[greeneggs]

> Only the profit is privatized. It has always been thus.

This is false. Just the other day we had a discussion on another Alzheimer's drug failure [1]. From the linked article, "Biogen and Eisai will discontinue two late-stage trials designed to evaluate the efficacy and safety of the drug, aducanumab, which has cost the partners more than $830 million over the past three years." This comes after Eli Lilly spent $3 billion on another Alzheimer's drug, that failed in 2016, and other failures from Merck and Johnson & Johnson. There's a fortune being spent on the last steps of getting a drug to market, or not.

One might argue that there has been some regulatory capture, that the pharmaceutical giants have happily acquiesced with the FDA in making drug trials more and more expensive. Now only the giants can afford trials, and small companies have to go through them. But the trials are absolutely extremely expensive.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19468987