Well this is a terrible shock in the pharmaceutical industry. Who would have thought?
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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Medicine
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I am patently flabbergasted.
1000$? It costs 80$ here. Insurance covers the 1mg injection completely. Drug prices on the US market are inflated as hell. Also it can be made for 5 bucks but the decades of research and billions poured into said research and testing is what raises the price.
Regardless corporate greed is corporate greed and big pharma is into some really shady stuff. Especially when we get to biologicals.
In a research driven company, research is a basic operational cost. These are all sunk cost paid for by other products. Before the product is introduced all of the research has been paid for.
So let's take a look at this companies financials.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVO/financials?guccounter=1
Their cost of goods was 36 billion. Out of 232 billion in sales or around a 85% margin.
It says they spent 32 billion dollars research.
They claimed a profit of 104 billion dollars after spending 2x the total research bill on sales/marketing and admin (62 billion) in other research driven industries this would be around 1/2 research budget.
They still made enough money to pay for more than 3 years of research.
In better regulated industry where greed didn't rule the day. They should be making less than 1/2 the gross income.
This is pure greed based upon people's suffering
Hey, that dude needed a third yacht. Who the hell do you think you are?
Uhg!
Is there more investment/interest/research due to those fat margins?
Nothing significant.
There comes point where tossing more money at at a research topic does nothing. Certain stages in development just take time. There are bottlenecks in the development process that limit the speed.
The thing that drives prices up is greed and marketing.
There is a good chunk of funding for medications that gets federal grant money.
It costs a 1000. Government programs make it 80. And that's good.
Our insurance system IS the government program. The government negotiates prices with the manufacturer. This is also the reason we have drug shortages. Cheaper drugs get re-exported legally by third parties to countries with higher prices. Abbvie straight up made a system where their new drugs would be delivered personally to the individual patient via a personal code to circumvent what happened to Humira.
Tresiba, Insulatard, Actrapid and a couple of other insulins, as well as antibiotics like Augmentin (which is in short supply to begin with) also suffered from re-export until the government issued a temporary ban.
The wholesale companies' response? Stockpile and wait for the ban to expire.
Yeah I'm aware. I'm just saying, someone is paying the bill
They always "face pressure" when they get anywhere near an actually free market.
In other news the Danish government "discovered" an additional 16 billion DKK (2.13 billion EUR) in the budget, solely because of Novo Nordisk's increased corporate taxes.
I'm employed by the Danish government, and I'm getting a 6% raise on my next paycheck. Nurses and daycare workers are getting even more. Our military will actually be getting the NATO required 2% of the GDP. Meanwhile Americans are dieing because they can't afford to buy the insulin... Feels dirty
Can you imagine your national economy being so reliant on one company? If wegowy and ozempic turns out to cause pancreatic cancer then we're fucked.
Hollywood, OF and housewives hoarding all the medicine to look like Jack Skellington. Diabetics always getting fucked by corporate greed.
I've heard about shortages of the drug. Does anybody know how hard it actually is to make or if they're manufacturing scarcity as well?
According to the article they're spending $17 billion to increase production.
If you had goose that was laying gold eggs, wouldn't you try to hatch some?
Engineered Biologics involve having to make special cell cultures off engineered specimens so it's a research forward cost. The actual production is cheap once the cultures are made.
I think if you look deep enough you'll find public funding in a lot of these projects like with Humira, which was funded by the UK Government and is now absurdly expensive as fuck
It's a pretty simple peptide, there's multiple companies in China that make grey market versions.
The scarcity seems to come from the government enforced monopoly, only a single company is officially allowed to make it and they don't have enough machines, I imagine getting more machines takes time.
Governments could issue compulsory licences for shortages like this, but they never do.
I personally know 3 people - who are not diabetic - who are on this drug to lose weight. It's anecdotal evidence for sure, but it makes me think that people are seeing this as a miracle weight loss drug. Which is probably causing the shortages.
The drug is definitely over prescribed I am sure, but surely using it as preventative treatment before the person becomes diabetic is long term better than waiting for them to become diabetic, right?
I don't really know anything about the drug but I know it has helped some people who really need it. It is a shame it is being locked behind patents and shortages.
Biologics are not complex to make once you get the cells farting out the medicine