2024 LC Thread

[TrollyWantACracker]

Lol at you old farts with your Ozempic, nicotine suppositories, sensible exercise and capitalism. Smoking crack and GOMAD for lyfe.

[bbb7979]

Wow, OK I’ll keep replying to @Rugby and others if people are interested. I definitely have more to say but thought this was getting into derail territory and didn’t want to be that guy. I guess mods can decide whether this topic needs to be separated into it’s own thread. The idea that Pharma, which is creating innovations which cure disease is equivalent to tobacco which makes a product that kills people is stupid on it’s face so I may choose to not respond to you again if you don’t have a more substantive critique.

I definitely think communism sucks and the Russian variety in particular was one of the worst evils of the 20th century and @bobman0330 made a nice burn, reading and liking a post is different level of effort to writing a reply

[Fabian2]

@bbb7979

Wow, OK I’ll keep replying to @Rugby and others if people are interested.

Sure go ahead, you’ve missed a few posts already.

[TrollyWantACracker]

IMO the best pharmaceutical development is still Advil. For the life of me I don’t understand why all pills don’t have a candy coating. Did they patent that or something?

[bbb7979]

@Rugby

I’ll try again. Because we are clear talking past each other.

I’m not saying your company is evil for not funding billions of dollars in medical research for Malaria. They are private companies doing private company things.

However. It is clear (and obvious, I thought) that allowing decisions around allocation of R&D to private companies results in worse outcomes for Malaria, and in this case, evil outcomes.

From my point of view, the money big pharma gets to allocate to R&D is the money they can attract from investors or their own profits that can be reinvested. Pharma working on obesity drugs or cancer treatments or Botox that have a higher rate of return doesn’t prevent governments or nonprofits or anyone else from funding research into malaria or anything else. If the capital wasn’t going to Pfizer or GSK or whoever it wouldn’t be redirected to malaria, investors would be putting it into banking or tech or other industries that generate a profit. This isn’t some nuance of Pharma industry. This is how the global economy works. A dollar invested in development or a different drug isn’t a dollar taken away from malaria any more than a dollar invested in creating a new SaaS offering or power plant is. So I disagree that Pharma industry is responsible for lack of resource allocation to diseases in poor countries rather than society at large.

It’s also the same with the human capital. There might be a limited number of experts in vaccine development today but there’s no theoretical limit to how many people could develop that expertise rather than learning to code or learning investment banking or whatever. Many of the people working on pharma R&D would be in different fields if the industry did not pay what it does, which it can only do because of the profit margins. I don’t see a pharma company as taking resources away from malaria any more than any other industry for that reason.

@Rugby

I do work in Energy, and it’s exactly the same there.

Private energy companies are not doing enough to invest in low carbon energy fast enough to address climate change. This does not make them evil. But allowing private companies to make these decisions has resulted in the hottest two years on record.

Without massive intervention by government private energy companies would have us blowing past 7 degrees of global warming. Like, that’s the completely agreed climate consensus. 2 degrees is considered catastrophic. 7 degrees is indescribable.

This too, is an evil result, from private decisions.

I don’t see it as exactly the same. Carbon is a negative externality caused by the energy industry. That’s more akin to side effects from a drug than lack of investment in a different disease. And the pharma industry invests a lot in understanding and minimizing side effects. Nothing the pharma industry does is creating malaria the way carbon emissions are creating global warming.

@Rugby

As a side note. Some energy companies definitely are evil or do evil things, such as when they fund climate change denial.

As a side side note. Some pharmaceutical companies were definitely evil when the were lobbying against use of generic aids drugs in Africa. Resulting in the avoidable deaths of millions of people.

This decline in this chart would have shifted about 8 years to the left and taken off the peak if the US pharmaceutical industry had just got out of the way of India selling generics to Africa in the early 2000s.

Millions of actual deaths.

Yeah many pharma companies have done many evil things (look at this). I am not going to defend them all. Probably also the case with AIDS medicine, I don’t know the extent of the lobbying, but I am sure there were bad people doing bad things for personal gain.

That said, if the industry didn’t develop the cures in the first place there wouldn’t be a decline in the chart at all. If they weren’t able to extract profits from western consumers they wouldn’t be able to attract capital to invest in those cures. You want to blame the industry for waiting 8 years but without the industry and their profit motive we probably have more overall deaths today. I think the trade off for society is a lot better and the decline in that line is evidence that Pharma is doing a lot more good for the people of Africa than most other industries.

[microbet]

I think anyone who couldn’t tell I was joking/trolling about Das Kapital is dense. The stuff about it maybe also being USA football or other stuff was meant as a clue about that. Point was that waving the Capitalism flag like a patriotic numbskull is childish and simple.

[Trolly]

@simplicitus

Maybe Charles Darwin and/or Louie Pasteur invented increased life expectancy in 1859?

Unironically, yes and yes.

[microbet]

Giants of Capitalism.

[microbet]

@bbb7979

From my point of view, the money big pharma gets to allocate to R&D is the money they can attract from investors or their own profits that can be reinvested.

Also public money. Literally 99% of drugs R&D in the USA includes NIH funding.

Comparison of Research Spending on New Drug Approvals by the National Institutes of Health vs the Pharmaceutical Industry, 2010-2019 - PMC.

[Huehuecoyotl]

https://x.com/SteveRattner/status/1805996966712651859

[LFS]

Florida man sneezes his intestines out of his body at restaurant

[mosdef]

THAT’S SOCIALISM!

[LFS]

@LFS

All of this to say that I’m going to see my doctor tomorrow to ask about the semaglutides.

Results: doctor was like “oh yeah you are a great candidate for Zepbound”. He submitted the prescription and it did not immediately kick back so he thinks it might just go through (sometimes the insurance process can be drawn-out). My BMI is 32 and I have sleep apnea, so hopefully insurance will be smart enough to see that de-fatting me is in all of our interests.

[simplicitus]

I’ve never been convinced multivitamins are useful under normal conditions. I’ve started taking one again but mainly because I’m pretty sure they’re not harmful.

Daily multivitamins do not help people live longer, major study finds

[kerowo]

Think of it as an investment in your pee.

[suzzer99]

Guessing your insurance will probably cover $150 of the $1200/month. You can use a coupon for a while.

[simplicitus]

The costs aren’t crazy if covered by insurance. Copay with vanilla Kaiser plan is under $300/mo, and it may now be $200/mo if last orders price was accurate, at least for Ozempic. If not covered, the monthly cost through compounding pharmacies is like $200-300/mo.

[bbb7979]

Pharma doesn’t allocate the NIH budget?

Yes, NIH does a lot of research on biological targets and the industry can build off of that data, so what? Are you saying NIH should invest more in Malaria and that’s Pharma’s fault?

Or is it that Pharma shouldn’t get credit for developing their drugs if NIH first published research on the biological system that provide the target for a drug’s mode of action? Even with that info 90% of drugs fail in clinical and a huge % of compounds don’t even make it that far. It’s not like NIH research gives them some risk free freeroll to develop and patent.

[microbet]

@bbb7979

Or is it that Pharma shouldn’t get credit for developing their drugs

You are the one who made an absolutist statement. Just because I’m adding that some of the funding in this research isn’t just from investors or reinvested profits doesn’t mean I am making the opposite claim and saying none of the money comes from investors or reinvested profits.

[Foiled]

@bbb7979

Or is it that Pharma shouldn’t get credit for developing their drugs if NIH first published research on the biological system

I think you’re missing the bigger picture here. People are saying NIH is quite proficient at generating research so it’s not inconceivable they could take over more of the process and questioning if the societal loss of money siphoned out by shareholders is worth the alleged benefit of it running through a private investment structure versus a different model.

It’s kind of the same as insurance companies, nobody is saying in the current US model that insurance companies or pharma have no purpose. They are wondering if would be better for the population to funnel cash towards providing these same services in a way that didn’t incur a loss of societal cash to shareholders/investors in the process