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Originally posted by james t kirk
Actually, that is not true.
The reality is that the big phramas spend more advertising their products than they do inventing them and getting FDA approval.
As far as "new drugs" go, the big pharmas aren't interested in coming up for a cure or a vaccine for anything. They only want to sell you treatments. They want you to take a beaker of pills for the rest of your socalled life.
Back in the 40's and 50's when the government ran research programs at the Universities, they discovered antibiotics like penicilin, and vaccines for mumps, small pox, leperasy, and polio.
Please list any vaccine discovered by the big pharmas in the last 20 years that I would say, "wow, thank god for the big pharmaceutical companies"
You won't be able to.
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The costs are nowhere close to comparable, even when you throw the cost of a salesforce into the "advertising" mix. The average R&D costs (including research on drugs that don't pan out) of bringing a new drug through the entire R&D and government approval process is about $800 million*. You then have to recoup your costs during the patent protected period of the drug before someone else takes your work and sells it. In most cases the patents already are nearly half over before the drug even gets to market.
As far as your big pharma conspiracy theory of holding back treatments in order to make more money, please. Companies pray for a drug which will hit the $billion mark. A cure for any major disease would easily hit that mark.
As far as vaccines in the last 20 years, there have been vaccines for Hep A, Lyme Disease, and rotavirus.
There are countless non-vaccines created by the evil big pharma companies that save millions of lives a year that are one use drugs and do not require a lifetime of maintenance.
*J.A. DiMasi, R.W. Hansen, and H.G. Grabowski, “The Price of Innovation: New Estimates of Drug Development Costs,”