"But how will Big Pharma do the R&D for new big discoveries?!"
Newsflash: they don't.
Heard about those hot GLP-1 treatments? Yeah, all Big Pharma did was race to patent a bunch of highly similar chemicals, the very last step of R&D.
Y'know who funded the real research to get there?
Taxpayers.
Newsflash: they don't.
Heard about those hot GLP-1 treatments? Yeah, all Big Pharma did was race to patent a bunch of highly similar chemicals, the very last step of R&D.
Y'know who funded the real research to get there?
Taxpayers.
Comments
@dereklowe.bsky.social has written a lot about this:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/where-drugs-come-comprehensive-look
But one thing people should be fascinated to see is how governments make decisions about drug pricing. They are literally evaluating the cost of people living vs dying.
https://www.ahip.org/news/articles/new-study-in-the-midst-of-covid-19-crisis-7-out-of-10-big-pharma-companies-spent-more-on-sales-and-marketing-than-r-d
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2023/spending-on-consumer-advertising-for-top-selling-prescription-drugs-in-us-favors-those-with-low-added-benefit
Hence the billions currently going into making yet another GLP-1 receptor agonist.
It’s just not something govt is well-suited for. That risk should be privatized
To be clear, not b/c they wouldn’t be able to sustain losses, but b/c it’d require doling out massive amounts of 100% unaccountable money.
2. Some research reduces Polio and gives us immunotherapy and beta blockers. This is amazing life-saving stuff.
3. Federal funding does not come from federal taxes.
Maybe patents are the wrong model for funding drug development, but it does need to be paid for.
Taxpayers massively fund the basic research
Big pharma stopped that shit long ago
The bulk of those billions they spend are for FDA certification and marketing but the rest is just buying patents and blocking others with 「 strategic 」 patents.
https://pro.bloombergtax.com/insights/federal-tax/rd-tax-credit-and-deducting-rd-expenditures/
Either give the US the same prices as the rest of the world or raise it throughout the world (GLP-1’s are the most visible with the US paying 6-8x anywhere else).