For sure, i was agreeing with you when i replied 
my rebuttal was more directed toward Shkrelli himself. Sorry if i didn’t make that apparent
1 Like
I still can’t make up my mind who has a more punchable face, Martin Scameli or Ted Schmooze
4 Likes
I skimmed the article and saw mention of “grammar school” so I figured we were talking about 12-15 year olds but I see now that’s just the name of the school.
The (perhaps overstated) point remains though that this guy is a dick and doesn’t really need to be commenting on this, even if it is directly calling him out. I agree with your assessment he just likes the attention, even if it makes him look like a fool.
The drug was developed and licensed in the 50s. It has been out of patent for a very long time. Making it is very cheap. You could probably purchase a literal ton of it in China from a chemical manufacturer for substantially less than $2 a dose. Certified medical grade. Any competent chemist could make this stuff. What the school did was a nice lab exercise for educational purposes. Journalists blew it out of proportion (as usual).
The $750 price tag is because of FDA regulation. Shkreli is exploiting a loophole in the regulation to effectively get exclusivity on selling the drug in the USA. As long as the FDA does not step in, he can charge what he likes. This is the law protecting a capitalist, not a problem with manufacturing or even anything to do with the pharmaceutical industry. This is just a hustler making a buck by exploiting society.
If anyone could find a novel process that can actually be patented, that would be fine. If you hold the patent, no-one else can use your route to the product for a while. Good luck finding some route that is faster/cheaper. They probably tried 100s back in the day.
Anyone can make it in any other way they like, however. The compound itself is no longer patentable for the application it is currently used for. Still couldn’t sell it in the US though.
Alternatively, if you could find a new application or a new way of administering the drug. That could be potentially patentable, but you would have to show it was safe and better than currently existing drugs. Not sure if that would circumvent the FDA protection Shkreli has.
11 Likes
I would need to punch them both to determine this. Probably more than once (reproducible results, you know).
12 Likes
[quote=“whiterhino, post:9, topic:90406, full:true”]
From the linked article:
Mr Shkreli said the price rise was to extract money from insurance companies to fund research for better drugs.
Can you imagine any other industry trying to do this? Like if you asked why a pair of headphones was so expensive and the salesperson told you it was so they could fund research for even better headphones in the future. [/quote]
Not to defend Shkreli here, but this has certainly been a standard business practice for a long time. For example, most modern communications infrastructure wouldn’t exist without AT&T using decades of inflated telephone service and equipment pricing to subsidize their research work, which later led to things like the transistor and Unix but was blue-sky at the time.
3 Likes
Which rights?
This drug is old. There are no patent rights whatsoever. What Turing purchased were the marketing and distribution rights. It’s not that Turing’s the only company allowed to sell this product, it’s that it’s the only company in the US actually making and selling it. If the Gates foundation, or anyone else, wants to produce this drug, then they just need to figure out how to produce the compound, come up with a manufacturing process, get regulatory approval to manufacture it, build a manufacturing facility, and set up a distribution network.
Why hasn’t someone done this already? Because it’s a niche product, there were only 8,000 prescriptions written for it in the USA. Want a generic manufacturer to come along and undercut Turing? Reduce the barriers that make getting regulatory approval to manufacture a 70-year-old drug so expensive. Or reduce the barriers that prevent foreign generic drug manufacturers from selling their products in the US.
2 Likes
The Shkreli story is old. Nobody is missing out because of the price of the drug.
Capitalists make money - that’s what they do.
It’s not as simple as saying "He charges $750?! I can make it for $2!"
Here it is folks - you can’t buy the $2 dose.
It’s standard practice that the cost for research is factored into the cost of the finished product, not the inferior current product.
Late Stage Capitalism.
1 Like
Capitalists
make moneyextract rents - that’s what they do.
FTFY
14 Likes
OK, if the medicine has so little use, does this mean it isn’t used in the 3rd world at all? Because if it was something that millions of people used, I could see the Gates foundation working with someone to pump a lot of it out.
I admire your commitment to the scientific method!
10 Likes
Further investigation will be needed if I’m to finish my thesis titled “Cover Drive or Reverse Sweep: An examination of cranial impact trauma forces on Homo Douchebaggii and the effects on human stress levels.”
11 Likes
⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑⇑
Quick, someone get this humanitarian some grant funding!
10 Likes
The drug is available readily overseas for not a lot of money. Because the countries that make it don’t erect the regulatory barriers that the FDA does. It costs a couple of cents for a dose in Brazil. Over a dozen companies manufacture it in India.
This is a really hyped issue that doesn’t matter much. One, if you’re not in the US, it’s a very affordable drug. Two, if you are in the US, there are better and cheaper drugs to treat malaria and toxoplasmosis. Three, if you’re in the US and actually need it (and again, we’re talking 8,000-10,000 scripts for it a year so odds are low), you’re probably not going to pay that list price in the first place since Turing willingly participates in the 340B discount program. The only people paying near full price for that drug would be wealthy people with expensive health care plans.
Turing’s pricing is predatory and cynical, but it’s predatory on the insurance industry, not on the end user, and it is exactly the sort of behavior that the FDA’s regulations encourages and can be expected to produce.
3 Likes
It’s the making off the health and well being of one’s fellow human beings that’s shitty.
8 Likes
My hypothesis is that the amount of impact applied to the cranium directly influences the amount of stress felt by the person applying the impact. However, we need to collect test data. Lots and lots of test data.
2 Likes
Didn’t you know that Naked Capitalism is a Russian propaganda website? Because science says so.
This is a great reply because it’s finally raising the right issues! A whole lotta people missing the point, this thread here.
Absolutely on the first part. For BB to call them children is dumb, but the journalists reporting this story are alright by me. I’d rather know about this stuff than not.
[quote]
The $750 price tag is because of FDA regulation. Shkreli is exploiting a loophole in the regulation to effectively get exclusivity on selling the drug in the USA. As long as the FDA does not step in, he can charge what he likes.[/quote]
As I understand it, it would be more accurate to say that his company is the only producer that has pursued a license since it went off patent, or at least the only one that received one. So not so much a loophole as just yet another instance of Congress failing to step in in a clear case of market failure.
Certainly it is those things. And it could be fixed in so many ways. The law could allow you to import a generic (that had been previously approved) if less than 2 companies got a license to produce it. Or the FDA could be given power to set prices on generic medicines, either in such specific case or, perhaps, more generally.
You could, by getting a license for generic production from FDA.
Correct me if I’m wrong, here? Shkreli is still an odious worm. To quote:
What’s going on, basically, is that a new breed of pharmaceutical company has emerged (Valeant is, or at least was, the archetype) that doesn’t develop drugs but identifies business opportunities in existing drugs --many of them with expired patents – that the previous owners were too lazy or timid or decent to fully exploit. So they acquire them, and jack up the prices.
and also where he says “no one ever bothered to develop a generic competitor” in the part right before that. from this article
3 Likes
I fully agree. The government or at least the FDA should step in an stop encouraging companies to adopt orphan drugs in such a non-productive way. They did this to ensure that there would be at least one producer for drugs that are considered not very profitable, because they are no longer in patent. That makes sense, but excesses like this need to be stamped out.
The solution is not to show the public that “it can be made really cheaply” and convince them that that is the problem. Or that it is the “big bad pharmaceutical industry” that is fleecing its customers. It is not. It is regulatory problem and a byproduct of ill-concieved laws and regulations that sociopaths can take advantage of. That is where the focus should lie and that is wat needs fixing.
The only way to do that is to get the public behind it, and for that they need to be well informed on the issue. Selling more papers (or advertising) with a heart-warming but misleading story is not going to help.
2 Likes
