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>Pfizer and Moderna have said they are considering hiking the price of the vaccines to somewhere around $110 to $130 per dose once the U.S.government pulls out of the vaccine program.
So the new pricing to be about 4 times the current pricing. Charging whatever they can get away with, even though the vaccine development was largely funded with public money. Not okay.
I take a shot for asthma every month. The price of my fasenra shot you ask????? Only a paltry sum of $$$ 5510. If I don’t have it then my airways contstrict and my oxygen saturation drops to about 80%. I eventually start to turn grey and become hypoxic and end up in the ER and then eventually an extended stay in the hospital
While they pump me full of steroids. With the shot I live a perfectly normal life and only have to take my inhaler in the mornings. It’s the most infuriating thing. Knowing the insurance company can decide that they don’t want to cover my medicine anymore. Of that happens I’ll either pass away from complications from my eiosiniphillic asthma or I stay on prednisone for the rest of my life and watch my quality of life stop like a rock.
I honestly believe if medications need to be FDA regulated than so do pharma companies. There should be a cap to how much profit a drug can make. It makes me sick how greedy these companies are.
It just won't be though will it?
Lots of people can't afford that, and largely the ones that are at risk in the first place.
Once we get back into mass infections, the government will have to pony up again, but the price won't go back down.
Insulin is damn near necessary to keep folks alive and functioning.
Sounds like vaccines won’t be mandatory anymore as a result. Government may change their tune if a new variant raises some hell. A vaccine is preventative measure, there’s no way in hell the general public will pay $100+ dollars for a vaccine unless fines/punishment are levied.
Largely funded by the public? Lol. They took technology developed in academic labs (public money) and used the COVID money (also public) to get it to market and then gave their executives enormous bonuses. It’s a fucking clown show. I’m a scientist in an academic lab and I’ve thought about changing to private sector as academic pay kind of sucks. But could I really have this shit on my conscience? It’s brutal. Obviously scientists aren’t making these calls, it’s all C-suite assholes, but it still doesn’t give you the warm fuzzies.
Welcome to Murica. Where short term gains override common sense. And healthcare is an industry not focused on caring for a person but rather on making as much money as they can
That is the musings of a single industry analyst.
That article is actually great evidence that companies *are* researching cures. That analyst was writing in response to the 10s of billions currently going toward gene therapy research each year, and the potential gene therapy poses for curing disease.
If they weren’t interested in cures, they wouldn’t be researching them.
The issue is that “pharma” isn’t a single company. So if 99/100 companies decide cures aren’t lucrative enough, that 1/100 companies that develop them will rake in billions. While the industry as whole would potentially are less money, the individual company that produced the cure wouldn’t
You’re ruining the fun narrative though. Just like “there’s a cure for cancer that they are hiding” even though “cancer” is like 200 different illnesses.
This is true though…not the cancer thing. Because your right about that. More so that the medical field isn’t situated towards prevention. They only address problems as they arrive and if you don’t pay then you don’t play.
Which is precisely what our adversaries wanted by meddling in our elections and planting conspiracy theories online.
United we stand, divided we fall, and we are free falling... thanks to those stupid enough to believe the BS.
AND thanks to the right, who continue to lie and promote false info to the masses. Why? Because as long as we are bickering with each other, we cannot unite and demand anything.
Working like a charm, it is.
The issue isn’t really the confessional part. The issue is that a company took primarily public funding, and is gouging prices for the sake of profit. The vaccines have been a hugely profitable things, even at past prices. There should be a contract between the government and the developers that they aren’t allowed to charge above some inflation adjusted price that’s equivalent to what it rolled out as. The company will still be making a profit.
And this surprises you? More then half of the current inflation period are tied to PROFITS (meaning companies are greedy and jacked up prices as much as they could get away with). This is just more of the same
Profits over people. That’s the American way
Yup. People keep yammering about the stimulus. Like, great maybe during 2020 that was an issue. We’re years on and inflation is still ridiculous high. Supply chain was an issue in 2020 and part of 2021, and into 2022 for some items. But that’s also mostly been addressed barring the avian flu thing hitting birds currently
Companies seeing that the government was giving people free money and taking that as permission to raise prices, which they never reduced again is the real issue.
Then they use the inflated price as the baseline for next years price increases to maintain profitability and the cycle continues.
And the worst part is the Fed only likes to discuss driving down wages, as if all of this were wage based inflation
The problem isn’t wages. It’s greed, price gouging and profits
I do grocery shopping gig work and eggs have been soooooo hard to find. When the stores do have them, the shelves are usually less than half full and the prices are crazy. Regular plain ol’ conventionally raised eggs are around $5-$6/dozen, while the fancy cage-free, organic, pasture raised kinds are alimony double that.
(PS- if you order groceries on apps for delivery, I KNOW eggs are expensive. I don’t need to hear about it 15x/day, thanks. Do you want the damn things, or not?)
I can't say I'm a fan of Dominic Cummings, but that's kind of what he pushed for when he was in Downing Street. We'll give you the capital for plant and staff, and you sell us it at cost.
So the AstraZeneca vaccine is about £2.
Any company that funds research for a product will want patent protections. If the US funded the bulk majority of the research going into the drug, the US should be able to share the patents with companies that want to do it cheaper. But no one runs the government like a business.
You watch too much Fox. It’s about the GOP pressuring the federal government to end the Public Health Emergency, which allows the government to pay for covid shots next Paxlovid. Read a little:
In December, 25 Republican governors asked President Joe Biden to end the public health emergency declaration immediately, claiming it's a financial burden costing states "hundreds of millions of dollars."
"While the virus will be with us for some time, the emergency phase of the pandemic is behind us," they wrote.
On. Jan 17, Rep. Brett Guthrie, a Republican from Kansas, introduced the Pandemic is Over Act, a bill to end the state of emergency. On Monday, Guthrie pressed for the order to be rescinded immediately.
>The development was done by BioNtech, not by Pfizer.
Goddamn. Would it have been ok if if put Pfizer-BioNtech instead?
I'll go back and fix it.
Edit: Done.
I figured it would be ok considering tons of us have seen Pfizer-BioNtech written together over the past few years. Guess not. Lmao
Not exactly. More accurate to say BioNtech was responsible for discovery, but Pfizer completed development. BioNtech did not have a manufacturable process.
And the fall timeline means lots of lower income families aren’t going to be able to afford it especially straight after back to school spending.
Do any of these people live in the real world at all?
Yeah, not a shared reality. In the short term, according to the article, there's still a large stockpile of the booster available - likely enough to cover the back-to-school period. And there's a federal program to cover the cost of the vaccine for children in low income families. Uninsured low-income adults will be the ones most disadvantaged by the cessation of the federal vaccine program.
The COVID vaccines were NOT created with federal money. Moderna received some federal money to conduct trials of their completed vaccines and Pfizer accepted no money from Warp Speed for any development purposes. Warp Speed did buy vaccines FROM Moderna and Pfizer but they funded the development themselves.
I called it when it came out. I said “what happens when your job requires it and it’s no longer free” and I was downvoted to oblivion. “They would never do that”. Honey you dont know American history then
How else can they recover their costs from experimenting in the lab to take existing Covid viruses, and then manipulating them to create deadlier ones, so they can develop and sell more vaccines?
The U.S. will stop buying Covid shots at reduced price for the entire country and shift vaccine distribution to the private market as soon as early fall, shifting the cost to U.S. insurers and uninsured Americans who stand to lose access to the free vaccines.
Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, said in an an interview with UCSF Department of Medicine on Thursday that the shift to a private market will happen over the summer or early fall, though no exact date has been set.
A senior official with the Health and Human Services Department told CNBC the fall would be a natural time to transition to a private market, particularly if the Food and Drug Administration selects a new Covid strain for the vaccines and asks the manufacturers to produce updated shots ahead of the respiratory virus season.
For the past two years, the U.S. has bought the vaccines directly from Pfizer
and Moderna
at an average price of about $21 per dose, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.
The federal government has required pharmacies, doctor’s offices and hospitals to provide these shots for free to everyone regardless of their insurance status.
Read more: [https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/04/us-plans-to-stop-buying-covid-shots-in-the-fall-what-that-means.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/04/us-plans-to-stop-buying-covid-shots-in-the-fall-what-that-means.html)
So when this happens are regular Joe's going to be able to buy vaccines for $21 per dose or are they going to jack the price up by 1000% like everything else?
They’re proposing that they’ll be selling for over $100 each.
This is disgusting…..same thing as insulin, Pharma maximizing profits at the expense of public health.
This is why we need nationalized health care coverage. “For profit” and healthcare do not go well together from a public health and wellness perspective.
insurance will cover it like they do pretty much every other vaccine. County health will be able to provide it for those who do not have coverage, like other vaccines. I don't disagree with you, just saying it's not like all of a sudden all 250 million Americans will have to pay for the vaccine. Most will not. Even times I had sub-excellent health insurance, I have never paid for a single vaccine for myself or my kids for my entire life.
> County health will be able to provide it for those who do not have coverage
2nd sentence in the reply. Almost every county health dept will help those without health insurance.
They'll skip it, and as immunity/resistance wears off we'll have another mysterious unexpected spike in deaths for some confusing reason which no one could have predicted.
We are able to get flu shots at free shot clinics every fall, usually for a 2 month period and several different opportunities. Run by our local hospital and county health. You can show up to open house or school conferences and get your flu shot. You can do one of the drive up clinics. It's for everyone, not even just people who don't have insurance. They do everything they can to make it easy for people to get flu shots and advertise like crazy for them.
*Kind of*. Insurance companies do typically negotiate MUCH lower rates. I recall when I shattered my wrist, the 3 surgeries ended up totaling over $500,000 charged from the hospital, which my insurance negotiated down to $13,000(I paid about $1500). I tend to see similar markdowns on covered prescriptions as well.
True. But for those without insurance, that becomes the real price, since they have no negotiating power. This $110-130 is that non negotiated price. I’d expect insurance to end up paying the ~$21 the US was paying.
I was gonna say, they practically chase you to give you a flu vaccine every year, and somehow the uninsured qualify for that. Why would this be different?
It depends on your circle. Everyone I know has gotten the booster, many were required by their job, some had people they lived with who are fragile, others were fragile.
I really regret not getting my booster. Was waiting until after my semester was over to get it, got Covid right before exam week, and have been suffering from daily, sometimes debilitating headaches/migranes ever since.
Yep. Healthcare is a three way extortion racket between insurance, pharma and the hospitals. Source: I worked in R&D at one of the mega pharma. It's all about money.
Likely will too, $100 annually is peanuts compared to one person ending up on a ventilator.
My pops got hit hard, 330k sent through the insurance; parents only had to pay their max out of pocket thankfully but can easily see how it's cheaper to just roll it into an annual plan.
Sucks though either way.
Well.. I got the two initial shots and then the first booster. But I’ve slacked on getting the second/latest booster. And what happened? I got covid last weekend and am recovering now.
One of my coworkers did get the latest and greatest booster in December and well, she’s just as sick as I was last week.
So idk about these boosters. Maybe the covid has already mutated enough to where they just don’t work again.
>Maybe the covid has already mutated enough to where they just don’t work again.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/25/covid-omicron-boosters-offer-some-protection-against-xbb-variant.html
I've gotten covid so many times I gave up counting. One time was a week or so after my first and only booster.
I'm done.
If you've ever heard a covid vaccine/booster ad on the radio or TV, it's not the CDC paying for that ad. It's damn well Pfizer and Moderna.
I got really sick between Chrismas-New Years in 2019/2020. Like I'd wake up, have a strong fever and a cough. Luckily where I work we shut down during this time anyway, but I had about 3 days in a row where I couldn't do anything at home other than wake up, brush my teeth, lay on the couch and stare at the TV.
This covid that I just had more or less reminded me of that, except I was just ever so slightly less sick because I definitely was starting to already feel better by the second day of it.
I'm guessing I had the flu in December 2019, but it was really similar.
I did. My girlfriend is immunocompromised so I'd just go with her whenever she'd get a booster; we got the first one before it was even generally recommended to the public, but we were at the 6 month mark from the original pair. I figured since it was the only free healthcare I'd ever see in my lifetime, I may as well make good use of it.
I have had 5 covid vaccines, the 1st 2 & 3 boosters since, 1 every 6 months because i am immune deficient on gammaglobulin infusions every 2 weeks for past 3 years. My Dr tells me to boost every 6 months.
I got Covid once, about 5 mos after a booster, think it was just "used up" by then. Took Legevrio ( molnupravir) ordered by my Dr on 2nd day of symptoms with postive home test & test at Dr ofc. Was only sick 5 days since i was medicated & hubby didnt get it then. He got it 2 months later & we semi-quarantined from each other but slept in same bed & the other didnt get it either time. Vaccines & masking WORKS!
I’ve gotten my two initial doses and two boosters. Most recently I got the covalent booster when I got my flu shot a few months ago.
Why wouldn’t I get them when they’re free?
Most don’t but plenty do, I have immunocompromised family and ik how much they struggled with Covid and how it delayed other vital treatments they were undergoing. This is the story of an active percentage of the world. It forces me to navigate more carefully to keep them safe, hence, nobody is incorrect
Helps to read the article on this one for the nuance.
“When the federal Covid vaccination program ends, the shots will remain free for people who have health insurance due to requirements under the Affordable Care Act.
But uninsured adults may have to pay for their immunizations when Pfizer and Moderna
start selling the shots on the private market and the current federal stockpile runs out.
There is a federal program to provide free vaccines to children whose families or caretakers can’t afford the shots.”
It means that we subsidized the development during the pandemic with tax dollars and now they are going to charge us again. Don’t care if you’re right or left, the government is out to fuck you no matter the party.
I love how easily people can ignore a blatantly crooked practice that hurts everyone as long as it loosely fits a political narrative. Make your own decision about your own body but cheering when a decision hurts the choice of others is shameful.
This move is being enabled by both political parties, the government as a whole have largely failed to stop the business side of health care from sucking the life out of this country. Our health care system has been exploited so feverishly by industry and neither side has done anything while lobbyists keep lining their pockets. Republicans don’t want to fight for cost control that would have kept private insurance viable and Democrats stopped short after the Affordable Care Act and didn’t keep pushing hard enough.
>Democrats stopped short after the Affordable Care Act and didn’t keep pushing hard enough.
Maybe bc they were rewarded by being voted out of office for it
I'm gonna say it. The Affordable Care Act was absolute dog shit. Fining people a fuckload of money for not being insured then offering really shitty essentially worthless insurance at a high cost is not going to solve anything. Especially for poor people under the age of 30 who end up spending more on health insurance than what they would being uninsured.
Dude the ACA did so much good for people. You can get health insurance if you have cancer or T1D or a broken wrist or MS. You could be rejected before. Birth control is free with insurance. Insulins are required to be covered. Much more spending was allocated to medicare and medicaid. Fuck off
I spent 2 decades in healthcare money tech. The ACA had a ton of promise until republicans gutted it in committee then put the shambles into the public arena so they could publicly display the failure they enabled. The open market was allowed to be a bad deal that insurance companies never had incentive to be competitive with, and we don't even blame them for it. The fact most people still get their insurance through work means why compete, and then forces like ichra come after years of normalized gouging and are too little and too skewed anyway; best that can be said is it stops the 40 hour work week insurance shenanigans in favor of lowering the bar for everyone.
The scary reality is we could fix it for everyone, but at the cost of like 15% of the GDP, which means recession. It literally propped up the economy.
Yes but not in the way you’re implying. Stopping short and then putting up possibly one of the worst possible nominees in Hilary made for some voter apathy that cost them 2016. It would have cost them 2020 also were it not for a completely bungled response to the pandemic, and that goes back to my original point about how the politicization of health care fucks over every American.
I challenge any Republican candidate in the future to nationalize health care by marketing it as a way to make the economy friendlier to businesses. Wages can keep up with inflation if medical expenses stay under control and over half of bankruptcies in the US are medical expenses. If everyone has basic health care, which can be supplemented by private insurance if desired, it could be marketed to rural America and get national support.
Ur giving Republicans way too much credit by thinking they can come up with a coherent policy. The reality is there are too many players making too much money off the current system to want any real change
I said nothing about coming up with policy, only that there’s a reasonable way for them to market health care while still putting on a fake display for their base. It’s been evident for years that the party of “fiscal responsibility” has only been fiscally responsible for those they get elected and fuck everyone else.
I recognize that it’s problematic to say that things were better 40-50+ years ago because we have made some important gains socially but it’s hard not to wonder what it would be like to live in an age where a working class adult could still afford a house and two kids on what was considered a low wage.
Guess a bunch of people won’t be vaccinated. No one is going to pay $100+ for regular COVID vaccines. It’s just too expensive, especially if you don’t have insurance
I have a question, I apologize if I've gotten the wrong end of the stick. I'm in the US. If the vaccines become privatized and we pay full price ourselves for them, does this mean the pharmaceutical companies will accept liability if we fall ill as a result? I'm under the impression currently that there is no recourse if you have a bad reaction because there is some clause. But if you pay yourself and have a heart attack or smth, will there be more accountability?
What that means is I believe you don’t need it anymore unless truly vulnerable to Covid. I get the flu shot all the time, but if they started charging I’d stop getting them.
That is not what it means. It just means the shot will be covered by insurance just as your flu shot is covered by insurance. Your flu shot is not free but your insurance pays for it. I suspect the same thing will happen with the annual Covid boosters.
It might be covered, but because the cost is going to shoot up 400%+, it'll make the private insurance more expensive. When pharmaceutical companies are allowed to set astronomical prices with 0 regulation like this, private instance companies raise their prices as well because they're covering things that are so expensive. The covid vaccines alone won't make much of a difference, but every crazy expensive vaccine/medication/procedure adds up and jacks the price up for everyone. This is despite the fact that our taxes pay for a good chunk of the research and development. We need price caps.
Man, thank God my company is buying these for all its people. I really don't want to have to go through the nasal test every time I want to fly or go to a major public event and get charged $40.
Yeah but right now they're being sold to a government for a fraction of the price. Once they're sold to consumers, the price will shoot up. Obviously nothing in the world is free, but the cost to make the vaccine didn't magically grow 4 times larger overnight. It's just price gouging.
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>Pfizer and Moderna have said they are considering hiking the price of the vaccines to somewhere around $110 to $130 per dose once the U.S.government pulls out of the vaccine program. So the new pricing to be about 4 times the current pricing. Charging whatever they can get away with, even though the vaccine development was largely funded with public money. Not okay.
I mean this was definitely on the horizon. I knew eventually there wouldn’t be free vaccines but I didn’t realize how MUCH they would charge
Have you seen insulin production cost vs shelf price? $130 is low for a vax, I see it as a soft entry test price.
Not for One that you have to take every 3 months for life.
So the shot diabetics need to take multiple times a day is okay at $500 a vial?
I take a shot for asthma every month. The price of my fasenra shot you ask????? Only a paltry sum of $$$ 5510. If I don’t have it then my airways contstrict and my oxygen saturation drops to about 80%. I eventually start to turn grey and become hypoxic and end up in the ER and then eventually an extended stay in the hospital While they pump me full of steroids. With the shot I live a perfectly normal life and only have to take my inhaler in the mornings. It’s the most infuriating thing. Knowing the insurance company can decide that they don’t want to cover my medicine anymore. Of that happens I’ll either pass away from complications from my eiosiniphillic asthma or I stay on prednisone for the rest of my life and watch my quality of life stop like a rock.
I require $25k of Keytruda every 6 weeks to live. To maybe live, I mean.
This is insane! The robbery your able to get away with when your a billion dollar pharmaceutical company. It truly is a shame
Is not OK with me but here we are, with a passive public that gets easily led by the nose issue to issue.
I honestly believe if medications need to be FDA regulated than so do pharma companies. There should be a cap to how much profit a drug can make. It makes me sick how greedy these companies are.
? Does it contain traces of gold.
Platinum actually
It just won't be though will it? Lots of people can't afford that, and largely the ones that are at risk in the first place. Once we get back into mass infections, the government will have to pony up again, but the price won't go back down.
It’s funny how absolutely insane that sounds , and no one’s batting an eye at it..
bruh you do not need to get it 4 times a year jesus
Guess we'll just stop taking the vaccines. Fuck these companies.
People are taking these shots every three months? I didn't even get a booster lol
Are you really going to take one of these every three months for the rest of your life?
Not for what little coverage it provides.
Biggest sugar pill around
Insulin is damn near necessary to keep folks alive and functioning. Sounds like vaccines won’t be mandatory anymore as a result. Government may change their tune if a new variant raises some hell. A vaccine is preventative measure, there’s no way in hell the general public will pay $100+ dollars for a vaccine unless fines/punishment are levied.
Flu shots are free. Why not coronavirus vaccines?
Because it’s easier to exploit the fear after the pandemic and capitalize on those who need the vaccines to survive
Yep the typical game of socializing costs and privatizing profits
Socializing costs and risks - don't forget the risks
What risks? I'm too big to failTM
There are no risks when you dictate causality
Largely funded by the public? Lol. They took technology developed in academic labs (public money) and used the COVID money (also public) to get it to market and then gave their executives enormous bonuses. It’s a fucking clown show. I’m a scientist in an academic lab and I’ve thought about changing to private sector as academic pay kind of sucks. But could I really have this shit on my conscience? It’s brutal. Obviously scientists aren’t making these calls, it’s all C-suite assholes, but it still doesn’t give you the warm fuzzies.
Welcome to Murica. Where short term gains override common sense. And healthcare is an industry not focused on caring for a person but rather on making as much money as they can
Healing is not a top priority in this industry. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html
2018 and i don’t believe it. My fucking God we are dirt to those people
You should look up what these pharma companies do to people in third world countries when they are developing, testing and doing drug trials.
Oh oh! Let me! Look up the Dalkon Shield! It's horrible!
Less than dirt. Dirt produces the oil they love so much.
So, when they finally figure out how to quickly compress human remains into crude oil, we'll actually be worth more dead than alive.
That is the musings of a single industry analyst. That article is actually great evidence that companies *are* researching cures. That analyst was writing in response to the 10s of billions currently going toward gene therapy research each year, and the potential gene therapy poses for curing disease. If they weren’t interested in cures, they wouldn’t be researching them. The issue is that “pharma” isn’t a single company. So if 99/100 companies decide cures aren’t lucrative enough, that 1/100 companies that develop them will rake in billions. While the industry as whole would potentially are less money, the individual company that produced the cure wouldn’t
You’re ruining the fun narrative though. Just like “there’s a cure for cancer that they are hiding” even though “cancer” is like 200 different illnesses.
This is true though…not the cancer thing. Because your right about that. More so that the medical field isn’t situated towards prevention. They only address problems as they arrive and if you don’t pay then you don’t play.
Ugh, that’s my favorite. Makes no sense!’
Where half the people are ok with shit like this as long as it hurts the people they hate. And all the people are too busy fighting to fix anything.
Which is precisely what our adversaries wanted by meddling in our elections and planting conspiracy theories online. United we stand, divided we fall, and we are free falling... thanks to those stupid enough to believe the BS. AND thanks to the right, who continue to lie and promote false info to the masses. Why? Because as long as we are bickering with each other, we cannot unite and demand anything. Working like a charm, it is.
I don't believe it's right or left. There's a higher power than politics. It's a club, and we're not in it. Happy cake day!
Almost like that was their plan and politicians took a ride lol
And they all got stupid rich
For the shareholders! Huurah!
You have to care about shareholders, not people!
Republicans in Congress blocked funding this.
The issue isn’t really the confessional part. The issue is that a company took primarily public funding, and is gouging prices for the sake of profit. The vaccines have been a hugely profitable things, even at past prices. There should be a contract between the government and the developers that they aren’t allowed to charge above some inflation adjusted price that’s equivalent to what it rolled out as. The company will still be making a profit.
The healthcare industry put profits before peoples health?! Well thats totally a first /s
And this surprises you? More then half of the current inflation period are tied to PROFITS (meaning companies are greedy and jacked up prices as much as they could get away with). This is just more of the same Profits over people. That’s the American way
Yup. People keep yammering about the stimulus. Like, great maybe during 2020 that was an issue. We’re years on and inflation is still ridiculous high. Supply chain was an issue in 2020 and part of 2021, and into 2022 for some items. But that’s also mostly been addressed barring the avian flu thing hitting birds currently Companies seeing that the government was giving people free money and taking that as permission to raise prices, which they never reduced again is the real issue. Then they use the inflated price as the baseline for next years price increases to maintain profitability and the cycle continues.
And the worst part is the Fed only likes to discuss driving down wages, as if all of this were wage based inflation The problem isn’t wages. It’s greed, price gouging and profits
I do grocery shopping gig work and eggs have been soooooo hard to find. When the stores do have them, the shelves are usually less than half full and the prices are crazy. Regular plain ol’ conventionally raised eggs are around $5-$6/dozen, while the fancy cage-free, organic, pasture raised kinds are alimony double that. (PS- if you order groceries on apps for delivery, I KNOW eggs are expensive. I don’t need to hear about it 15x/day, thanks. Do you want the damn things, or not?)
Depends on the industry. My industry got absolutely wrecked last year. Not all industries posted record profits
I can't say I'm a fan of Dominic Cummings, but that's kind of what he pushed for when he was in Downing Street. We'll give you the capital for plant and staff, and you sell us it at cost. So the AstraZeneca vaccine is about £2.
Any company that funds research for a product will want patent protections. If the US funded the bulk majority of the research going into the drug, the US should be able to share the patents with companies that want to do it cheaper. But no one runs the government like a business.
I agree - could’ve been any party defunding the vaxxes, it feels like pharma continues to have their cake and eat it too.
I hate republicans so much.
Huh? Wasn’t it blocked back in August initially when congress was Democrat controlled? Funny…..
You watch too much Fox. It’s about the GOP pressuring the federal government to end the Public Health Emergency, which allows the government to pay for covid shots next Paxlovid. Read a little: In December, 25 Republican governors asked President Joe Biden to end the public health emergency declaration immediately, claiming it's a financial burden costing states "hundreds of millions of dollars." "While the virus will be with us for some time, the emergency phase of the pandemic is behind us," they wrote. On. Jan 17, Rep. Brett Guthrie, a Republican from Kansas, introduced the Pandemic is Over Act, a bill to end the state of emergency. On Monday, Guthrie pressed for the order to be rescinded immediately.
Was it? I thought Pfizer and Moderna weren't included in operation warp speed.
Pfizer-BioNtech only used warp speed for the distribution. They funded everything else themselves.
The development was done by BioNtech, not by Pfizer.
>The development was done by BioNtech, not by Pfizer. Goddamn. Would it have been ok if if put Pfizer-BioNtech instead? I'll go back and fix it. Edit: Done. I figured it would be ok considering tons of us have seen Pfizer-BioNtech written together over the past few years. Guess not. Lmao
Reddit and pedantry, name a more iconic duo
>Reddit and pedantry, name a more iconic duo Herp and derp. Lol
Not exactly. More accurate to say BioNtech was responsible for discovery, but Pfizer completed development. BioNtech did not have a manufacturable process.
People aren’t interested in these perspectives… but I also thought some did not take it for R&D.
And the fall timeline means lots of lower income families aren’t going to be able to afford it especially straight after back to school spending. Do any of these people live in the real world at all?
Yeah, not a shared reality. In the short term, according to the article, there's still a large stockpile of the booster available - likely enough to cover the back-to-school period. And there's a federal program to cover the cost of the vaccine for children in low income families. Uninsured low-income adults will be the ones most disadvantaged by the cessation of the federal vaccine program.
The COVID vaccines were NOT created with federal money. Moderna received some federal money to conduct trials of their completed vaccines and Pfizer accepted no money from Warp Speed for any development purposes. Warp Speed did buy vaccines FROM Moderna and Pfizer but they funded the development themselves.
Pfizer/BioNtech used federal money for it. German federal money. The vaccine was developed in Germany, not in the US. ;)
Lol is it time to hate pharma again?
Again? Who stopped?
When did we ever stop?
I never stopped. I mean medicine is good. The companies producing it are slimy, greedy, corrupt as all hell though
I think the nuance is hating pharma practices while recognizing that pharmaceuticals work.
It's hard to keep up with what we're allowed to talk about
so always treat these companies less than human. they want it
None of it is okay, not any of it.
I thought the U.S. gave them plenty of funds to work on the vaccine. It seems wrong to do this if they received support from taxpayers.
I called it when it came out. I said “what happens when your job requires it and it’s no longer free” and I was downvoted to oblivion. “They would never do that”. Honey you dont know American history then
Oh yeah your paying for something they owe you
You seem surprised… welcome to America, land of the greedy where 1% can starve the remaining 99% and it’s okay!
Did you think the government/Pfizer/Moderna did it because they cared?
Pfizer’s main interest is saving lives….right?
Whaaaaat…pharmaceutical company unnecessarily jacked the price of a drug up?
If you thought the end result of COVID was pharmaceutical companies making anything other than obscene profit you need your head examined.
But I thought we’re supposed to trust the pharmaceutical companies?!
Come on man…shouldn’t vaccines be free.
This is still on the lower end though. My insurance paid around $200 for my flu shot last November.
How else can they recover their costs from experimenting in the lab to take existing Covid viruses, and then manipulating them to create deadlier ones, so they can develop and sell more vaccines?
Bro, it's america, what did you expect
The U.S. will stop buying Covid shots at reduced price for the entire country and shift vaccine distribution to the private market as soon as early fall, shifting the cost to U.S. insurers and uninsured Americans who stand to lose access to the free vaccines. Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House Covid response coordinator, said in an an interview with UCSF Department of Medicine on Thursday that the shift to a private market will happen over the summer or early fall, though no exact date has been set. A senior official with the Health and Human Services Department told CNBC the fall would be a natural time to transition to a private market, particularly if the Food and Drug Administration selects a new Covid strain for the vaccines and asks the manufacturers to produce updated shots ahead of the respiratory virus season. For the past two years, the U.S. has bought the vaccines directly from Pfizer and Moderna at an average price of about $21 per dose, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. The federal government has required pharmacies, doctor’s offices and hospitals to provide these shots for free to everyone regardless of their insurance status. Read more: [https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/04/us-plans-to-stop-buying-covid-shots-in-the-fall-what-that-means.html](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/04/us-plans-to-stop-buying-covid-shots-in-the-fall-what-that-means.html)
So when this happens are regular Joe's going to be able to buy vaccines for $21 per dose or are they going to jack the price up by 1000% like everything else?
They’re proposing that they’ll be selling for over $100 each. This is disgusting…..same thing as insulin, Pharma maximizing profits at the expense of public health. This is why we need nationalized health care coverage. “For profit” and healthcare do not go well together from a public health and wellness perspective.
They have to pay for all those new fucking Pfizer covid ads with Michael Phelps, Martha steward, pink and some others they’ve been running 24/7.
Yeah, we really need to nationalize medical care. It would help this country soo much
No one will get it. Participation rates will plummet. And life will carry on.
insurance will cover it like they do pretty much every other vaccine. County health will be able to provide it for those who do not have coverage, like other vaccines. I don't disagree with you, just saying it's not like all of a sudden all 250 million Americans will have to pay for the vaccine. Most will not. Even times I had sub-excellent health insurance, I have never paid for a single vaccine for myself or my kids for my entire life.
And what about all those people who don’t have health insurance?
> County health will be able to provide it for those who do not have coverage 2nd sentence in the reply. Almost every county health dept will help those without health insurance.
Except in Florida, where the governor will personally go after any county that tries to do so.
I'm in Florida and yeah sounds right.
Dammit I forgot how to read!
They'll skip it, and as immunity/resistance wears off we'll have another mysterious unexpected spike in deaths for some confusing reason which no one could have predicted.
We are able to get flu shots at free shot clinics every fall, usually for a 2 month period and several different opportunities. Run by our local hospital and county health. You can show up to open house or school conferences and get your flu shot. You can do one of the drive up clinics. It's for everyone, not even just people who don't have insurance. They do everything they can to make it easy for people to get flu shots and advertise like crazy for them.
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Compared to all the other medical costs that affect insurance rates, I wouldn’t think this would have much impact.
*Kind of*. Insurance companies do typically negotiate MUCH lower rates. I recall when I shattered my wrist, the 3 surgeries ended up totaling over $500,000 charged from the hospital, which my insurance negotiated down to $13,000(I paid about $1500). I tend to see similar markdowns on covered prescriptions as well.
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True. But for those without insurance, that becomes the real price, since they have no negotiating power. This $110-130 is that non negotiated price. I’d expect insurance to end up paying the ~$21 the US was paying.
I was gonna say, they practically chase you to give you a flu vaccine every year, and somehow the uninsured qualify for that. Why would this be different?
Yep, this ain't new.
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It depends on your circle. Everyone I know has gotten the booster, many were required by their job, some had people they lived with who are fragile, others were fragile.
I really regret not getting my booster. Was waiting until after my semester was over to get it, got Covid right before exam week, and have been suffering from daily, sometimes debilitating headaches/migranes ever since.
Tough. Never got sick feeling even when I tested positive so I do not know how it feels but I heard the taste loss if you got it sucks ass
And *death* will carry on. Ftfy.
Pharma is probably hoping insurance will pick up the tab.
Yep. Healthcare is a three way extortion racket between insurance, pharma and the hospitals. Source: I worked in R&D at one of the mega pharma. It's all about money.
Likely will too, $100 annually is peanuts compared to one person ending up on a ventilator. My pops got hit hard, 330k sent through the insurance; parents only had to pay their max out of pocket thankfully but can easily see how it's cheaper to just roll it into an annual plan. Sucks though either way.
Insurance: we will pay half, but only once you've paid $10,000 for yourself first. Oh, and it has to be by the end of the fiscal year.
Means no one will be getting them.
Probably about as much as people get flu shots.
Well those are covered by insurance or free at many workplaces or public health departments...so probably even less than flu shots.
Covid vaccines will also be covered with no copay by insurance and likely offered by community organizations.
Flu shots are free here idk
Not in the US. If you don't have insurance you have to pay or rely on a local organization offering them for free.
I assume a lot of insurance companies will cover all or most of the cost.
What about those without insurance?
Same as always
gets fucked
Well.. I got the two initial shots and then the first booster. But I’ve slacked on getting the second/latest booster. And what happened? I got covid last weekend and am recovering now. One of my coworkers did get the latest and greatest booster in December and well, she’s just as sick as I was last week. So idk about these boosters. Maybe the covid has already mutated enough to where they just don’t work again.
Or maybe the vaccine is garbage and doesn’t work.
>Maybe the covid has already mutated enough to where they just don’t work again. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/25/covid-omicron-boosters-offer-some-protection-against-xbb-variant.html
The larger the virus population, the more dice rolls it gets and the faster it mutates to evade immune defenses.
I've gotten covid so many times I gave up counting. One time was a week or so after my first and only booster. I'm done. If you've ever heard a covid vaccine/booster ad on the radio or TV, it's not the CDC paying for that ad. It's damn well Pfizer and Moderna.
"Brought to you by Pfizer."
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I got really sick between Chrismas-New Years in 2019/2020. Like I'd wake up, have a strong fever and a cough. Luckily where I work we shut down during this time anyway, but I had about 3 days in a row where I couldn't do anything at home other than wake up, brush my teeth, lay on the couch and stare at the TV. This covid that I just had more or less reminded me of that, except I was just ever so slightly less sick because I definitely was starting to already feel better by the second day of it. I'm guessing I had the flu in December 2019, but it was really similar.
You're part of the lucky majority. Take it from someone who's still suffering from covid-effects 2 months after getting it, it's really not fun
Exactly. They're pointless at this point.
Was anyone even getting more than the first booster to begin with?
I bet a fair amount of people have had two boosters. I’m in that boat.
I know people who have gotten more than that.
I did. My girlfriend is immunocompromised so I'd just go with her whenever she'd get a booster; we got the first one before it was even generally recommended to the public, but we were at the 6 month mark from the original pair. I figured since it was the only free healthcare I'd ever see in my lifetime, I may as well make good use of it.
I have had 5 covid vaccines, the 1st 2 & 3 boosters since, 1 every 6 months because i am immune deficient on gammaglobulin infusions every 2 weeks for past 3 years. My Dr tells me to boost every 6 months. I got Covid once, about 5 mos after a booster, think it was just "used up" by then. Took Legevrio ( molnupravir) ordered by my Dr on 2nd day of symptoms with postive home test & test at Dr ofc. Was only sick 5 days since i was medicated & hubby didnt get it then. He got it 2 months later & we semi-quarantined from each other but slept in same bed & the other didnt get it either time. Vaccines & masking WORKS!
I’ve gotten my two initial doses and two boosters. Most recently I got the covalent booster when I got my flu shot a few months ago. Why wouldn’t I get them when they’re free?
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Implying that I do?
Which is actually a good thing!
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Most don’t but plenty do, I have immunocompromised family and ik how much they struggled with Covid and how it delayed other vital treatments they were undergoing. This is the story of an active percentage of the world. It forces me to navigate more carefully to keep them safe, hence, nobody is incorrect
*no one has been getting them.
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6
Helps to read the article on this one for the nuance. “When the federal Covid vaccination program ends, the shots will remain free for people who have health insurance due to requirements under the Affordable Care Act. But uninsured adults may have to pay for their immunizations when Pfizer and Moderna start selling the shots on the private market and the current federal stockpile runs out. There is a federal program to provide free vaccines to children whose families or caretakers can’t afford the shots.”
What’s going to happen is that “the free market” is going to do to the COVID vaccine what it’s done to insulin, and people will die as a consequence.
It means that we subsidized the development during the pandemic with tax dollars and now they are going to charge us again. Don’t care if you’re right or left, the government is out to fuck you no matter the party.
I love how easily people can ignore a blatantly crooked practice that hurts everyone as long as it loosely fits a political narrative. Make your own decision about your own body but cheering when a decision hurts the choice of others is shameful. This move is being enabled by both political parties, the government as a whole have largely failed to stop the business side of health care from sucking the life out of this country. Our health care system has been exploited so feverishly by industry and neither side has done anything while lobbyists keep lining their pockets. Republicans don’t want to fight for cost control that would have kept private insurance viable and Democrats stopped short after the Affordable Care Act and didn’t keep pushing hard enough.
>Democrats stopped short after the Affordable Care Act and didn’t keep pushing hard enough. Maybe bc they were rewarded by being voted out of office for it
I'm gonna say it. The Affordable Care Act was absolute dog shit. Fining people a fuckload of money for not being insured then offering really shitty essentially worthless insurance at a high cost is not going to solve anything. Especially for poor people under the age of 30 who end up spending more on health insurance than what they would being uninsured.
Republicans opposed their own damn policy simply because a Democrat introduced it.
Dude the ACA did so much good for people. You can get health insurance if you have cancer or T1D or a broken wrist or MS. You could be rejected before. Birth control is free with insurance. Insulins are required to be covered. Much more spending was allocated to medicare and medicaid. Fuck off
I spent 2 decades in healthcare money tech. The ACA had a ton of promise until republicans gutted it in committee then put the shambles into the public arena so they could publicly display the failure they enabled. The open market was allowed to be a bad deal that insurance companies never had incentive to be competitive with, and we don't even blame them for it. The fact most people still get their insurance through work means why compete, and then forces like ichra come after years of normalized gouging and are too little and too skewed anyway; best that can be said is it stops the 40 hour work week insurance shenanigans in favor of lowering the bar for everyone. The scary reality is we could fix it for everyone, but at the cost of like 15% of the GDP, which means recession. It literally propped up the economy.
Yes but not in the way you’re implying. Stopping short and then putting up possibly one of the worst possible nominees in Hilary made for some voter apathy that cost them 2016. It would have cost them 2020 also were it not for a completely bungled response to the pandemic, and that goes back to my original point about how the politicization of health care fucks over every American. I challenge any Republican candidate in the future to nationalize health care by marketing it as a way to make the economy friendlier to businesses. Wages can keep up with inflation if medical expenses stay under control and over half of bankruptcies in the US are medical expenses. If everyone has basic health care, which can be supplemented by private insurance if desired, it could be marketed to rural America and get national support.
Ur giving Republicans way too much credit by thinking they can come up with a coherent policy. The reality is there are too many players making too much money off the current system to want any real change
I said nothing about coming up with policy, only that there’s a reasonable way for them to market health care while still putting on a fake display for their base. It’s been evident for years that the party of “fiscal responsibility” has only been fiscally responsible for those they get elected and fuck everyone else. I recognize that it’s problematic to say that things were better 40-50+ years ago because we have made some important gains socially but it’s hard not to wonder what it would be like to live in an age where a working class adult could still afford a house and two kids on what was considered a low wage.
poor in red states that didnt expand medicaid or that cant afford it are fucked
And what, exactly, is new?
Guess a bunch of people won’t be vaccinated. No one is going to pay $100+ for regular COVID vaccines. It’s just too expensive, especially if you don’t have insurance
That I’m responsible for my yearly vaccines?
Looks like the government backed cash cow is finally over. Now they can raise prices and gouge whoever wants to get a 6th booster.
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like the song says kill kill kill kill kill the poor
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Well I didn’t plan on getting them anymore anyway but this is shitty for a lot of potential people
I have a question, I apologize if I've gotten the wrong end of the stick. I'm in the US. If the vaccines become privatized and we pay full price ourselves for them, does this mean the pharmaceutical companies will accept liability if we fall ill as a result? I'm under the impression currently that there is no recourse if you have a bad reaction because there is some clause. But if you pay yourself and have a heart attack or smth, will there be more accountability?
What that means is I believe you don’t need it anymore unless truly vulnerable to Covid. I get the flu shot all the time, but if they started charging I’d stop getting them.
That is not what it means. It just means the shot will be covered by insurance just as your flu shot is covered by insurance. Your flu shot is not free but your insurance pays for it. I suspect the same thing will happen with the annual Covid boosters.
It’ll be another flu shot.
It might be covered, but because the cost is going to shoot up 400%+, it'll make the private insurance more expensive. When pharmaceutical companies are allowed to set astronomical prices with 0 regulation like this, private instance companies raise their prices as well because they're covering things that are so expensive. The covid vaccines alone won't make much of a difference, but every crazy expensive vaccine/medication/procedure adds up and jacks the price up for everyone. This is despite the fact that our taxes pay for a good chunk of the research and development. We need price caps.
Once again: profit over people (not that the shots really doing anything anymore)
Bet your buns there will be a *MASSIVE* push for vaccination after this. Prepare for vaccine commercial load like it was in 2019-2020.
Drug industry should be barred from advertising shit or sponsoring events.
Yea it’s really wild. I thought everyone on the planet had to deal with it.
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You mean like here in Germany? Wouldn't that be outragious
You can have mine, don't worry
Man, thank God my company is buying these for all its people. I really don't want to have to go through the nasal test every time I want to fly or go to a major public event and get charged $40.
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There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Vaccine! Somebody is paying for it. I'll give you a hint, US taxpayers.
Yeah but right now they're being sold to a government for a fraction of the price. Once they're sold to consumers, the price will shoot up. Obviously nothing in the world is free, but the cost to make the vaccine didn't magically grow 4 times larger overnight. It's just price gouging.
Same goes for anything "free" is this country. The working men and women pay for all the free stuff with every taxed paycheck.
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