darksidecat
Dr. Lucky Tran 
Gilead has announced that lenacapavir, the game-changing HIV prevention drug just approved by the FDA will cost $28,218 USD per person per year.
Researchers say a generic version could be made for just $25 per person a year.
Capitalism kills.
Sources:
The Lancet
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5293409
crispy branzino ☭ (sold out forever)@luckytran expect a generic version that the global south gets to enjoy for $5.
Piper@luckytran I'm curious what the PBMs will negotiate that price down to. There's a 0% chance anyone will ever spend $28k on a single dose, but will the PBMs negotiate it down under $10k? Under $1k?
Maier Amsden@pmc @luckytran It's just like rich folks paying ridiculous amounts for super new cutting-edge tech (like the laser disc of the early 90s) and such. Of course, AIDS kills, so it won't just be a hobby/ status symbol. But I'm guessing a handful of rich people will buy it.
Lucas C. Wheeler@luckytran I think it says something about the state of things in the US that I initially thought you meant "Gilead" as in the christofascist dystopia from the Handmaid's Tale. Which....that's pretty much the dream of a lot of people in the current administration.
But, on the actual topic, this is so unconscionable. How have we allowed a society that does this to people to be built? Profit at all costs, with no regard for the well-being of human beings. :(
DianeAnd this is why my mom likes RFK, Jr.
Because she knows the pharma companies are ripping people off.
But sadly she hasn't learned he's also ripping people off too.
StuartB@luckytran given the way the US is headed at an acceleratingbpace, the name of the company is pretty apt...
pancakes🔜Bed@luckytran waiting for the four thieves vinegar collective version to be announced
Nazani@luckytran
I predict one of these patients (or a parent) is going to decide to 'take someone with them.'
I predict one of these patients (or a parent) is going to decide to 'take someone with them.'
Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC@luckytran AIDS must never be eradicated because it is the divine punishment for all those sinners. Also, it helps reduce the population of Africa. That's how those bastards think.
gjm@luckytran In a hypothetical world without those greedy bastards at Gilead, though, we don't get lenacapavir at $25/year, we get no lenacapavir at all. (Because lenacapavir was discovered by Gilead. They were willing to put in the effort and resources because they hoped it would lead them to a drug that they could make a lot of money from.)
In a more distant hypothetical world without capitalism, _maybe_ we get all the same drug discovery that in our rotten greedy capitalist world is done by companies who hope it will make them rich, and then the drugs get made available at non-extortionate prices. That would be nice. But how do you know that's what we'd get?
Michael BuschLenacapavir was developed by Gilead with NIH support.
And even if it had not been, that would not excuse the extortionate price gouging.
e.g. 50 USD per year for 40 million people would still be a billion dollars per year to the company.
platanoutre@michael_w_busch @gjm @luckytran Also making it impossible for most of the global south to afford is is just loathsome avarice. Perhaps if they don’t provide affordable access to the drug the company is ineligible for NIH funding or land grant university research access.
AdamI guess it's impossible to know what would happen in the alternative hypothetical world, but I'd take my chances any day of the week in a world where people's actions are motivated by personal interest and joy instead of maximizing profit for the shareholders
@adamsaidsomething @luckytran I too prefer joy and benevolence to greed and ambition. But so far as I can see the options we actually have, if we don't get to reform _human nature_, are (1) whatever drugs will be developed by curious/benevolent people just out of the goodness of their hearts, or (2) that _plus_ whatever others will be developed by greedy profit-seekers who want to get rich, and #2 seems better to me than #1.
Gilead may well be evil greedy bastards (or they may not, I don't actually know) but apparently their greed led to the production of this game-changing therapy, which will do a lot of good even at $40k/year, and it won't cost $40k/year for ever.
It absolutely would be much better if they sold it for $25/year from the outset, provided extra subsidies for people in poor countries where even $25/year is a lot of money, etc. But in a world where they had to do that they (being, as I stipulate, evil greedy bastards) wouldn't have developed the drug in the first place.
The way I see it, capitalism is a roadblock to reforming human nature. In a different world where society doesn't reward greed and punish benevolence while brainwashing people with egocentric ideologies, people would be more free to rediscover the natural joy of altruistic pursuits
@adamsaidsomething @luckytran I'd love that to be true. But in the history of the world, are there actually any examples of this? And how well have they done at actually making difficult and useful things happen?
(That's a genuine question, not an I-know-the-answer-is-no gotcha. Maybe Bhutan is a bit that way, for instance? Though so far as I know it isn't much of a hotbed of scientific discovery.)
I feel about capitalism roughly as Churchill allegedly felt about democracy: the worst system there is, apart from all the others that have ever been tried. The healthiest societies I know of seem to be ones that combine capitalism (harnessing greed to get valuable things done -- along, alas, with lots of not so valuable things) with unashamedly redistributive taxation (so that as well as the valuable things that are motivated by that greed, we also direct some of its products to help the people who aren't well served by a brutally capitalist system).
Maybe something much better is possible. It would be nice to think so, because the capitalist meat-grinder ain't pretty. But there seems to be rather a shortage of examples of plausibly-better systems.
Patrick H. Lauke
@patrick_h_lauke @luckytran Different drugs. If your point is that Gilead are evil greedy bastards, you may well be right, but _my_ point is that capitalism enables us to get some of the evil greedy bastards to do drug discovery, software development, etc., rather than traditional evil-greedy-bastard activities like theft, and the world is better overall when it gets _both_ the drug-discovery efforts of scientists in it for the sheer joy of discovery _and_ the drug-discovery efforts of evil greedy bastards chasing monster profits. In this case it got us lenacapavir. For the moment "us" means mostly rich people because of the price, and that sucks, but it's better than the drug not existing at all, and the price won't be $40k/year for ever.
samiamsam
R@luckytran sure this is a novel drug class, but is the advantage over the existing tenofovir-based PrEP just the fact that this one is available in a depot injection?
T2R@luckytran Outright corporate greed.
jackson_sweater@luckytran Gilead are the assholes who made their Hep c treatment solvadi cost over 100k for a course of treatment arent they
ChookMother 🇦🇺🦘@luckytran Some serious evil happening here.
RiaResists
miki@luckytran Serious question:
Do you understand the terms CapEx and OpEx, the difference between them, and how CapEx impacts drug prices?
gkrnours
MicroLab Suite
MicroLab v1.0 Make your own medicine A toast to the dead, for children with cancer and AIDS;A cure exists, and you probably could have been saved. - Felipe Andres Coronel The MicroLab v1.0 The Microlab is a do-it-yourself Controlled Lab Reactor (CLR). You don’t need a CLR to make chemical reactions happen, but it makes [...]
Toni Aittoniemi@luckytran Do you know where Africa will be getting their HIV medication from now on?
It ain’t USA, or Europe, or any other state that follows US patent law.
Axel van Bergen@luckytran
What about condoms? Much cheaper, and reliable not only in the prevention of HIV, but numerous other STDs also.
What about condoms? Much cheaper, and reliable not only in the prevention of HIV, but numerous other STDs also.
Joel Falcou, Ph. D@Axelotl @luckytran condom doesn't help with blood contamination nor mother fetus contamination...
Yora@luckytran On the one hand, decades of research costs went into this.
On the other hand, world governments could pool money to pay the company double or triple for what they spend on the project without breaking a sweat, and make it free for any medicine factory to produce.
On the other hand, world governments could pool money to pay the company double or triple for what they spend on the project without breaking a sweat, and make it free for any medicine factory to produce.
LukefromDCFew will be able to afford this kind of money. A Gay teenager with a different partner every week can fucking forget this even exists.
I may have caught a break myself: Some around me believe that the only reason I am still here after HIV in the 1980's killed almost all of those I knew in the community at that time must be an HIV resistance gene my 1/4 Norweigan mother could have passed to me. This is based on statistics: Autistic/Aro Gay culture bi kid in the 1980's, whatever partners were available each weekend, zero protection as none was known. I am still here somehow.
The same level of protection for those around me today should not be held hostage for $28K a year. That's more than many people's entire annual income. If it costs only $25 a year to make this stuff and pay off all reasonable salaries this greed is nothing but theft.
HIV meds have had this level as a "target price" all the way back to AZT in the late 1980's. There must be more money in selling meds to condo-owning "Guppies" and ignoring the rest of the world than in actually providing healthcare.
Gilead has been one of the worst offenders in this and similar fields for many years.
The scumbags pricing these drugs should be used for research themselves, instead of the higher animals used now. Save a rat, use a CEO!
Hein Ragas@luckytran @skye I maintain that mandatory licensing of medicines, with a licensing fee determined by an independent court, is the best way to deal with this. The inventor of the medicine gets paid for their discovery, but they do not get to set the price. And then anyone can license the medicine at that price and produce it and sell it on the market.
Jon Wood@luckytran god, they’re actually called Gilead? I thought that was a comment on how dystopian this is, but no, it’s real.
Laura ✨🎨@jon @luckytran literally came to the comments to write this 🙃
morfil (any)🌈@luckytran I van imagine that 28k is not realistic but neither is 25$
I suppose a moral calculation for cost per unit would look something like this:
1) production cost
2) cost based licence/development costs (including overhead) decided by the number of expected sales (potential number of patients times duration of licencing rights
3) morally acceptable profit margin
No idea what these numbers would come out to but this would be how to derive them.
Qybat@luckytran Pharmaceutical pricing in the US is weird. The manufacturer always specifies a hugely expensive list price, but this is really just their starting point in negotiations and will be subject to numerous discounts and special deals in almost all cases. The aim of this is to make sure that every patient ends up paying exactly as much as they can afford, and not a cent less. It's the perfection of differential pricing.
Inc Hulk 🧪@luckytran Capitalism is not perfect, but don’t blame the evils of the USA so-called ‘health care’ insurance scam, on Capitalism. In civilised countries the drug developer is offered a reasonable payment for their products. In the USA there are multiple cases where drugs cost 100 or 1000 times the price paid in civilised countries.
Ned Hamson@luckytran who will break it and produce an underground generic version?
Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)@luckytran everyone is always like, "how do you expect companies to make back the cost of 10 years of R&D?" And my answer is.... Taxes?
atapi ❤️@luckytran ....they're calles Gilead? that has to be a bit right
Arena Cops 🇺🇦✌@luckytran Found something with about the same results.
"...
The pharmaceutical company says it needs to recoup its development costs for the drug. But experts and AIDS activists disagree. Astrid Berner-Rodoreda, for example, refers to calculations done by a British pharmacologist, Andrew Hill, at the University of Liverpool.
Hill has said that even with a profit margin of 30%, lenacapavir could be sold for as little as $40 per year — that's one thousandth of what Gilead wants to charge.
..."
From Nov 29, 2024:
https://www.dw.com/en/hiv-prophylactic-lenacapavir-very-safe-and-very-expensive/a-70920492
#DrugsIndustries #PriceGouging #Medication #Healthcare #AffordableCare
Penguin@luckytran @jensimmons Without capitalism there’d be no drug. Drug companies only have a certain number of years to monetize their huge research investment, that’s the system and we’re happy to get new drug therapies from it. I’m certainly alive in old age because of it. The drug will reach generic status soon enough.
@PenguinToot @luckytran @jensimmons Do you work for a pharmaceutical company? What about the amount of $$$ taxpayers spent to develop the initial research? Healthcare should not be for profit.
meeech@luckytran any way to show how much public money went into research that led this treatment ?
quixote@luckytran It all goes back to the madness of giving anyone with a monopoly free rein to set any price they want.
And not any old monopoly. A life-and-death monopoly.
Bang. $25 transmogrifies into tens of thousands.
Profiteering was illegal once upon a time. Maybe we could make it so again.
Compulsory licensing for any companies whose pricing is foreseeably likely to lead to damage or death. _Some_thing! Enough of these bloodsuckers.
@luckytran The purpose of the FDA and the GOP is to plunder Americans for fun and profit.
Kenner@luckytran someone is about to receive a visit from the FBI
Emmanuel Lécharny (he/him)@luckytran Would they make every patient having HIV in the world pay 100$/year, so 4x the expected price to produce the vial, they would already make 3.3B$/year, more than 10% of their annual revenue.
I suggest to rename this company Greedlead.