I read this article and was surprised. I imagined making medicine was complicated and too difficult to do. But apparently not for all medicine.
Switzerland has many Pharma companies that create medicines to help people and they do need to be compensated for that. On the other hand, I understand that there are people who simply can’t afford it.
Fascinating
Yeah, it’s not called “bucket chemistry” without reason. A lot of the basic ingredients for many medications are not in themselves that difficult to obtain and/or manufacture. But the article is massively flawed; by picking on a couple of high-priced (in the unregulated US market only) drugs that are fairly simple to produce and drawing conclusions from that. And their “costs” appear to include only the ingredients required, nothing for equipment, disposal of potentially-harmful by-products, let alone time, packaging or any sort of quality control.
In practice this sort of illegal manufacture is not as rare as one might hope, but it’s usually done on an industrial scale with counterfeit packaging and all. And they don’t always contain the right amount, if any, of the active ingredient.
Also note that India, for one, does not support prosecution for patent impingement, i.e. it’s not illegal to manufacture generic versions of drugs which elsewhere are protected by patent. Many of the more prominent drug-contamination scandals that make the headlines are products of this largely unregulated industry.
Looks like „Small Pharma“ isn’t overall better than „Big Pharma“. Just different.