A joint study between Yale University, King’s College Hospital in London and Doctors Without Borders found a single shot could be made for just 89 cents.
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.
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.
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.