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Open thread Oct. 20, 2017

Dan Crawford | October 20, 2017 7:27 am

Tags: open thread Comments (1) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
1 Comment
  • Denis Drew says:
    October 20, 2017 at 8:48 am

    I was sitting in the doctor’s office one day — and one of the drug company folks was sitting across from me waiting to talk to the doctor. Then it hit me and I asked him: “If Harvoni …

    … [Gileads 99% cure of Hepatitis C which it sells in the US for $100,000 an 84 pill treatment] …

    … is worth so much why don’t they knock off a truckload? They must keep it somewhere. Isn’t the Mafia interested?”

    Later a whole gamut of criminal enterprises opened up for me. You could get a prescription and you could hit the pharmacy when you knew they had it (burglary or robbery). You could use it or you could sell it and get another prescription: you “never got it.”

    Harvoni could be the smuggling enterprise dream. You are not going to get life imprison for smuggling kilos of prescription drugs (I don’t think). 84 pills weighs, what, about two ounces? A couple of million dollars per kilo at US pharmacy prices — maybe $200,000 on the street. Cost to manufacture: maybe $2,000 — going by $150 a treatment for Sovaldi (I saw somewhere), the main ingredient. No raids and no payoffs at the point of manufacture (India, China, Egypt?) — and no guilty conscience: you’re saving lives! 🙂

    Organized crime would not apply its “you-deal-you-die” rule.

    It could be like prohibition (exactly like). Cops may look the other way — they don’t want people to die. Juries may not convict!
    * * * * * *

    Possible anti-pharmaceutical extortion TV ad:
    I’m thinking of a scene I used to see on Seventh Avenue outside Madison Square Garden in the 70s. Two money trucks would be parked, one at the curb, one catercorner the next lane out, four guards come out of the building, one with two boxes (presumably money) on a hand truck, one just behind him to one side, another ten feet behind him to the other side and one trailing thirty feet back on the other, all guns drawn.

    Well, you’d just need a little box with a dozen bottles of pills to go way over a million legit pharmacy smackolas with Harvoni. You could film it being delivered to a drug fortress. Once the opportunity of extreme profits knocking off sky high-priced prescription drugs, not just Harvoni, gets around you’re going to have to safeguard them much more than, say, mere check cashing place dollars — worth incomparably more.
    * * * * * *

    Another medical murder angle:
    Put up a countdown billboard showing how many years and days before Hepatitis C can be wiped out in this country — simultaneous with Gilead’s Harvoni patent running down.

    It is crazy to have a cure for Hepatitis C and have to wait twenty years to take advantage of it — for lack of funds to pay Gilead’s $300 billion(b) dollar drug store price. Which price Gilead will extract at $15 billion(b) a year over twenty years anyway — to treat more active infections, many or most of which will be passed on from today’s 3,000,000 uncured hosts.

    Crazy ironic because VA research funds started the cure on its way in the first place — whence said VA researchers smelled money and took over same for themselves (took it all the way to Ireland actually for lower intellectual property taxes) — the lead endocrinologist taking off a cool $446 million (almost enough to manufacture enough for all US patients) for himself when Gilead bought the cure for $11 billion.

    WHO WANTS TO BECOME THE “Tony Montana” OF HEPATITIS C? :-O

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