obviously
anybody who believes pharma costs are justified by materials is… well, let’s just call them uninformed. It’s not justified by R&D costs or production issues. It’s justified by the stock market, by the CEO having a race with other pharma CEOs for the biggest bonus, and by no other thing.
Normally you can think of these prices as the reward to taking a risk. The chance of developing a drug and bringing it to market is usually small, and the reward should accordingly be high. However, in the particular case of Ozempic, the company attempted to develop a diabetes drug, and accidentally found that the drug works against obesity. That means that the reward in this case outweighs the risk by an obscene amount.
I honestly don’t get why so many people are so upset.
I get it with things like insulin where we know how to make it for years. But a new revolutionary drug? Sure their production cost is low but that doesn’t include R&D and just think of how many drugs don’t work. That’s why when we do find something that works we can’t expect it to only pay for itself, it has to make enough buck to basically pay for them as well, because why else even bother?
