Dopey Media

Name a drug that was discovered and brought to market by a government, any government any time anywhere. I have some spare time so I will wait while you think about it. Try googling it, I don’t mind.

Did you google it, if you did you will likely find an article or two pumping up the role that fundamental research plays in the development of drugs and even the development of actual drugs in a research lab. Great, well done, thanks very much we appreciate your efforts research folk really I do. But….. (who didn’t see that coming) none of them made it to market without a private company in the mix who picked up where the researches left off and actually got them into the hands of patients and that is what counts. Having the cure for cancer on a shelf in a lab is no use to anyone, distribution to the consumer (patient) is what makes it useful.

So what I hear you ask. Well today on the radio I heard a women campaigning and explaining how you could buy and import Hep C generic drugs into NZ because we do not current provide these through Pharmac with the only option being self-funding of the patent holders drugs at a very high price. We are talking $60k - $100k  for a course of medication (I think but she didn’t actually say) vs some $6k. So it is easy to see the attraction and let’s be honest with ourselves if I was dying of Hep C and could use her system to fix the problem I probably would.

But….. Yep another one, why is she allowed on the radio to promote this idea? Here is what she is actually suggesting in the long term. A drug company (don’t know which one) invested a ton of money developing the drug and getting it FDA approved to bring it to market. This costs on average $4 Bn USD and can be as much as $11 Bn. To give that some perspective the Health budget in NZ is only $11 Bn USD total. To make this worth their while they charge like wounded bulls for as long as they can or put another way until their patent runs out (20 years). At which point every other drug company in the world copies their drug and starts grabbing their market and the price inevitably tumbles.

In the case of the Hep C drug China and India in particular have decided to ignore US patents so drug companies in those companies start manufacturing at a cheap price straight away as they have not had to part out with the $4 Bn the other company did.

NZ plays ball and only uses patent medicines until the patent runs out and then we buy the cheapest we can get. If you don’t act that way then private drug companies will stop spending the $4 Bn to bring the drugs to market, and as we know, no one else is doing it, therefore no new drugs, i.e. the cure for Hep C would never make it out of the lab.

So the wide spread popularisation of her cunning scheme helps 20 years of Hep C patients (before the patent runs out) but condemns everyone else to potentially no new drugs as a result. 

Like I said I may well do the same as her if I had Hep C what I certainly would not do is allow her a powerful spot on my radio show (if I had one) to promote an idea that could harm many many people (the ones who won’t get new drugs) in favour of helping a few.

The lack of critical thinking of our modern media continues to astound.