According to the latest research, more people trust pharma, but what do they charge? I’m sure they trust the drugs given to help them overcome health issues, but what about pharma’s marketing and corporate governance?
According to Fierce Pharma, “the good news is trust in the pharma industry is up. The bad news is that it’s still not enough to move the industry out of “distrusted” status. The reasons are apparent. Politicians and the media have been zeroing in on high drug prices for a long while PBMs, insurers, and hospitals are raking in cash. The debacle around the approval of Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug didn’t help either.
The bigger question is, “does pharma care what people think of them?”. The answer is “no.” They know the public needs prescription drugs to stay healthy. We’ve become a population that believes any bad health problem can be counteracted with a pill or infusion.
Pharma did respons with vaccines for Covid in record time but we should also remember that they have been working on these vaccines for decades and there was a huge pile of cash as a reward. If we need annual Covid vaccines pharma will rake in tons of cash and Wall Street will be happy.
The other side is that Moderna developed their Covid vaccine with the help of taxpayers and is now charging $130 for a vaccine that costs under $3.00 to make. The vaccine has made a lot of multi-millionaires at Moderna.
The biggest disconnect is that the public wants to believe that pharma is here to help us. That’s not true anymore. They are a big business and theire primary goal is to keep investors happy, not patients. When new drugs are in development they are evaluated on sales potential and data is often manipulated to ensure FDA approval.
There is a change happening, however. Insurers are no longer covering “me too” drugs and the government is also taking a harder look a drugs covered by Medicare. I believe that eventually there are going to be mass layoffs in the industry, espocially with the sales force that has become somewhat innefective.
The public wants to believe that pharma cares about us but that belief is misplaced. It’s big business who needs more big drugs to keep growing. We nee dto stop asking about trust and start realizing that big business does not have our best interests at heart.