Quote:
Originally Posted by Nosauz
I'm pretty sure Big Pharma holds all the patents and patents on the derivatives of those drugs. Because of that only big pharma can produce them and if it's too expensive then big pharma doesn't unless some foundation pays an inflated cost for it. If you had a malaria producing plant south america it could be run infinitely more efficiently because you wouldn't have to pay for infrastructure to deliver and it would be mass production would marginalize the cost per vaccine. I think that's why I'm so vehemently opposed to copyright and intellectual property laws, because their meant to restrict those who are already at an economical disadvantage for something that should be common knowledge, like how salt is NaCl. This notion that information and facts can be "protected" and DNA sequences can be intellectual property just drives me nuts.
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OK, but then, how do you pay for research? Research, not only of the blockbuster drug, but of the ten failures that accompany it? And hey, if there was a cheap way to make a medicine, what's to keep big pharma from using it?
(Now that I think of it... health code, that's what. If you want to change the way you make your drug, you've got to file a whole new approval request from the FDA or whatever. It's not cheap, and it doesn't extend the length of your original patent.)