Government…..
That is the subject I teach.
Yet, I’ve been reminded this is not the place to share my personal feelings in that arena….
They (governments) could solve this issue, but WE CAN’t EVEN GET BASIC ZIKA FUNDS THROUGH OUR TOTALLY FUCKED UP CONGRESS!
pardon my language.
m

In the case of lack of government funding they just lie.

[UPDATE: We should note Appendix 2 on page 24 of this report lists National Institutes of Health grants to Pharmassset and its former chief executive before the sale to Gilead].

Edit: can’t seem to create a linky in a quote so ‘this report’ is http://freepdfhosting.com/e8476beb4e.pdf

Very surprised my comment survived moderation on that article. Earlier there were only ones supporting the price.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the stakeholder was king. CEOs saw their role as one of balancing the interests of the various groups that touched their companies—customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and the community at large.

Another interesting comparison is the monetary rewards of then versus now. I wonder if their performance has increased commensurately?

The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased 1,000 percent since 1950, according to data from Bloomberg. Today Fortune 500 CEOs make 204 times regular workers on average, Bloomberg found. The ratio is up from 120-to-1 in 2000, 42-to-1 in 1980 and 20-to-1 in 1950.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/30/ceo-to-worker-pay-ratio_n_3184623.html

And yet, many of us here have bought drugs legitimately, from companies with licences tied to Gilead, for much lower prices than the Western RRP.

Why are people only criticising from one side when we have done so well with Gilead’s own cut-price drugs? I’ve mentioned this many times, but no-one seems able to accept that they got very good deals from the company they are attacking.

Yes, they are greedy, but they also allow this wide open back door that anyone with half a brain, thanks to the work of this site, has been able to make use of.

So please keep your arguments balanced, especially when you start praising other companies that pirate the drugs and have made relatively little investment into research apart from getting the manufacture right. They are the real bottom-feeders (but all the same, I have some respect for their criminal professionalism in delivering even cheaper drugs to the market.)

It’s a complex issue that doesn’t yield much to the logic of dedicated witch hunters and other overly idealistic commentators.

Hi A.L.,

Of course the problem with your argument is that it is not “Gilead’s own cut price drugs” that people here are using but mostly Indian and a few Bangladeshi manufactured drugs enabled by the fact that India didn’t and Bangladesh isn’t required to recognise a Gilead patent.

Gilead only provided a licence to some of the manufacturers after it realised it was unlikely to achieve the patent control it had applied for in an attempt to harvest some income from the situation. The fact that they have subsequently acquired patent in India is irrelevant to why we can access these medications.

And they certainly don’t “allow this wide open back door” as you state. In fact they attempted to apply rules of supply such as “bottle return before prescription refill” to their licencees to prevent this occurring. Thankfully they have not been very successful in doing that.

Nor have Gilead invested a great deal into research in this case, instead they took a gamble on other’s investments in that area. How much that was truly a gamble can probably be gauged by the 11 billion they overpaid for an asset that the market valued at 7 billion at the time. You could possibly call it an astute or more correctly clever investment but it is one which they have used to price gouge the sick around the world ever since.

By the way, your use of belittlements such as “dedicated witch hunters” in what appears to be a thinly veiled attempt to inflame participants of this discussion does nothing to inform your argument or your audience.