The hidden truth behind drug company profits

The hidden truth behind drug company profits

www.independe nt.co.uk

Our governments have chosen, over decades, to allow a strange system for developing medicines to build up. Most of the work carried out by scientists to bring a drug to your local pharmacist – and into your lungs, or stomach, or bowels – is done in government-funded university labs, paid for by your taxes.

Drug companies usually come in late in the process of development, and pay for part of the expensive, but largely uncreative final stages, like buying some of the chemicals and trials that are needed. In return, then they own the exclusive rights to manufacture and profit from the res

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At last the scandal that is the way Big Pharma operates is making it into the MSM arena.

Contrary to what most people think, drug companies (according to an independant study) spend only 14% of their budgets on developng new drugs.

They also have huge influence in the WHO - could this be the reason for the WHO declaring a pandemic very early?

The article proposes a reform of the way drugs are made and patented - with the scientists in universities who do the bulk of the work getting paid, and then the drug coming into the public domain.

Of course this will have the drug companies in uproar - not because they care about the consumer, but because they care about their profits and protect them at all costs, to the extent that they spend hundreds of millions lobbying governments to change laws to suit them.

www.independe nt.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

Drug Compaines make alot of money plus they do alot of PR work towards the doctors to recommend their drugs as well

[edit on 5/8/09 by Sth Hemisphere]

This year i suspect the big pharma companys will make billions of pounds in profit from Tamiflu. The funnier thing is when winter arrives swine flu will evolve into a new strain and Tamiflu will have no effect at all on it....
People also don't understand that Tamiflu was developed in Japan armound 2004-05 to help combat bird flu in China......

BOYCOTT PHARMACEUTICALS. Find alternative and preventative ways. This will be a start to getting these killers under control somewhat.

I have been trying to wage a one-man war against the outrageous lie behind the well-established meme that "drug companies spend billions to develop new medicines" for years now.

Even WITHIN the research community itself, where they should know better, they maintain this 'the king has no clothes' shadow puppetry, pretending that the drug companies actually 'invest' in the process. It's like willful ignorance.

WE pay for it - the drug companies make a paltry gesture, and then claim the revenue flow, as if THEY did something other than pay marketing and regulatory costs.

The Higher Educational (University) institutions are willing participants in the charade since it allows them to fleece the government of funds via indirect cost reimbursement and the more they do, the more politically relevant they are allowed to become.

It is a scam, a disservice, and a slap in the face to everyone who has been indoctrinated to believe that they are a 'constructive' member of society, rather than the opportunistic leeches they are.

Soon, someone will post a lot of hyperbole and crap about how 'expensive' it is to carry out drug research... and you will see just how deeply programmed the general population is.

reply to post by Maxmars


Like most things, people seem to believe propaganda - and that's what it is when the drug companies claim they spend billions on research.

This should open a few eyes, however:

a detailed study by Dr Marcia Angell, the former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, says that only 14 per cent of their budgets go on developing drugs – usually at the uncreative final part of the drug-trail. The rest goes on marketing and profits. And even with that puny 14 per cent, drug companies squander a fortune developing "me-too" drugs – medicines that do exactly the same job as a drug that already exists, but has one molecule different, so they can take out a new patent, and receive another avalanche of profits.

As a result, the US Government Accountability Office says that far from being a font of innovation, the drug market has become "stagnant". They spend virtually nothing on the diseases that kill the most human beings, like malaria, because the victims are poor, so there's hardly any profit to be sucked out.

We all suffer as a result of this patent dysfunction. The European Union's competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, recently concluded that Europeans pay 40 per cent more for their medicines than they should because of this "rotten" system – money that could be saving many lives if it was redirected towards real health care.

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The problem doesn't belong with organisations like NICE when certain medicines are deemed too expensive to save or prolong a persons life - it belongs with the politicians who allow this corrupt practice to continue, along with those who deem that profits are more important then human life, even when they had little hand in creating a product.

It's also one of the major reasons why people in the US pay so much for their healthcare, insurance etc

Sadly, unless there is a complete overhaul of the system, this will not change anytime soon.