Some would argue that’s part of the new model of journalism, that doesn’t actually use journalists.
But I personally would agree with you, because I’ve been on slashdot since before karma.
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I like to call that style of article writing “wanking in public”…because that’s what it is.
I also hate it when articles derail into tangents, or detail a problem but stop short of even describing any efforts to solve said problem.
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I must admit, some of my favorite comments ever have come when trollies have inspired people to eloquently and thoroughly produce arguments that they usually think go without saying…
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And there you have a classic case of a captive market.
Hep C is surprisingly common, so the argument about amortising the costs of development doesn’t cut it. At current prices, you could do it treating a small fraction of the cases in the US (CDC estimates there are about 2.7M - 3.9M chronic cases), and, of course, the market isn’t limited to the US, not by any stretch of the imagination.
However, Gilead did not develop the drug; they acquired the company that did (for roughly 10x the cost of development). At current pricing, you could quite handily amortise Gilead’s acquisition costs in the US market alone in short order, assuming that your sales actually reflect the incidence of the disease, and there’s the rub, eh? At those prices, how likely is it that the drug is reaching all the people who need it? I’d imagine that Gilead has calculated that the captive market has tilted the playing field enough that they can maximise profits without needing to price for maximum market penetration.
I’d say that the public good is not particularly well served by this example of “profit incentive”. Greed can be a useful motivation, provided you put some hard limits on its grasp. That means regulation.
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You’ve pointed out the key “problem” with a drug that cures an infectious disease 95% of the time. If it is widely available, it not only will eliminate the current market, but also future “customers” through epidemiological eradication of the disease.
Looking only at the spreadsheets, the drug’s commercial success is doomed unless it’s priced to be prohibitively expensive.
With luck, but, considering the prevalence of the disease, I doubt it - the drug is curative, not preventative like a vaccine, which means that the probability of communicating the disease before diagnosis is non-negligible. The number of new cases in the USA is dropping yearly, but it’s still a fair number.
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Ah, I thought that a successful course of therapy eliminates the virus from the patient, thus making them no longer a carrier. I stand corrected.
It’s not that. We had drugs that did/do a similar job on bacterial infections, i.e., antibiotics, but those bacterial infections are still around (and the antibiotics no longer work as well as they did). We achieved eradication of a number of viral diseases by making sure that people were immunised at a very young age before they could contract the disease.
The problem is not that the people are carriers after a course of treatment - they aren’t - it’s that they are carriers before, for however long it takes to achieve a diagnosis of Hep C. Note that CDC has a very wide estimate of how many people are affected (2.7M - 3.9M) - that’s because a very large number of cases go undiagnosed. That’s not an ideal situation for eradication, regardless of how effective sofosbuvir is.
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