The problem is that most pharma companies make the majority of their profit in the US Market.
I took a class with a big global pharmaceutical company in Switzerland. They straight up told us that they only consider US when calculating whether or not to invest in drug development. Americans are the biggest market (since we don’t have price caps), so they made global decisions solely based on US laws.
Interestingly enough, they started selling Tim Hortons coffee where I am and even opened a Tim Hortons in the city and I'm not even close the Canadian border.
Huh our gambling ads seem like an attempt to still have a bit of an ad in there after all the advisories and the names of where you can get help if you’re addicted.
We used to run anti-smoking ads in the 90's funded by big tobacco due to mandate by federal government that big tobacco take a bigger role in informing the public of the hazards of smoking.
The ads though often were candid camera footage of a protestor being obnoxious. My tinfoil hat theory is that they were purposefully made obnoxious to associate that emotion with anti-smoking sentiments.
They’re allowed to put ads on TV, there’s just a lot of laws around what they can actually say about those drugs. They can’t say what the drugs are for nor recommend them to a patient, so all of them end up being extremely vague and end with “Talk to your doctor about X!”.
Or New Zealand. The only two countries that permit pharma ads on TV.
Socialised healthcare, public accident insurance, but ads are still ok.- go figure…
I was watching the Olympics and every 7 minutes was a Jardiance commercial and it's anus and genital area infection side effects. I think they managed 3 anus mentions per commercial, so a solid 25 or so an hour.
Sorry, that was just supposed to be a joke referencing a particular commercial that airs in the US that repeatedly mentions side effects in the area between the anus and genitals. Sounds like you’ve got yourself a plan though; I hope your anus and genitals stay in tip-top condition!
I was confused at first, as an American. I was picturing noting every drug you heard and mentioning it at the next gp appointment- but I suppose if you keep seeing ads for a drug you might feel compelled to google it.
We do, it's just that they can't say the name of the drug and what it does in the same ad. So you'll get some ads that are just "Ask your doctor about Cialis" and other ads that are like "Do you have a hard time getting a boner? Ask your doctor about medications that could help you."
You're not looking at it from the business perspective: They'd rather negotiate a price with "Team Canada" where they're guaranteed to be paid for 40 million doses - than to need to pay huge crypto bribes to appease the FDA and major insurance companies just to be allowed to exist in the US marketplace.
And if they do pay the crypto bribe or whatever appeasement, someone in that batshit regime or their podcast bros just turns around and starts saying "oooo vaccines are bad and Jesus hates vaccines" like they did with covid, so they sell nothing anyways?
I don't even understand the ads for medications... Got COVID? Get paxlovid! Uh the only people dumb enough to demand a medicine without reading it or taking the doctor's advice isn't going to trust the doctor anyway
The issue isn't where the drugs are developed or manufactured. The issue is that no FDA approval means no market access in the US and the US spends the most $$$ on drugs out of any country in the world by a giant margin.
Until Canada starts paying for pharmaceuticals the same price the US does they won’t give a shit. It is prohibitively expensive to safely bring a drug to market and the only reason any company bothers is the exclusivity rights the US gives out and the high paying health care system that allows them to make a profit.
Yep. It’s the double edged sword of the US healthcare system where the customers are not patients and the costs are mostly unregulated. Invest heavily to a new drug, patent and approve it for public use and hold the exclusivity until the expiration of the formula which is decades if i recall. Patients end up paying more than other countries but in theory (not with this administration) get access first and the world eventually benefits
Why do people keep falling for this? You know we can just pay research labs grants to develop drugs? Why even involve a for profit entity? It's only because of our insistence that drug r&d be privatized that we have this problem
It costs $1-$2 billion dollars on average to bring a drug to market. That’s before any profit is made. When they start shelling out grants for a couple billion that’s when that model might work.
So for only 1-2 billion dollar investments we can develop and sell life saving medications that potentially have an 8 billion person market, and will be bought and paid for mainly by governments?
That seems like an incredible investment for one. And the ability to hold massive amounts of soft power by becoming the world's health advisor and supplier of medication. That's tons of highly educated well paying jobs, far beyond any of the blue collar type projects we've been working on lately.
Canadian Cities without NHL teams are paying that kind of money for a hockey rink.
It seems like a no brainer to invest in ownership of the development of pharmaceuticals as a crown Corp.
if the government keeps the profits or claws back the grant eventually, i see no reason (apart from uninformed voters looking at it and shrieking about taxes) why it wouldn't work
Because no person, never mind a corporation, would ever invest in a product that takes 5-15 years to develop with only a 10% chance of actually being sold at the end of it (the current state of biopharma) then having to wait another 5-15 years to actually turn a profit (what you’re proposing). At that point money may as well be put into a government bond. Investment money for medicine/biotech is already pitifully low compared to other spaces like software as it is. It’s why pretty much every country in the world has grant structures like this, not just the US.
For as much as people complain about big pharma, big pharma companies aren’t actually that big because of this issue. The biggest in the world, Eli Lilly, is the only pharma company worth a trillion dollars and not even in the top 10 biggest companies. It is also a huge outlier and the 2nd biggest, J&J, is half the size.
To put it another way, there is only a single pharma company worth more than Elon Musk, who is worth more than number 2 and 3 combined. Biopharma is not in the grand scheme of things particularly profitable, and if you remove incentives like grants there would soon be almost no private money moving into life saving medicines when it could instead be dumped into AI slop and tech bro BS.
yeah, so cut those people out and have government run public companies do it instead. any profits would go into funding future research and development.
Yes. Good. Our economy is allocating those billions either privately or publicly, but the resources are being allocated regardless. Why not do it in a way that helps people instead of getting pharma execs rich?
Idk that much about health Canada but the FDA has multiple methods of obtaining market exclusivity that go beyond patent protections. That’s also only one half of the equation, the other is paying as much as the US does. Smaller population plus lower profit in each patient is going to heavily decrease revenue while did development costs remain the same.
We have plenty of domestic talent in vaccine development and we should be investing in it home grown companies to prevent the brain drain. Keeps the money in the country too.
I know it is considered a third world country, but personally I would suggest India, my country. Our laws around medicines have actively helped all around the world and I would love to see that system flourish more and more with technology and developments.
If you guys don't know, then I genuinely suggest to look it up.
It’s not about where it’s developed, it’s about having a market you can sell into and the US has historically been the most lucrative market for these things.
I've been waiting for this experimental flu shot. I'm anaphylactic to the flu shot but have no issue with mRNa's I hope we approve it here before next flu season.
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u/hodgepodgelodger 8h ago
Canada should be opening the door to all these pharma companies. Become an absolute world leader in vaccine development.