Next time you take a pill, think of this: Big Pharma makes billions of dollars a year on that pill. Yes, it was expensive to develop and test, but quite likely Big Pharma recovered the initial investment in research and development within the first first few years or less once the drug was on the market. Consider, too, the pharmaceutical company who developed and markets that drug has a 17 year patent in order to prevent the development of a generic form, which naturally sell for much less. For argument sake, lets say that pill youre taking costs $10 per pill, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people take the same pill at $10 per pill every day at least once but quite possibly more. Within the first 2 years on the market, the drug company recovers all of its research and development investment. The drug company then has 15 years of $10 per pill profit from hundreds of thousands, or millions, of doses per day. Multiply that figure by the number of medications that particular drug company has on the market times the number of pharmaceutical companies around the world. Instead of doing the right thing and using some of those HUGE profits to work on medications for nonprofitable, yet deadly and fast-moving diseases, what happens? As always...shareholders and executives get richer and the sick die. Whatever happened to humanitarianism? When customers are paying $10 per pill for 17 years, basically 15 of which are clear profit to the drug companies, do they not have a moral and humanitarian responsibility to develop medication to treat a pandemic such as Ebola?
Posted on: Sun, 19 Oct 2014 15:46:46 +0000
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