From PR email:
Accountable.US’ review of R&D spending by the five-biggest U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies found the $112 billion they spent on R&D over the last three years has been outpaced by the $125 billion they spent on stock buybacks and dividends, and the $159.8 billion in profits they reported over the same period.
So the pharma companies made 30% in three years on their R&D spending. This is not excessive is it? Too large an incentive to continue spending on R&D?
Sorry, but their R&D spending generates less than nothing over three years – it takes twice that long (usually more) to get a drug on sale starting from discovery. The profits are from drugs discovered years ago and painstakingly tested before submitting them to clinical trials followed – sometimes – by approval. That’s whu patents last for 20 years from registration of the patent.
One might like to point out that the $125bn spent on dividends and stock buy-backs has to be part of, not additional to, the reported profits. The “and” is deliberate suggestio falsi.
” it takes twice that long (usually more) to get a drug on sale starting from discovery.”
Or if it’s a vaccine a couple of months and no liability and you get cover from any questioning courtesy of the government and the MSM. AND you get rules in place saying everybody has to take multiple doses whether it works or not.
Of course the pharma companies I cynically refer to are the evil corporate ones which collude with regulators to exploit poor sick people and make obscene profits, not the heroic private sector philanthropists who make the drugs that keep me alive. Other characterisations are available
I wonder how much Big Pharma spends on public relations.* If I were an evil capitalist profiting of the sick, I would spend a bit of money publicizing all the good I do through developing new drugs for the sick etc., but they don’t seem to.
Same as Big Oil. You’d think they might produce some glossy ads pointing out how much of our current existence depends on fossil fuel, (and how rubbish the models are which attack them), but they don’t.
Strange.
*Actually I don’t really wonder. They seem to think their money is better spent ‘lobbying’ pols and bribing doctors and perhaps they’re right. Their fight seems to be mostly against their rival Big Pharma companies rather than convincing us.
Don’t stock buybacks come from retained earnings that have already been taxed?
Don’t stock buybacks come from retained earnings that have already been taxed?
No, isi3
Mostly they load up on debt to fund the stock buy backs. And debt interest is tax deductible.
We’re in the money! Until the interest rate hammer comes down…
Where to even begin with this rubbish?
1. Tim, they say profits so it’s not a 30% [sic] return as it’s already net of the R&D costs.
2. Except it isn’t because this is for totally different products. So it’s net of some other R&D cost.
3. Stock buybacks and profits is indeed double counting.
4. R&D are not the only costs. You’d only compare profit to R&D alone if you were looking for a correlation.
5. Because the R&D and profit are for completely different products, we have no concept of NPV or similar – how long did it take to get the return?
6. The past 3 years wasn’t exactly a typical period for pharmaceuticals.
I could go on. In summary, this email brings drunks and lampposts to mind…
Don’t they hedge with interest rate swaps?
It was good to see “our” NHS doing their bit. Search “Dr Campbell Pfizer illegal exploitation” on youtube…
For the sake of fairness I should point out there is also a youtube of “the dishonest rise of Dr John Campbell”.
So you decide…
Kevin, big pharma do not see patients as their customers, they see the payers, mostly governments, as their customers.
This is a predictable response to the incentive structure.
The PR consists mostly of patient “lobby” groups, some of them basically fake, much more of this in the US than Europe, and some direct to patient advertising, again in the US. Development is highly focused on the US because demand can be generated cheaply, and medicare patients (mostly >65) have something close to an absolute right to be prescribed any drug on the market, and most of the cost paid for by medicare, which is also (but likely to change) prohibited from negotiating prices.
I’ve watched the video accusing Campbell. I’ve watched a lot his videos and never seen him make any claim not backed up by a scientific paper. He does have the occasional guest who might make a claim of their own. The ‘dishonest’ accusations are pretty flaky. What they are attacking him for is questioning the official story. That is free speech. And when questions cannot be asked we know what is going on.
Rhoda – your first characterisation is correct.
Kevin B – they spend a fortune on PR, advertising (which buys media compliance), sponsoring TV news shows (in the US), taking doctors on junkets etc etc
Grist – John Campbell has basically moved from belief in the vaccines to wondering what the fuck is going on, by following the evidence eg
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202208.0151/v1
and
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/08/13/large-german-insurer-reports-staggering-rise-in-adverse-effects-from-covid-19-vaccines/
My father and his wife worked in healthcare and there was always copied of the Nursing Times lying around, which was full of pharma adverts advocating this or that treatment. Target your advertising at your audience. Oh No! That’s what Facebook does, it must be evil!
Phillip, I thought they’d capped the amount of debt interest you could claim against tax?
I’m definitely Doing Science when I tick the box next to a garbage summary of a garbage paper.
Its hard work to keep on monetizing retards. And I have to maintain the same level so the retards don’t stop watching?
Listen like and subscribe and don’t ask me any basic medical questions.
Pfizer ‘vaxxine’ linked to heart problems and blood clots. This week, Pfizer buy company that specialise in dealing with sickle cell and blood clots.
Incidentally, where are the calls for a windfall tax on Pfizer, Moderna et al?…..
“Pfizer Inc.’s top-selling COVID-19 vaccine and treatment have left the New York City drugmaker flush with cash to spend on an acquisition spree. The vaccine and treatment brought in more than $16 billion combined just in the recently completed second quarter”. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/pfizer-continues-pandemic-revenue-buying-spree-with-5-4-billion-hematology-deal
John Campbell is a youtuber. I don’t need to pay to get his vids and I can make my own assessment of them. The ones who are pushing useless vaccines and denying their ineffectiveness and the amount of harm they do while trying to silence opposing views, those people include people who are paid my tax money to look after the nation’s health and they lie right to my face.
@Rhoda
Correct. At this point, those wilfully igniting the evidence against, or shilling for, the jabs eg ’Nurse Campbell’ above are either paid by pharma, or government, or are experiencing such overpowering buyer’s remorse that that it’s sending them mad.
It was entirely fair to at least consider the jabs early on; now it’s insane.
A few days ago the CDC removed the section on its website that ‘the mRNA and spike protein do not persist in the body’.
Actual scientists have been saying for some time that this did not appear to be true but government bodies charged with ensuring the safety of the people, and the media which is supposedly holding government to account, have been extremely reluctant to make such admissions. Why??
The fact is that the jabs turn your body’s own cells into factories for the spike protein – this much they openly state. The vaccines still being given out to anyone fool enough to take them are for a spike protein which is a) now entirely obsolete and b) itself toxic.
I must say that I find our host’s relative lack of interest in this huge medical, legal and financial scandal odd, too.
It’s not something I know about, not a subject where my view adds anything to the information etc. It’s not just that I dunno, I don’t even have the base expertise to be able to go find out. So, let other people talk about it, I’ll carry on with the things where I do know something.
What I find strange, Tim, is that you have endless opinions (most of which I agree with) about government expenditure on everything else, but you don’t appear to be even the slightest bit curious about the economics of governments agreeing to pay Pfizer billions for ‘vaccines’ that have been developed at light speed amidst allegations of fraud, and force (or at best coerce) their citizenry to take them?
It doesn’t interest you for instance that the FDA goes to court to try to keep the Pfizer trial data secret for 75 years – data in respect of a(n often mandated) product that has been injected into the majority of people of the western world, under a blanket of media and social media censorship, with (at the very least) concerns from serious doctors and scientists about the outcomes?
As a writer on economics and politics, you don’t know – or even care to think – anything about whether or not it was right to print (in the UK) something like £400 billion to support lockdowns and the rest of the bullshit?
As a writer on abortion, you are not interested in what appear to be very sudden and high levels of still births?
I doubt you have a very intimate understanding of the physics of eg building bridges, but you know when one is falling down, and you know when the government is being ripped off or is acting otherwise improperly.
Interested, plus one.
Tim, it doesn’t matter if epidemiology or virology or vaccines are your specialist subject. It is sufficient to ask why nobody is allowed to ask why.