Doubled
Over
The premise of today's
comic is only slightly hyperbolic as modern
pharmacology works more like
this:
Company A creates a radical new drug that
is a miracle cure for a terrible disease.
Company B then buys Company A for billions
of dollars
then jacks up the price of the new drug,
thereby reaping zillions of dollars forever
and ever.
This is, in short, the tale of Gilead Science,
which bought the company which invented
a cure for hepatitis C, now known
as Harvoni. Gilead paid $11
billion for the company and made over $19
billion in profits.... in 2015 alone. That's
pretty good return of an investment, if
you're complete bastards.
What I mean by that is that Gilead is currently charging
U.S. customers $85,000 for a 12-week round of treatment
Harvoni, even though
in India the exact same treatment costs less than $1000.
Writer Phillip Smith chronicled
his cure of hep C by purchasing
Harvoni direct from India.
This atrocious medical tale is the fault of lax U.S.
drug-price regulation, one the GOP has no interest
in fixing as long as Big Pharma funds their campaigns,
among other things. Probably.
As for developing drugs and finding cures there's no
better example that thalidomide. Once used as a sedative
in the 1950s, to disastrous effect, it's now used
in cancer therapy.... also Crohn's disease, rheumatoid
arthritis,
leprosy,
multiple
myeloma
and
probably dropsy, the willies, and the heebie-jeebies.
Seems to me like they're throwing it at a lot of different
walls
and
seeing if their patent still sticks.
=Lefty=
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