If memory serves; the usual approach is to ensure that the valuable intellectual property ends up in the hands of the Irish branch; and the domestic operation licenses it at a rate more or less calculated to eliminate any domestic profit.
Given the delta between generics and on-patent drugs, I’d assume that as long as they can arrange for the patents to be ‘licensed’ to the domestic side of the operation; they’ll be able to book as much of the profit as they wish in Ireland.
Oh, people on the ground level absolutely care about these things. Individual people have a strange tendency to, on average, be average. The reality is that public corporations are collective consciousnesses unto themselves. A corporation is more than its CEO’s happy thoughts. It is an organism that is required to glean a profit to survive, and maximize profit to grow. If it were instantaneously and easily more profitable to do so, they might sell boots for cats instead of medicine. Their shareholders, i.e. the owners, likely don’t care one way or the other. They want their investment to pay off. If you have a diversified portfolio and own Pfizer stock, you don’t necessarily care about one set of shares serving your morals. With majority shareholders, it can be a little different, but even then the propensity of the human mind to fool itself is great.
It’s possible to care about people and simultaneously do little or nothing to help them, even harm them. Emotions don’t matter as much as actions. The profit motive provides an ulterior incentive to keep on trucking and not look too closely at what you’re doing. I genuinely don’t care if the people at Pfizer care, because their impact on the healthcare system is more significant than their intentions.
There is literally nothing that guarantees that. Even if so, preferential societal contributions presents interesting moral questions. Is it okay to unilaterally decide that the society you essentially live in (never mind what it says on paper) should prioritize drug R&D? In a society that is ostensibly democratic, it seems strange to decide where your “taxes” (since we’re taking the position that the public good is simply being reallocated, rather than pocketed as profit) should go with no regard to representative government. We sanction some of that in charity tax breaks, but we absolutely put a limit on it for very good reasons.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that drugs are expensive to research and produce, but thus far, the pharmaceutical industry has taken advantage of widespread third-party payer systems to fund that. Whether this needs to change and how it can be done is an interesting debate, but there’s nothing about their actions here that indicate it’s anything more that business as usual. It’s not a paradigm shift. When I hear hoof-beats in Nevada, I think horses, not zebras.
Such as the US.
Thank you for this well thought out, fair, snark-free, and very interesting response. I’m particularly interested in the last paragraph:
Interesting debate, indeed. I spend a lot of time thinking about this.
[btw, I do not work at Pfizer, but am a scientist that works in oncology.]
Their friends are already working on it:
Right. So - we’ll be increasing tariffs on Irish products then?
well, I think that the development of computers was good enough to have pretty large-scale government backing. Why not use that model for developing drugs?
To paraphrase one Donald Rumsfeld, “You undertake government projects with the government you have, not the government you want.” In principle, I see nothing wrong with this, but if we somehow wrestled such a beast through Congress, there would be a few parties that would work to neuter it.
The thing is, it might be a viable idea for antibiotics and vaccines. Pharmaceutical companies really don’t like developing those because they’re not very profitable. (*Watches an antivaxxer’s head explode.*) Still, the prospects of getting such a thing to happen in the current political climate are not great. Technically we’re still haunted by the legacy of the Sequester.
If ISIS weaponized cancer somehow though, they’d be all over it tomorrow.
The company I work for is arranging to do this same bullshit.
I (and all other stockholders) are on the hook to pay capital gains (if the bought price is less than the merger price) for the privilege.
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