill, or a bottle of aspirin.
Tax shareholders on their gains and rebate customers if the company doesn't adjust the price.