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Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

fortune.com

131–140 of 218 posts

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frankly the US pays for the cost of the research while the rest of the world just pays for the cost of production. Oh come the fuck on, this has been the talking point since the early 2000's. Surely nobody still believes this horse shit. Phizer by itself raked in 50 billion last year alone.

It comes up here in NZ every few years, as there is frustration that we aren’t paying as much as the drug companies would like. The US leaned on us hard to scrap our single payer system. This sympathy for these massive companies in this thread depressing. Big Agg and Big Tech don’t get this free pass.

It was depressing in 2008, now it's just pathetic. It's no wonder they feel so emboldened to continue fucking people raw for their medications, they have hordes of defenders in government and otherwise ready to offer page upon page of apologia for their rampant profiteering.

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#132
post #90

Who educates these scientists through PhD programs? Oh, OK. So we are paying these people to get their PhDs so they can go and start a company to scalp people with drugs that deliver 10% lift in efficacy. What a scam model.

How much do you know about this? Novo Nordisk sponsors many universities around Denmark, they pay a lot of money for those graduates.

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an awful lot of sympathy for the drug company in this thread. You are correct, research and approval is expensive. But at some point there is a limit. Things like insulin are long paid off, and the pricing there has generated controversy. People have been charged $1000 a month for it [1]. What’s fair? They are screaming out to be regulated when they behave so badly, and that’s what’s happened with insulin. […

That limit is the length of a patent (plus/minus some factors like extensions and time to market). That's been the deal ever since the FDA was a thing. It's nothing new. My understanding is that the controversy is over a newer type of fast acting insulin that's not yet generic. In general insulin is really cheap, but the really nice new stuff makes life a lot easier for diabetics so everyone wants it.

Turns out many many of the drug companies have been abusing the systems. The feds created a process for handling drug patents, and companies keep filing extenuating patents on existing stuff, and they also have been submitting not just drugs but devices to the registry illegally too, to hold monopoly. No one has guarded the registry.

FTC is finally taking some charge, after all the other agencies (patent office, FDA) have failed to do any enforcement.

Really good recent write up by the usual king of company & capitalism watching, https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-how-ftc...

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#135
post #123

If the EU can fine Apple and Google, the US should be able to fine Novo.

That's against US law. The US has innovated the laws that make NN profits possible and helped other countries to adopt them. EU created anti trust laws that makes fining Apple and Google possible.

Citations for all of this please.

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#136
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their market cap is also bigger than the GDP of their home country (Denmark) As a Dane that's pretty terrifying to me (see Nokia and Nortel)

Apples to oranges comparison. Revenue to GDP is better. Novo Nordisk $35 billion in revenue. GDP of Denmark:$400 billion. Their revenue is roughly 9% of GDP.

I think that depends on what I'm trying to illustrate

There's a lot of pensions and savings tied up in Novo stock, so a potential downturn would have a catastrophic impact on the danish citizens

The danish economy is, to a large extend, dependent on the stock price of Novo, not its revenue

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the last one makes the distinction between modern synthetics and basic insulin. Frankly the US pays for the cost of the research while the rest of the world just pays for the cost of production. If you want to fix the cost of insulin products (and many other drugs) in the US you need to figure out how to make everybody else pay for the true costs. Edit: also your last source there doesn't even know what it's tal…

The history of insulin shows a great deal of involvement and progress made by researchers in several countries, and the US would probably not even rank as first among them.

Eli Lilly was the first commercial producer of insulin at any significant scale.

Genentech developed biosynthetic human insulin using engineered ecoli.

Eli Lilly produced the first of the modern synthetic insulin analogs.

Literally every major breakthrough except the initial bovine extracts were done in the US.

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#138
post #98
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no free market for lifesaving drugs. Just extortion.

Is it ethical for a doctor to accept payment for life-saving services, then? A much more interesting discussion could be had around who pays for it (and how, and how the prices come to be as high etc.) – because somebody ultimately does.

Nope it's not. They can get paid a wage from gov and charge nothing. Private Healthcare in its entirety is unethical. Shouldnt exist. Full stop.

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the usable refrigerants were either flammable, toxic, or highly ozone depleting, or a combination, up until the 90s…

Pretty sure R290 is flammable and I believe being used more and more

Yes, R600 even more so, there are some very expensive exotic refrigerants that are not, but they literally didn’t exist pre 90s.

Re: Novo Nordisk facing pressure as study finds $1k drug can be made for $5

#140

The world no longer has an obesity problem. It has a semaglutide access problem. We can't manufacture virtue at scale, but we can make vast amounts of a simple organic compound. Give it away. The public health benefits will pay for themselves.

Wouldn't be better for people to simply eat better? Obesity levels are much lower in Norway than they are in the UK and US. As far as I can tell this is because in Norway we simply eat less fast and ultraprocessed food.

> Wouldn't be better for people to simply eat better?

Has a half-century of telling people to "simply eat better" worked?

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