Re:Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
by aquadrop on Monday November 23, 2020 @03:22PM
(#25191283)
I don't see a reason they would be really against it. FDA says it to everyone, so all companies in same condition. And they can shift cost to healthcare system and have larger revenue. They probably don't mind their pie as a whole being larger, because having revenue of 50 billions and profit of 10 billions is better than revenue of 5 and profit of 1, even though proportionally it's the same. All big pharma companies are massively profitable, fx Novartis net income in 2017 $17.8bln on $50.4bln revenue. Pfizer's $14bln operating income on $53.6bln revenue in 2018. And it's year after year. They really don't seem to suffer from those high costs trials. Also, Pfizer reports only $8bln on R&D in same 2018. I'm sure there' a lot of inefficiencies in those trials, same as it turned out vaccine could be created in year instead of a decade. (btw, previous large scale epidemic of swine flu was largely profitable for pharma companies). They just don't have incentive to reduce the inefficiencies.
You're telling it's not just US but then you cite high healthcare costs (retail vs large scale trial, definitely can be cheaper at scale), which is much cheaper outside of US. I would be very interested in reading numbers of detailed case study of creation of some real world vaccine/drug.
Re:Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
by refurb on Monday November 23, 2020 @07:11PM
(#25193587)
They probably don't mind their pie as a whole being larger, because having revenue of 50 billions and profit of 10 billions is better than revenue of 5 and profit of 1, even though proportionally it's the same
It doesn't work this way. Pricing of pharmaceuticals is independent of the cost of development. Nobody will pay $200 per Covid vaccine dose just because the cost to develop it went up 10x. Every extra dollar spent on development, is one less dollar of profit.
That's why some drugs never make it to market - the cost to bring them to market and the low price means they'll never be profitable.
Re:Oxford University breakthrough on global COVID-19 vaccine
by aquadrop on Monday November 30, 2020 @01:12PM
(#25256911)
Even if it doesn't happen for each and every drug, that can easily be the trend on average. And it probably already happened with covid vaccines. Moderna comes out and says it will cost ~$30 per shot. Why not 3? And for others drugs, when price goes into thousands and don't have much competition that easily can be the case.
Now, $10-15k per patient-year is for a typical therapeutic. And that is an average across global trial sites, not just the US. It’s not much money. You go a 15 min doctors appointment and your insurance is billed $150. Now imagine going 1 per week and having multiple tests run each time. Or having to stay in the hospital for a day when the drug is administered. You can burn through $1,000 per month pretty damn quickly.