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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

What high cost? US companies pay more money for advertising than for creating the drug.

Add other regulation and inefficiencies, and subsidized research would work with 1/10 the money.

Not to mention that because of the commercialization of medicine, tons of research is for BS like Viagra and other such drugs (like the tons of stupid feel-good "energy" drugs, so that your boss can squeeze even more overtime out of you), where far more important but less lucrative stuff is ignored.

That's how you get the US sucking donkey's balls in infant mortality rates. As if it was some third world country.

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If that were true, the rest of the world would have radically surpassed the US in terms of drug innovation, research breakthroughs, medical device technology and so on.

Because their lower investment levels should be producing returns so much higher, that they would quantum leap the US while spending less. That hasn't even remotely happened.

Sucking donkey balls on infant mortality? You should become better educated.

How about Canada, at 5.22/1000 versus 6.81 for the US. That's your magic line on 3rd world countries and donkey ball sucking? Well Singapore is 1.92, and Japan is 2.6, so Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Britain are apparently 3rd world countries by comparison.

Half of the US infant mortality rate is due to high black poverty. Maybe you should become informed on the root causes of problems in America before making bad assumptions.

Viagra was not initially being developed as an erection pill it was a heart medication (I think) but turned out to be better at causing erections so they ran with that.

Sildenafil (Viagra) was developed to treat hypertension and angina. It had little effect, but was found to assist with maintaining erections, so it was further developed for that purpose. Later it was discovered to be effective for pulmonary hypertension and is approved for that use, as well.

>What high cost? US companies pay more money for advertising than for creating the drug.

Misleading stat that doesn't look at the full cost of bringing a NME to market.

You're looking at a yearly budget for a company while ignoring reality: drug development isn't yearly, it takes about 8-12 years total. To analyze something on an 8 year cycle using 1 years worth of data is at best ignorant and at worst, intentionally dishonest.

They'll spend almost $1,000,000,000 USD to whittle 10,000 drug candidates into what is hopefully a single FDA approved new molecular entity.

>That's how you get the US sucking donkey's balls in infant mortality rates. As if it was some third world country.

Did you hear that loud crack? It was you smashing your head against correlation/causation. You might want to have that fallacy checked out. Looks bad, man.

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