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Pfizer says it will price Covid treatment Paxlovid at nearly $1,400 for a five-day course, which researchers estimate only costs Pfizer $13 to produce.
That's a 10,000%+ markup. Shameful.
Last year, the three largest US-listed pharmaceutical companies by revenues, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Merck, spent a combined $39.6 billion on R&D. That is, admittedly, a lot of money. But less than Medicare is currently paying on just ten drugs
While Big Pharma holds vast portfolios of existing patents for prescription drugs, the innovation pipeline for new drugs actually has very little to do with Big Pharma. In reality, public sources — especially the NIH — fund the basic research that makes scientific breakthroughs. Then small, boutique biotech and pharmaceutical firms take that publicly generated knowledge and do the final stages of research, like running clinical trials, that get the drugs to market. The share of small companies in the supply of new drugs is huge, and it’s still growing. Fully two-thirds of new drugs now come from these small companies, up from one-third twenty years ago. It is not the research labs of Pfizer that are developing new drugs.
That cost to develop was likely not borne by Pfizer in the first place.
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/big-pharma-research-and-development-new-drugs-buybacks-biden-medicare-negotiation