Regulate the fuck out of the drug companies or nationalize them. Idc which, but operating unbridled is clearly a failure. Unregulated capitalism will kill us.
The amount of Pfizer boot lickers here is astounding
Bots and shills.
Bots and shills.
Wish the admins could do something about them (bots at least).
It’s like someone urinating in the swimming pool, so that nobody else wants to swim in it.
You have to consider all the R&D they put into it.
(Didn’t the government pay for most of that?)
Their R&D was releasing it to the public.
Right?
In a just world, “the people” would see this pricing, realize that they were the ones who paid for the development of it, and simply seize the company.
Whether that took the form of government litigation to force the company to offer this at a reasonable price, or simply a mob of people forcing the company’s hand or else they burn it to the ground, either way, there needs to be a stick of fear to go along with the carrot of profit.
I’m not saying they should make no profit, but this is ridiculous.
Explain why we make it legal for companies to set their own prices again
It does make companies more willing to invest more into drug research , which is a good thing.
Covid treatment was publicly funded. This is a case of public funding going to research and private companies profiting from it.
Everyone should be outraged from the situation. This cheap treatment is being denied to the majority of the world’s population because of patients, and so covid has more opportunities to mutate and make everyone less safe.
Drug research is overwhelmingly publicly funded. Private R&D is a PR myth we were fed to justify high prices.
I never said wasn’t. What I said is still true.
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No. Those two statements don’t go together like that. They aren’t making big new drugs. At most they are looking for ways to adjust the formula so they can extend patents. There is no amount of profit that makes them willing to do more R&D.
Why don’t we just take investor money and invest in it ourselves?
Others have already pointed out that the covid vaccine was publicly funded ergo the benefit should be publicly owned
I was given (free) Paxlovid when I finally contracted covid this year. We need laws regulating price increases. If you can’t demonstrate that your costs for a product or service went up, you can’t increase by more than x%. I don’t know how you do this without encouraging higher introductory prices because it’s not a problem that I’ve thought about in depth, but something like this needs to happen with further consideration.
Another thing I’d like to see is robber barons getting prosecuted for crimes against humanity, but that’s not realistic.
Biden took the first steps towards combating this in the US with the Inflation Reduction Act: https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2023/03/15/hhs-releases-initial-guidance-historic-medicare-drug-price-negotiation-program-price-applicability-year-2026.html
Medicare is now able to negotiate with drug companies on drug prices. Now we just need to bring it home by electing enough politicians (that are open to the idea of course … so Democrats and likely more progressive Democrats), that a Medicare for all option is also added.
Just get rid of copyright, let the person who can create your product the cheapest make money off it
Or would that be too capitalist for the US
So you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars creating and testing a new drug to cure something. Then another company can come along and undercut you since they didn’t spend the upfront money. And now you go bankrupt? How is that fair? I’m not saying Big Pharma isn’t an issue but as always, the solution is somewhere in the middle.
It’s fair because it helps people
Medicine is a service
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
Guess they’d be stuck with relying on research grants and finding cheaper ways to combat diseases
No, they would just keep everything trade secret and we’d have no idea how to replicate the medicine.
Then there will be no new medicines, companies will not be able to afford to pay the scientists.
That would not be true if the government funded things.
I really wish we didn’t let Capitalism control vital to our living services.
Why on earth would we want the government funding and running things, that would be a nightmare. Government is far too big as it is now.
Why on earth would we want the government funding and running things
I’ll take competency issues over greed and harm anytime.
To be fair, I come from a country where we have free healthcare, free education up to college level (we only pay when taking masters or things like that, after finishing our chosen career. Our most know public university is pretty top notch if we talk about content and education quality. And our healthcare is pretty good too, although there is also private healthcare and education. In the education department, at least to my knowledge, there is not really a difference. The USA is not big. It spends a lot on defense (which usually use to wage innecesary wars or disrupt other governments) and maybe too much in mantaining this horrible two party system you’ve got. That said, my country’s economy is in very bad shape (Argentina has inflation rates that are sky high).
Drugs aren’t protected by copyright. They’re protected by patents.
In either case that would be an extreme move and I would not support getting rid of patents or copyright as they’re genuinely useful concepts.
Copyright in particular doesn’t just protect the money hungry. Lemmy, Linux, and many other open source projects are protected from those who would prefer to use their source code to make a closed source proprietary application and contribute nothing back.
Copyright needs to go back to 30 years. You have 30 years on a patent to make money off it. If you haven’t already made your money back, and a handsome profit in that time, you should have hired a business manager year 2.
Patents are either 14 or 20 years, depending on type. Copyright is absurdly long, but copyright also doesn’t apply to drugs, inventions, recipes, game rules, mathematical formulae - mostly just creative works.
Ok, 14 to 20 years on patents seems reasonable. I would still set copyright back to 30 years, since as you pointed out, it’s really only affecting the public domain.
I’d be okay with that, but acting like copyright doesn’t exist for a reason or ever do any good… Isn’t helping actually lead to a solution :)
In a world where you can’t protect your IP, how do you have close sourced?
Military tech is the bigger issue
Very easily, you compile it.
You keep the source code, methods of operation or manufacturing methods private. Companies can already do this. Patents force companies to make their inventions public information (you can access the patent), in exchange for a limited exclusive right to use this technology.
For no trivial things patent legislation is a great benefit. Everyone can access the patent knowledge. For trivial iterative things patents only benefit the patentee who gets the exclusive rights.
Copyright means anything you produce that is easily to copy, you have legal control over how it’s copied and the revenue it may generate. This is for things like art work, books, news stories, code etc. Things that can be copy and pasted or printed.
Copyright is granted when you create the content. There’s no application. It ensures someone can make money from the copy they produce. Less people would write books, if Amazon could print and sell copies without paying the author.
Military tech would be private. Even with our current IP protection system. A hostile power doesn’t care about infringing IP, there’s very little consequence for do this. If you patent military technology, then that info would be public.
I think you’re thinking of patents rather than copyright. I was about to ask something snarky like “without the ability to patent their discoveries what would cause these drug companies to pay for r&d up front?” but honestly, this one was paid for by government grants anyway and that’s really where my problem comes in. We seem to have developed this amazing worst of both worlds where the public bears all the up front expense of r&d and then the government just gives away what we bought for ourselves so that they can raise the price to 100x what the medication actually costs.
I was just being lazy and didn’t write patents and trademarks all together
I figured saying copyright would be enough for people to include the whole copyright office
Patents, trademarks and copyrights are three entirely different things. Patents cover products for sale, and give an inventor the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a given time. Trademarks cover branding, and allow the person registering the trademark to prevent anyone else from using it or something a reasonable person could confuse with it indefinitely. Copyright is exclusively for intellectual property and allows the copyright holder to stop anyone from making copies of their work, derivatives of their work or work that is substantially similar to their work.
This is very incorrect except for the very high level. Patents cover systems and methods and devices that are more than mere physical phenomena. Patent owners are granted an exclusive monopoly over the implementation of what the patent issued on (i.e., its eventual claims) that runs up to 20 years from the time of filing. They are an intellectual property right premised in property theory.
Trademarks cover designators of origin. Fundamentally, they are to reduce consumer confusion and are ultimately nothing more than a presumption once granted in favor of the owner in unfair competition disputes. They are also an intellectual property but are premised in totally different theories of law and can apply to literally anything that can be strongly associated with a company, more or less.
Copyright is an intellectual property, yes, but is limited to creative expression fixed in a tangible medium. This is a very short sentence but has some pretty serious depth to it. Copyright is ultimately a very specific type of right to, and this may shock you, copying a thing (fixed in a tangible medium…you do not have copyright on ideas).
That all said, pharma patents and, really, industry as a whole is super fucked and needs serious reimagining in the current era. But some form of IP absolutely is necessary to incentivize and enable drug creation of it is to persist in our free market capitalist economic structure.
Eliminating capitalism sounds like an easier idea, to be honest.
Yeah, that doesn’t really work. Because they will always find a way to make costs go up, and then demonstrate it. Auditing such things would benearly impossible. The only real solution is for certain industries to be nonprofits. Healthcare really shouldn’t be about profit, it should ge about care.
Thanks capitalism!!
/sarcasm.
I’ll never understand why so many people think middlemen somehow makes shit cheaper…
Taxes > government research > cheap meds
With the bonus point of no more pharmaceutical companies selling shit like oxy for profit
Because they think government is inefficient by default, and a commercial business is motivated towards max efficiency to cut costs. Maybe all of this is true, but in capitalism companies also sell for the optimal price based on price elasticity. No competitors + essential live saving product = high prices.
Actually in human societies, not just in capitalism.
People talk about capitalism being bad as if only there people try to eat each other to become richer.
If you read something about reasons the USSR wouldn’t have more efficient centralized planning, while having necessary machinery and resources, or why it wouldn’t have standardized something, while having the standardization apparatus and planned economy, or why all the Internet-like projects went nowhere in USSR while being much more ambitious due to, again, planned economy, or why despite less fragmentation scale wouldn’t make things cheaper to produce in USSR, but the opposite, and so on - that’s because every reform would mean someone losing influence, and that someone would naturally use that influence to resist reform.
It’s actually fascinating to read how some of those people really believed in Marxism and Communism, and were even very competent sometimes, but the general architecture made the whole thing less than just a sum of its parts. Really sad, though.
I agree that the problems aren’t just in Capitalism. However, the country with the unofficial historical tagline, “and then it got worse”, may not be the best example. I think China is a really good example of influence peddling outside a free market.
Well, China, when its ruling organization still had some consistent ideology, was a copy of Stalin’s USSR, bigger and weaker, give or take. Only it started later.
Its way off that track started with reforms like Kosygin’s reforms, would those not be neutered.
I’d say the reason in China this happened was exactly that it was bigger and weaker. It didn’t quite have anything like Soviet industrial establishment, and it had the issues of poverty, hunger etc.
Because “government research” doesn’t cover mass production and all of the supply chain management. Which is where anything bureaucratic really sucks.
(Unless you need to build things badly, but fast and on large scale, mobilization-style - see Khruschev-era mass construction in ex-USSR, or, for exotic stuff, older state-built housing in Israel which isn’t that much better).
Actual production rots very quickly, if centralized and bureaucratic.
I agree that research requires long-term investment and is in general a completely different thing.
There’s just so much wrong in your comment I can’t address it all…
But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?
We’re talking about patents right now.
The rest of what you said is still wrong, can’t stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about…
There’s just so much wrong in your comment I can’t address it all…
If you can’t then you’d better say nothing.
But where has anyone said the government had to manufacture it too?
You said when talking about pharma companies as middlemen. You remove those middlemen - you have to do tasks they perform.
We’re talking about patents right now.
Yes, patent law should be abolished. That’s what I’m talking about while commenting in most threads blaming “capitalism”, because in like 2/3 cases patent law is to blame and not that.
The rest of what you said is still wrong, can’t stress that enough, it just also has absolutely nothing to do with what people were talking about…
Thank you for your unsubstantiated opinion which I can beat with that of my own every time, so not sure why you’d even express it without details.
If you can’t then you’d better say nothing.
You’ve got a point, I should have said “won’t put the effort in”.
I looked at your profile, you wait till posts are really old, then spam a bunch of nonsensical replies in it.
I’m just gonna block you. Everyone wins.
I’m just gonna block you. Everyone wins.
Not the worst way to look at this, if you want my opinion.
People vote for it every two years and are shocked, just shocked when they get precisely what they voted for.
Do you think pfizer and other companies who spend hundreds of millions lobbying would be like “aww shucks! the public voted to curb our shitty behavior, let’s go home!”?
Ah, trademark laws and patents are obviously governmental stuff. So - not present in some imagined absolute capitalism. And with those abolished (except for stealing authorship still being illegal), I suppose market mechanisms would do their job sufficiently well for this particular case.
Believing in capitalism is believing in humans making rational and moral choices, anyone to do that would be nuts. That’s a proactive answer to politically active people getting triggered by my comment and labeling me as a member of the other crowd.
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Tax them too: https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/
Sounds good. In the meantime, I’m going to buy some Pfizer stock for my kids sake.
This comment is loaded with wishful thinking.
That’s optimistic tbh. More like my comment is the result of 2 decades of fighting the good fight only to watch those I’m trying to help dig a deeper hole. Time to tend my little patch of grass, build a sturdy fence, and hope for a renaissance.
Torches would burn the bodies too much. You need a proper grill.
changes need to happen badly
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They can treat deez nuts
I’ve been saying for years that universal healthcare won’t solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control. If they can regulate medical related industries, such as pharma, the need for universal healthcare can be reduced or eliminated. As an added bonus, it would help keep the cost (ie. taxes) for universal healthcare a lot lower. This is pretty common for pharma companies to make insane profits like this, and it’s extremely unethical.
universal healthcare won’t solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control.
But universal healthcare would get prices under control. You’re thinking completely backwards.
universal healthcare won’t solve the issue, unless we can get costs under control.
But universal healthcare would get prices under control. You’re thinking completely backwards.
It’s been too long since the aristocrats were reminded that they need us more than we need them and that they can’t hire enough of us to stop the rest of us once we take an idea to mind.
Je suis d’accord avec vous! 😉
From the bottom of my heart, fuck you Pfizer. I have had Covid twice, had my blood oxygen drop as low as 79, and I would still rather die a miserable covid death than suffer the injustice of being greed raped by the absolute worst caricature of capitalist pigs that actually came to life. I hope that money makes your board members miserable and can’t do much to treat the uncurable, flesh eating disease your evil pig carcasses should be justifiably riddled with by karma, leaving your kids to donate your disgustingly afforded estate to charity to cleanse themselves of the nasty aftertaste of human suffering, the faint stink of people who are trying to take paxlovid and recover from a major virus in the rain and vulnerable cold because they can’t afford both rent and medicine, after your death. Burn in hell, you uncaring scum.
EDIT: I realize this is a lot of vitrol to throw out into the universe, but they likely won’t ever see this on Lemmy, and to make matters worse they clearly won’t care anyway. It’s just my own version of catharsis, I guess
Much better strategy: you take the medicine… survive… and refuse to pay in protest. Sure, you might get sued for non-payment of bills… then a bunch of people can fight a class action lawsuit against pfizer.
and they lose $13. its a no win situation :/
If your scenario had more molotov cocktails, i think there’d be a winning situation.
had my blood oxygen drop as low as 79
Oh, my aunt’s husband was in this situation. And they live in Armenia, where normal Covid treatment was, is and will be virtually nonexistent.
He’s thankfully alive and didn’t lose any of his wits.
I get the anger. We really need to fully socialize these medical development centers. But on the other hand, they did most of the work. They didn’t have to.
I’m sure the research was publicly funded, and the profit will be private as is tradition.
They didn’t do most of the work. Not even close.
Yep, that Pfizer for you, using taxpayer money to R&D drugs they will use to price gouge the public who paid for it, out of the kindness of their hearts.
Just don’t take the damn Vax. We now know that people who never got vaxed have better immunity than those who did. Studies prove it
So no point getting this crap just to make Pfizer rich
This is very off topic but I like that mastodon is now a platform more commonly being used to share information like this. Although for their mobile UI, I really hope they get rid of the bar on the right, it’s very odd.
Can’t you just use any 3rd party app with a different layout?
my dad is refusing to take vaccines because he thinks taking it will automatically make him vote dem because of nano-machine in them.
he also thinks vaccines are kind of HRT.
anyways how’s your day?
Sorry you are going through that. Same thing happened to me, it really sucks :(
Block his router of the content
I watched birds are not real Ted talk the other day, I think it was awesome to give a perspective on the conspiracy stuff and how people run with it.
If it flies, it spies. 🐣
I hope you are an adult and no longer live with your parents.
If that is the case remember this. If you cannot have pleasant encounters with him, you are under no obligation to have them at all.
No obligation to keep seeing them, would be kind of hard not to have parents 😛
You still have them, you just don’t have contact with them.
but then who will take care of them? they were there at my time of need, shouldn’t i also be there?
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Nope they chose to get a child. You dont have to Do anything for them.
You sound like you have a good relationship with your parents, many don’t.
You can be there for them when they need you without putting up with the anti-vax ravings you mentioned. It is called setting boundaries.
You do what you think is right but also understand that is not a universal thing for all people.
You sound like you have a good relationship with your parents
not really.
i think it is best to minimize contact but not keep null, since these kind of people are self destructive.
that’s the only reason i stayed , for their health issues.
What about your health? Your mental health in particular.
Your parents raising you is not something you owe them for. You didn’t choose to exist; they chose that for you. Raising you is the bare minimum they can do after making a choice like that. And now that you are older, you can reflect on the manner in which you were raised and decide what your relationship with them needs to look like so you can keep your sanity.
Is your father a senator?
Nano machines son
sorry for your loss
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What is this??
Ah so that explains my D cups
RIP your inbox.
I’ll show my man boobs to anyone who wants to see them. Usually people tell me to stop showing them and say things like “gross” and call me bear tits but that hasn’t stopped me from whipping them out on every occasion and non occasion
It’s all that government big pharma stuff that have given me moobs, things like:
- Covid-19 vaccines;
- Fluoride in toothpaste and tapwater;
- Chemtrails;
- a horrendous diet and little exercise;
- pride flags
pride flags
You weren’t supposed to eat them smh
Right, but if I stop now, how am I going to perform my magic flag butthole trick? checkmate
You shove them up your butt, otherwise you can only do it once. Duh.
Technically you could do it again but it’s even less recommended than the original
But they look like sweets :/
Eating the frigging pride flags are making the frogs gay!
you should introduce him to the library
Gives a whole new meaning to the term “parental controls.”
If you have some disposable cash and you’re running into the “watch this video about antivax stuff”. I recently discovered Kagi’s summarizer works on as many YouTube videos as you want (seemingly by processing the audio itself).
It’s been a bit since I’ve received a video like that, but I think it’ll be a huge time saver for the next one… Or the next similar one…
Intellectual property is a scam. A commonly heard defense of intellectual property is that it is needed for companies to fund their R&D. However pharmaceutical companies typically spent a lot more money on marketing & sales than they do on R&D. Big Pharma spending money on marketing and sales is harmful to our health. Apparently it’s a lot more lucrative to get people drugged up on painkillers or whatever than to discover new medicine. If we didn’t have intellectual property then we would have competition resulting in the lowest possible medicine prices. Companies would have no money for marketing so medicine would be judged on their actual properties, only the best would be given to patients, not the best marketed, but best health-wise. Companies would have no money for R&D either, but the government could fund R&D We shouldn’t blame the players, we created a system that produces these bad actors. Let’s change the system so that these bad actors couldn’t exist. Intellectual property is a international problem, join the pirate party of your country and let’s make it happen!
They don’t do R&D; the university system does and they take the research, often without pay.
I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations I hate corporations i hate corporations i hate corporations
Who wants unpaid internships!
The woman who got the nobel prize for the mRNA research that led to the Pfizer vaccine did a lot of it while employed at Pennsylvania University before they fired her because they didn’t see the research leading to making them money. Then she moved on to Biontech where she continued the research.
I’m not sure how much was done at the university but it was probably not insignificant and then biontech got lucky and snapped it up for basically free.
That is nauseating
I’m always curious about the actual numbers. Here’s their R&D budget by year:
And their overall revenue:
In 2020, their revenue was about $40B on $8.5B in R&D cost. They had a huge revenue increase the last few years, with 2022 being $100B, but R&D only increased to about $11B.
So they do have R&D, but it’s not that big compared to the money they’re bringing in. Their net income has increased substantially, as well.
In addition to that, I’ve heard that a large portion of that R&D spending is on iterating drugs they already own so that when the patent runs out they can patent a new version and lobby the old one to be made obsolete so generics can’t be made.
Thank you for finding the numbers
In the bio industries R&D has almost exclusively become just the D. We like to think that there are a bunch of scientists doing lifelong, painstaking research to develop new drugs or treatments within the labs at Pfizer, Merk, Lilly, or whatever, but a significant portion of the research is done at small independent or school funded labs.
Once one of those small labs creates a decent treatment that will likely pass government testing, a large corp will buy it and say “We just made this brand new thing!”. Really though, their R&D budget is spent on acquisition, production, supply chain development, and marketing.
Working in R&D in a few different positions in my career and this is absolutely the case. Hell some of them you could equate to white label SaaS products. Using research from universities putting it in a neat package and selling it.
The corporate bio industry is so fucked up I can’t even begin to describe it. I tell my friends and family stories, but I sound like an insane person to them. The scale at which money is thrown around is just too large for most people to imagine.
Like this: imagine a worker that makes less than $35k per year processes, and is soley responsible for $20M in products, per month. Product that people all around the world not only use, but ingest. Now imagine that that one worker is the only one in the world who knows how that product is processed. That’s how bio manufacturers work.
AFAIK some US agency did R&D for COVID, they just
bribedsponsored Right People
