According to Forbes, Jonas Salk, by not patenting the polio vaccine, walked away from at least seven billion dollars in royalties. Albert Sabin, maybe up to twenty billion. It probably didn't really occur to either one of them. They were medical men, humanitarians, who saved millions of lives and improved the lives of hundreds of millions more. Their names have been revered and will be for decades, if not centuries, to come. They eliminated the scourge of polio from most of the world (pockets remain, thanks to the fucking CIA).
In contrast, people should spit on the ground after Martin Shkreli passes by. He is a walking, breathing argument for a socialized health-care system, if only to put villainous fuckers like him out of business. Hell, he even looks as though he should be a villain in a James Bond flick.
Remember, Shkreli said that he needed the money "for research", but his business model is nothing short of extortion. His idea of "research" is finding old drugs, only made by one company, buying that company, and then jacking the shit out of the prices. Because he's nothing more than an Albanian pirate, operating on the fringes of legality. His companies are nothing more than wretched hives of greed and villainy. One would hope that the shade of Alan Turing would haunt that little fucker for appropriating his name.
Shkreli, a scum-sucking, wretched, despicable bottom-feeder, just announced that he'll lower the price of the drug, but apparently he's going to wait until everybody stops hating him so much.
Even with assholes like this one, we wind up with more drugs for less money than we would if we had to rely strictly on altruistic genius alone. There aren't nearly enough Salks or Sabins.
ReplyDeleteThe word missing in all of this is that of a calling. Remember when medicine is a calling? My father and grandfather lived the life of practicing that kind of medicine.
ReplyDeleteUhm, Sevesteen, the point is that this cold-blooded sociopath developed nothing. He found a drug long out of patent whose development costs were amortized decades ago that has a small but critical market (as in, people die if they don't get it because there's no alternative), a drug that costs about 50 cents per pill to manufacture, and bought up the last factory that makes the drug and said to the sick people, "your money, or your life." That's not the free market developing new drugs. That's a Central Park mugger smirking as he tells people they must give him all their money or he'll kill them. And the hell of it is, there's only a few thousand people per year who need this drug, so there's no way to amortize the cost of a new $150M factory to put this asswipe out of business, he'd just drop the price until you ran out of money, buy your factory's equipment for a few dollars at the bankruptcy sale so nobody else can use it to make his drug, then hike the price right back up again.
ReplyDeleteI personally have no problem with a drug company charging what it takes to amortize the development costs of new drugs, but that's not what this smirking asshole did. What he did was nothing more than a mugging -- "Your money, or your life." That's the problem with "pure" capitalism -- it lets people who would otherwise be Central Park muggers find some *legal* way to extort money out of other people upon threat of death. Well, personally, I think he should receive the same punishment as any other mugger. A few months in Riker's Island would likely wipe that smirk off his face...
Stewart Dean:
ReplyDeleteFor a big dose of the modern day version of that calling, go watch this movie. It's a documentary about Highland Hospital here in Oakland.
-Doug in Oakland
http://www.whatruwaitingfor.com/
This guy is a sociopathic asshole--I'm in full agreement on that opinion. The issue I have is that any knee jerk regulatory solution to this particular problem is more than likely to cause even bigger problems.
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