HIV ‘vaccine’ could be made for just $40 a year for every patient
HIV ‘vaccine’ could be made for just $40 a year for every patient
www.theguardian.com
HIV ‘vaccine’ could be made for just $40 a year for every patient
20 comments
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Yeah and insulin can be made for like $5.
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It is elsewhere in the world. The US is an exceptional case.
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It's a Brtish news article so they actually do pay about that much for insulin, if they pay at all.
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Well I'm an American with type 1 diabetes and I'm jealous. I've paid $600 for a box of 5 insulin pens before when I didn't have insurance.
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I lost so many friends and lovers to AIDS in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Even my mom's first husband died of AIDS. A vaccine took way too long, and now that there is one this is what they do?!? The patents need to be voided and the vaccine distributed free of charge by amy clinic or hospital that takes federal funds.
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But think of all the lost profits that rich executives could make! /s
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Think of it as an investment. If you die of AIDS, you can never get high blood pressure, which means you can never buy drugs against high blood pressure!
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Knowing you have HIV decreases transmission by 90%. Giving antivirals decreases transmission by 99%. Back in the early 2000 I saw a paper saying we could make HIV tests for 10 cents a person if we wanted to produce enough for every person on the planet (0.1810^9= $800 million). That was something that could have been done back then. $40 a vaccine would be a price tag of $320 billion
20 comments
Accounting for 30% profit seems reasonable to me.
Yet they're selling it for 1000x the price.
I understand they need to recoup research costs, but...
I have no other words.
Except they don't even need to do that, because, as is with most pharmaceuticals, the research was almost fully funded by the taxpayer.
And the 30% profit is for a generic product, so the research has already been done.
So yeah, 30% profit is of course much better than 3000%, but both are still obscene profiteering off of a lifesaving product paid for by, and then essentially withheld for ransom from, the general public.
cough I believe if 40$ means 30% profit, then the cost to produce it is 28$. With the current price of it being 42,250$, this means the profit rate is 42,250$/28$*100%=150,892%.
In words, one hundred fifty thousand percent.
It's insane. Even if I am wrong and it's 3000% or 30,000% profit on a product funded by tax-payer money, it's insane and should be criminal.
This is the reason I hate when people use the "recoup" argument. If anyone takes any free money to do research, then that isn't an expense to that company. If I start my own thing, and use my own money to cure cancer, then I get to set the price to recoup my own losses. If the citizens paid for it through taxes or donations, then it should be cost + % profit. 30% is very fair.
The research cost recovery line they often yap about is bullshit itself though. The overwhelming majority of pharma research like the one involved here is subsidized through taxpayer dollars already, and they get tax incentives and write offs for failed research. If we had a sane, working government we could nationalize all life saving medications funded by public money while still allowing the inventors to enjoy some (reasonable) economic benefits from the research