Pfizer conducts research in various areas, including MS therapy. That costs a lot of money.
Like when Roche refused to study Rituximab in multiple sclerosis, which has been succesfully used as an off-label medication for more than a decade, and then released Ocrelizumab for MS, a totally different and not at all virtually identical drug for ten times the price?
Pfizer has a profit margin of ~30%, and that's after lobbying and advertising and the billions of fines they had to pay for illegal advertising and kickbacks. Unsurprisingly, extractable profit is a really bad proxy for people's health.
But I can't complain anyway, here in Germany you can get Paxlovid free of charge because it's prescribed by a doctor.
While I usually think the "free at point of service"-argument isn't necessary, it's very relevant here. You're still paying for it, and all the other drugs that have come out over the last few years that are much, much more expensive than the therapies they replace.
Take a look at GLP-1-agonists (Wegovy, Ozempic, ...) which will come to replace/combine with oral antidiabetics like metformine and have now also been approved for obesity without diabetes.
Metformine is basically free a 10ct/pill, i.e. ~3€/patient/month. GLP-1-agonists cost about 250 - 1000€/patient/month. More than half of the German population is overweight, and more than one in eight suffer from type 2 diabetes - with both figures on the rise.
This trend of massive price increases with every new generation of drugs is extremely dangerous healthcare systems themselves, especially public ones, and of course the patients themselves in the end. Every price hike sets a new baseline, and we need to be very, very careful about compounding effects.
People rightfully pointed out the safety issues in Qatar, but are happy to disregard them for a classic track.
Spa delivers great racing, but we've also seen two fatalities in the last few years (Hubert and van 't Hoff), and multiple close calls like
While Eau Rouge/Raidillon is probably the most exciting corner on the F1 calendar, van 't Hoff's death in july has shown that it still isn't as safe as it needs to be. While this decision is certainly also (or mostly) driven by financial motives, having the chance to reevaluate the track's safety in a few years is imho a good thing.
Spa is amazing and I want it to stay, but it's not more important than the health and safety of the drivers.
This calls for Bloonface's rebuttal. (Which is older than the talk, but refers to the same concept by the same person. I'm going to assume most points still apply.)
Always has been. In many ways, Lemmy resembles the Reddit of 10 years ago.