There is finally a cure for Hepatitis C. If you owned the rights to the drug, how would you recoup your investment? How much profit would be enough? Would you withhold it from certain victims, or would you eventually ensure widespread distribution as the people behind the Polio vaccine did?
Three million Americans are infected with debilitating and always fatal Hepatitis C (As are milllions more overseas) and it has been the number one killer of health care workers in the U.S. for the past two decades. The patient suffers from fatigue, muscle pain and weakness, joint pain, intermittent fever and an impaired immune system for two or three decades before the liver finally gives out and the patient dies. However, a recently developed pharmaceutical, Sovaldi, completely cures it with 84 daily doses. Its manufacturer, Gilead Sciences, has determined that a fair U.S. price for the drug should be $1,000 per pill ($84,000 for the total treatment). Shouldn’t Gilead reduce the price once it has recouped its expensive investment, asked an NPR reporter in December? “That’s very unllikely we would do that, ” said Gilead’s Gregg Alton, but “I appreciate the thought.” (According to NPR, Gilead “developed” Sovaldi merely by buying Sovaldi’s actual developer for $11 billion. At $84,000 per patient, Gilead would “recoup” that investment from the first 150,000 customers, leaving 2.85 million more U.S. patients to pay $84,000 each, for an income of $239 billion.)
Do you have friends or family, or know any health are workers that are victims of this pernicious disease? How do you feel about all this?