Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
What’re the prerequisites to get the antivirals these days?
60+ for pakeha, 50+ for Maori / Pacific Islander, or be classed as immuno-compromised, or your previous covid infection was severe.
I actually thought they’d loosened the criteria up but I guess not :(
:(
Supposedly it costs $13 USD to produce a five-day course of medication, but it’s sold to governments at disgusting prices because they can get away with it. It wouldn’t be capitalism if useful medicine was easily accessible, would it?
That $13 is the cost to produce, it doesn’t include the $1B-$3B USD cost to develop, test, and bring a drug to market, or the sunk cost of drugs that never hit the market.
Plus companies only have 7 years before the patent expires and other companies can produce it without the R&D cost.
Also, almost no one is paying sticker price, and pharmac pays some of the lowest prices in the world for drugs.
I’m not going to argue it isn’t still too much, but quoting the production cost is disingenuous because the cost of drugs is in R&D not the actual cost of prduction.
The markup is obscene, for sure. I think it was only last week it was announced the price is going up to US consumers, to around $1400 for a weeks’ supply. I don’t know how the billionaires expect to make money off their slaves if they’re all too busy dropping dead from lack of adequate healthcare.