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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

$350 a month is already almost as much as we pay in EU. It won't get any cheaper than that. Compounded GLP-1 drugs were an intellectual property theft - and not against some evil megacorporation, but impacting a company that actually already saved millions of lives and has capacity to improve lives of billions of people so much more. It could have been probably justified for a short while because of shortages (a logic of "as long as you are unable to satisfy our demand, we will copycat your product ourselves" is cynical, but with some moral stretch, acceptable), but not anymore.

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It is $500 a month after the first month, as El Lilly charges $350 during the first month for a starter dosage.

500 US$ = 442 euro. Does that include the higher doses? Than it is actually cheaper than in Europe.

15mg Zepbound is 489 euro in Germany for a month (4 shots).

$499 per month "[f]or the Zepbound 5 mg, 7.5 mg, and 10 mg vial" [1]. So, I don't know how much they charge for 15 mg.

[1] https://zepbound.lilly.com/coverage-savings

You wouldn’t download an injection that makes you not fat…

I doubt you will find many here who agree with your usage of “theft” here.

Similar prices in AU$ here in Australia too. So around AU$300 to AU$400 for a months supply, or thereabouts. It varies - just going off my experience.

Hopefully the market will correct the pricing situation once the goldrush calms down.

Even my local pharmacist ranted about what a rort it is last time I asked LOL

It's no moral stretch to say that if society pays tax to provide police and courts to enforce intellectual property rights for pharmaceuticals to encourage production of pharmaceuticals (note: not because of some "moral right" of a chemist), and you the pharma co don't hold up your end of the bargain (producing the pharmaceuticals), then we as a society need not hold up ours (enforcing the limited rights we granted you with our courts and police).

That seems like a straightforward deal. You provide us benefits, we provide you benefits. A one sided deal like you propose (we protect "your" medicine and yet get none ourselves) is the real moral stretch.

True (to some extent, there's always the other side), but now there's no longer a shortage. The drugs are there in the pharmacies. That's why compounding is outlawed.

The same goes for anything that provides value right? If you make some useful software, by that logic I should be allowed to copy it and use it in whatever way I see fit (including commercially), no matter what license you used?

If I refuse to make it available (commercially or otherwise)? Absolutely. Copyright exists to incentivize production and distribution.

I can see it argued that, being less critical than medicine, perhaps a book or software could be "out of print" for longer than medicine being out of production before the copyright protection ceases, but ultimately the only reason we have copyright to begin with is too encourage people to create and make available.

So yes, by all means. Make orphaned and out of production works publicly available.

You mean - on a permanent basis? Everyone knows that poor availability of GLP-1 medicines in the past were because of difficulties scaling production to match demand that unexpectedly proved insane. No one was ever intentionally withholding them. It was a temporary problem and it is now solved.

I do think medicine is a special category because people need it, whereas if there is a 36 month gap between a novel's first printing and second, I (being the radical copyright reform advocate I consider myself) wouldn't think we need an exception to allow other publishers to publish it during that window, as with medicine.

I do think that at some point that window is long enough that the author and publisher lose any logical justification for keeping something unavailable while the rest of us subsidize their ability (via courts, laws, and police) to do so. After all, if we're paying for that stuff, what are we getting in return?

Maybe we should look at it differently. If there was no patenting, only way to create drugs will be know-how: just keep contents secret and there will be no copy-catting. But that's not allowed: they can't sell drugs without telling the public what's in them, and assuring that the content and the effects of it have been thoroughly tested.

Saxenda (from Novo Nordisk) is 180€ in Hungary for 36 days dosage

Saxenda is a previous generation drug with efficiency below that of lifestyle changes/diets... Not at all what's being discussed here.

And honestly if you do a proper diet to lose serious weight, you are going to save much of that in food. If you are not doing a diet, then you have no business taking those products.

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