For decades, the global pharmaceutical industry has spread a deceptive narrative justifying the ever-increasing, sky-high prices of drugs, vaccines and diagnostics as something necessary and inevitable.
Here are some of the industry’s dirty, not-so-little secrets they’d prefer you not know!
Developing drugs is not as expensive as they say
Big Pharma exaggerates the costs of R&D of new medicines to justify their high pricing, and often categorise ‘opportunity costs’ and non-research activities, such as the cost of buying another company, as R&D costs. While Big Pharma often says it costs US$2-3 billion to develop a new drug, other credible estimates are at least 10 times lower – in the $100-200 million range.
