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Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

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Re: Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

#71

Post by supergirl »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #65
supergirl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure if totally accurate but if it is then it serves the rest of the world right for playing nice with the US while the US screws them over anytime it is convenient

I'm not sure there is much the rest of the world can do given that Gilead is an American corporation.

the rest of the world can do the same. stockpile their own products, e.g. ventilators, masks, etc. then everyone dies, cause you need all the parts for a full cure. anyway, it's more about the attitude of the US. I doubt stockpiling this drug has any consequence on the rest of the world. the just bought the first batches I guess. more will be produced.

Re: Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

#72

Post by auggierose »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #36
auggierose wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe so that next time we need them, they don't just say, naahh, gonna do something instead that actually pays?

That worked so well for opioid crisis victims.

Care to convert that sentence into a coherent argument?

Re: Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

#73

Post by kenhwang »

RobertoG wrote: post #62
kenhwang wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is one of the primary reasons US drug pricing is so messed up. Many European countries negotiate drug pricing on cost to manufacturer (practically nothing) with a negotiated slim profit margin. Then the drug companies just offload the rest of the R&D cost onto the US consumer. But, almost the entire cost of a drug is in the R&D. Imagine if the rest of the world only paid for CPUs based on the per unit cost of…

So, are you saying that the European countries should stop being so selfish and stop negotiating collectively to get better prizes? Would not be the logic solution that the USA started negotiating as a block too?

The US negotiating as a block would be the logical solution. And the US sorta does, between the megasized insurance companies and Medicare, it's not a single block, but it's far from nothing. But the US isn't going to bankrupt a US company over it. So then it becomes a nation-nation negotiation via trade pacts (which are happening, much to Europe's annoyance).

Pharma is just a zero sum game; for the US to win, someone has to lose.

Re: Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

#74

Post by polotics »

nix23 wrote: post #66
flumpcakes wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very few people have private health care in Europe, at least in the UK - they are either comparatively very rich or have a job that provides it (again, very rare and probably a job that pays very well to begin with). You will see a lot of buying power from free health care providers as they represent tens-hundreds of millions of people - they will most likely pass on a price gouging drug in favour for others. They wo…

>Very few people have private health care in Europe, at least in the UK In Europe at least in Switzerland quite many have private health care (the price difference is quite small because the obligatory insurance is tremendously high already), and if you think 'we' are rich..you are wrong.

Switzerland is a complete outlier in this respect, Zürich is much closer to Boston than to Paris.

Re: Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

#75

Post by retSava »

cwyers wrote: post #17
udba wrote: post #7

They say the goal is to help as many people as possible, and that this principle has guided their development and pricing of the drug. How do they reconcile this principle with the huge price difference between the USA and the rest of the world? Or between the developed world and the developing world? I assume they are still making a profit selling doses at low costs to developing countries. If the goal is to help as…

> I assume they are still making a profit selling doses at low costs to developing countries. Why would you assume that, instead of assuming that the high prices in the developed world are subsidizing losses elsewhere? (Or, at least, that they are amortizing R&D costs with the prices in the developed world, and doing so allows them to make a profit selling more of it above the marginal cost of producing more.)

The message from the CEO which this is about, says they have the exact same price across the globe, ie no subsidizing losses by that means, or there are no losses.

The US price is in practice the same - they just had to account for the always-expected discount which will push it down to the same as others.

Re: Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

#76

Post by chrisco255 »

ageitgey wrote: post #37
chrisco255 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a randomized clinical trial comparing the two treatments?

There are hundreds of trials in various states of completion for hydroxychloroquine [1]. At least 10 of them specifically call out using it in combination with zinc, though some completed trials that don't specifically call it out in the title also used zinc if you read the papers. There are about 35 trials in various states of completion of remdesivir [2]. If hydroxychloroquine actually does anything, we'll eventual…

Here's a recent study from France on 3700 patients treated with HCQ+AZ and it shows a 66% reduction in hospitalizations: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S147789392...

Re: Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

#77

Post by kgwgk »

kenhwang wrote: post #70
sam_lowry_ wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ~$2B is an estimate that factors in the positive feedback loop high prices create.I'd expect minimal costs to achieve the same results to be one to two orders of magnitude less. P.S. I worked for J&J once, seen their inefficiencies first-hand.

I briefly worked for GSK. It's not like the inefficiencies are limited to only US companies because they can charge more. Nor have I seen the public sector run any more efficiently or effectively (and it's often worse). The reality is that it takes a very large organization to develop a drug and large orgs tend to be run inefficiently.

> It's not like the inefficiencies are limited to only US companies because they can charge more.

US companies cannot really charge more than European companies [+]. They all charge more in the US and less elsewhere.

[+] In general, there are also cases where the same drug is marketed by a US company in the US and a non-US company in the rest of the world.

Re: Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

#79

Post by nix23 »

polotics wrote: post #74
nix23 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Very few people have private health care in Europe, at least in the UK In Europe at least in Switzerland quite many have private health care (the price difference is quite small because the obligatory insurance is tremendously high already), and if you think 'we' are rich..you are wrong.

Switzerland is a complete outlier in this respect, Zürich is much closer to Boston than to Paris.

No not really...that comparison is completely wrong.

Re: Open Letter from Gilead CEO: Remdesivir Pricing

#80

Post by kgwgk »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #46
kenhwang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It typically costs ~$2B to develop a new drug. Taxpayer contributions are practically negligible.

How much did the Fed spend buying Gilead's bonds? And how much more/less effective is Remdesivir compared to the generic Dexamethasone anti-inflammatory?

They are not really comparabale as they are indicated at different points in the disease progression.
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