TOPIC:

This pharma co is utterly obscene:


www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/11/2...oom-to-run-in-h.aspx

that's really disgusting stuff, ugh!

Alsdad
That was a horrible, nasty read!

""Looking ahead in Europe, we anticipate that our HCV revenues will be constrained by country-specific budgets rather than the number of patients in need of treatment." (This and other quotes courtesy of S&P Capital IQ.)

Put another way, countries will allocate some money each year to hepatitis C, and the remainder of potential patients will have to wait for future years. This means Gilead should be able to count on consistent revenue from Europe for years to come" ......

Welll UK Drs - What are you going to do about that?

And more getting infected all the time...for a continuing revenue-stream! *fistpump*


The ugly, venal face of capitalism

How breath-takingling callous! Its as if Gilead investors think of us as pork bellies:





"Randalph, this isn't monopoly money we're playing with!"

It's the blase way the article is written that gets me: Anyone would think he's discussing something like a high-end car manufacturer with a long waiting list for it's latest limited edition top-of-the-range sports coupe, rather than people queueing up for obscenely-overpriced medicine to save their lives!

Reminds me of this classic old Leunig

I think you will find that that conversation is happening regularly around the world for most of the common drugs pushed in obscene quantities often on spurious/questionable research. The amount of articles and books now being written by PROMINENT players in the field of medical research is getting larger and larger. They all point to the same corruption and criminal greed within the present medical research and marketing of drugs in the world. ie ex editor and sub editor of the British Lancet Journal, one of the founding members of the Cochrane review etc. I have been reading and studying in this area for the last 30 years. It is only when a lot of people all of a sudden due to their own personal circumstances discover this unhealthy truth.

And another insider story on this subject. I have a friend who lives in China and is married to a Chinese woman who is a Western medical doctor in the hospital system in a prominent position looking after retired political members.
Every weekend she is offered a holiday in a Chinese holiday destination 5-6 stars. She is also given kickbacks in her pay each time she writes a script for a particular drug and the hospital also receives kickbacks. No matter how you dress this up or what you call the payments they are kickbacks and incentives, and who is going to pull the plug on that? Deep levels of corruption in any other industry. Dont think that this only happens in China! Those companies are multi nationals and when you start to talk of 11 billion profit in 1 year from 1 drug, extrapolate that into a few more dozen drugs. A lot of buying power yes!

Hi Ann Bee,

Yes, Yes, I could not agree more... I just read "The Truth About The Drug Companies (And How They Deceive Us And What To Do About It)" By Marcia Angell (2004/2005), former Editor of The New England Journal of Medicine. I am now reading "Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients" by Ben Goldacre (2012/2013), University of Oxford.

... I am still a "newbie" (computer-geek term for "beginner") in all this, but already it seems like "...here we go again!" with Hepatitis C.

Will it ever end?

Maybe it is ultra-naive of me to say this, but the computing world used to be dominated by companies like IBM and Microsoft, and then along came completely new models of doing business Linux, Google. etc. (sure, they still make big bucks, but they add value!)

... My point being that its impossible to change the old dinosaurs (i.e. you can't teach an "old dog new tricks"), but IT IS POSSIBLE TO INTRODUCE NEW SOLUTIONS which quickly gain acceptance because they actually work for people...

So even if we love to knock the dinosaurs, we should also be thinking about how to achieve a better solution beyond Big Pharma?

In the development of computing, the internet did not wait for dinosaurs. Let's now use the internet for human health!

Leunig lives close to clifton hill and many a time we wait at the lights. i try to discreetly purve on the fine mind and ignore at the same time- just another clifton hill dude.

Yes, that's the same blythe tone that has got me too, when they tell you that you'll have to wait for an indefinite time for treatment, or they announce that you relapsed but never mind because more expensive drugs are coming soon that you'll have to wait for. Or they tell you they'll apply for a care home place for you that you'll have to wait for - and to meanwhile order up your groceries via home delivery if you can't manage your shoppng. Or they give your name to the undertaker, except you don't hear it that time.

We used to just be 'warehoused'. Nothing moved.
Now we are on the conveyor belt. A very long one. Moving but still no progress.

When you hear that blythe tone watch out because it only means one thing for you - the situation is so dire that we're all going to pretend that everything is aok.

I can't think of any company in recent times that has attracted so much hatred, even Big polluting Oil. If there is such a thing as karma then they'll get theirs, but I'm not sure it works that way. I agree with you Vororo that new solutions are our best hope for that.

dt

And while I am at it, let's not forget about the founders of Pharmasset who sold out to Gilead for 11B. They had an exceptionally brilliant company and developed sofosbuvir in the first place. They knew what they had, ie. the backbone of all ifn-free combos to come for the foreseeable future. As in - they knew they had the future medical equivalent of the internet. They also had a choice. Take the money and run, or take less money but ensure that sofosbuvir would be used in a humanitarian way. The GREED started with THEM.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharmasset

dt

Difficult to think otherwise, isn't it DT?


And now Michael Sofia, the inventor of Sofosbuvir, is lamenting the fact that not all sufferers are able to access the drug





And from the wiki article

When Gilead Sciences acquired Pharmasset for $11 billion in 2012, the "smaller company had forecast a $36,000 price per treatment course of Sovaldi. Gilead's investment bankers, Barclays and Bank of America Merrill Lynch did the "valuation of Pharmasset during merger talks and the related pricing assumptions for Sovaldi." According to the The Wall Street Journal in response to the price of Solvadi at $84,000 per treatment course, the United States Senate Finance Committee wrote a letter to CEO John C. Martin questioning how much Pharmasset had spent on research and development on Sovaldi and how much Gilead spent on its "Sovaldi-related research costs since the 2012 buyout