[pdonis]

> if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.

If you take billions of taxpayer money to fund your research and get special access to information from government agencies like the NIH that the taxpayers paid for, and then you try to quadruple the price of what you're producing after you've already sold billions of units at a nice tidy profit, yes, that's greedy.

If pharmaceutical companies were free market entities who took all of the risk of developing new drugs, then it might be justifiable for them to charge whatever the market will bear. But that's not how drug research works in our society; in our society, we already pay for much of the research with our taxes, so pharma companies that are doing parts of the research and producing the drugs are not operating in a free market. They are benefiting from government largesse, and there are limitations that go along with that.

[phpisthebest]

>>If you take billions of taxpayer money to fund your research and get special access to information from government agencies like the NIH that the taxpayers paid for, and

And exemption from all legal liability for your product even if due to quality control issues during manufacturing....

[nhchris]

> in our society, we already pay for much of the research with our taxes

I don't know if there was a study done for the Moderna vaccine funding, but the AstraZeneca vaccine research was 97% publicly funded, so "much" is an understatement.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/apr/15/oxfordastraz...

[blooalien]

> … "and there are limitations that go along with that."

There would be limitations if those governments involved weren't populated almost entirely by corporate owned puppets.