Sharing because I found this very interesting.
The Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has a DIY design for a home lab you can set up to reproduce expensive medication for dirt cheap, producing medication like that used to cure Hepatitis C, along with software they developed that can be used to create chemical compounds out of common household materials.
He does mention the fact that medicine research is hard and requires money but doesn’t explain how to solve that. This is a big argument of big pharma prices, they say it finances future research. I think a good example is how incredibly fast we got a COVID vaccine. It happened because private investors had massively invested in research platforms and they invested because they are expecting gains.
that’s not the full story though. according to the NIH, the US government spent over 30 billion dollars on the covid vaccines.
and this is not unique to the covid vaccine. here’s a source with two particularly damning quotes:
“Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has invested close to $900 billion in the basic and applied research that formed both the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors.”
and
A 2018 study on the National Institute of Health’s (NIH) financial contributions to new drug approvals found that the agency “contributed to published research associated with every one of the 210 new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010–2016.” More than $100 billion in NIH funding went toward research that contributed directly or indirectly to the 210 drugs approved during that six-year period.
Ok, so we should be able to control the prices for drugs where the research has been publicly funded. But how do we avoid losing the private investors who contributed?
well, according to the congressional budget office,
In 2023, federal subsidies for health insurance are estimated to be $1.8 trillion
and this report by research america shows that the private sector spent around $150 billion on “research and development” in 2019.
it’s no secret that the private healthcare industry jacks up the prices of things to increase profits. so, some napkin math makes me think it’s not that far-fetched to think that we can save more than $150 billion in healthcare subsidies if we stop privatized healthcare and dramatically lower the costs of medical care. we could then put that $150 billion back into research, without needing to appease the private sector at all.
Here’s a fun thought, the drug you make fails but doesn’t kill you.
Instead you now have another life long ailment that cause pain/degradation of daily life.
Sounds like a great idea.
And that’s different from the commercial pharmaceutical industry how?
Commercial drugs are giving people life long diseases on top of the ones they’re trying to cure?
News to me, got any source?
The most notorious is probably thalidomide, but there are plenty others on this list of withdrawn drugs that cause long-term side effects.
