General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Who here thinks drug companies (pharmaceuticals) are altruistic... [View all]NNadir
(36,193 posts)...to provide 100 million doses of it at $10/dose to recover your investment, but you need to add manufacturing costs - manufacturing done under very rigorous controlled conditions - just to break even.
That should be pretty clear.
If you can't sell a 100 million doses, you need to charge considerably more per dose. You need to recover all that money in five to seven years, before you lose your patent and generic companies can produce your drug for manufacturing costs only, paying much less for development than an innovator company. (They still need to do "bioequivalence" trials, but these are far cheaper than what is involved in innovation.)
Example If 10 million people have Covid and we can cure their disease for 2 pills a day for 10 days, that's 20 pills per person, 80 million doses, that would be $250 per cure - if we totally ignore all the people who failed to make the drug but spent close to a billion working on their failure - and ignore manufacturing costs, shipping costs, storage costs etc, and of course, without any reward for the people who took the scientific and financial risks of developing the drug.
I would reasonably expect a vaccine for this disease to be fairly expensive, but the cost would be spread over billions of people who would ideally take it. If it requires frequent boosters - and it may well do so - it will be a blockbuster drug, worth tens of billions, hundreds of billions of dollars.
What's worth more, Jeff Bezos making it possible for you to buy Christmas doilies on line, or rewarding someone for saving the lives that would be saved if we stopped Covid in its tracks; if we were able to cure infected people?
For curative agents, if it's $3000/cure, this would still be much cheaper than two weeks in an ICU on a respirator, wouldn't it?
The reality is that these things are very, very, very, very high tech. People don't whine about paying for their cell phones, their TV's, their meals in restaurants, their Tesla electric cars, but a drug that would save their lives is always "too expensive."
We live in a weird culture.
It turns out that because of certain incentives, people do develop "orphan" drugs for "orphan" diseases, but they are enormously expensive per dose. It comes down to a question of whether the insurance company will save money by treating you or by dealing with the consequences of hospitalizations, etc.
That's a cold fact.
By the way, in the last five years, the makers of 90% of prescriptions sold today - generic drug companies - show many examples of companies losing money hand over fist. That wasn't true ten years ago, but it is true now.
It's easy now to figure it out the whole deal though. It's a billion dollars to develop - rule of thumb, some drugs cost considerably more, others less - you then need to multiply the number of patients and the number of doses per patient and divide it into development plus manufacturing costs and bingo! You're there if the goal is no one makes (gasp) a profit.
Spark's drug does not cost $3000. It's more like a million dollars per treatment. What is the lifetime worth of a child who couldn't see being able to see?
I would like to have every blind child be able to see, but there is some realities between here and there that are not amenable to solution by finger wagging.
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