A single injection of this one-dose medicine costs $850,000

… but it’s like kissing god!


Great. Let them disclose how much government funding they received, if they used government paid for research (genetic research, DNA mapping, etc.), and how much R&D they wrote off their taxes.


People say that medical companies don’t want to cure diseases, only treat them indefinitely, because they get more money that way.

I guess Luxturna has found a way around that.

Considering how long it must have taken to save up the money (even deflated to 1960’s rates), it makes Selma’s story even more heartbreaking in Dancer in the Dark.


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It’s the sort of value question that normal people rarely need to ask. Of course from the individuals perspective, ones own life has nearly unlimited value: yet when taken at the larger scale, no life can have infinite value.

And as human lives encroach on animal lives, the converse question starts to come up:how much is that snail date’s life worth, or that dodo, or that passenger pigeon? And how much more is it worth as the breeding stock goes down?

Human economics is going to have to account for this stuff much better, if there’s going to be a human economy at all.

You could save rather a lot of lives by giving all your money to, say, UNICEF. You’ve decided otherwise.


More than half a pallet of hundreds is just asking for trouble. [Citation to Speed Grapher or whatever it’s called in Season 2 needed.]

So, this is for neonates though, eh? That’ll fix the average NICU cost.

Luxturna; a benign substitute for $450k of meth for detecting unscrupulous medicine supply chain actors.

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So i assume you’re spending your time curing hereditary blindness for free?

I’m afraid the correct answer is “… and the horse you rode in on

yes and no


Reality: If you write it off on your taxes you still paid the money. It’s not like deductible = free.


This is why they LOVE drugs like Statins that people will take for the rest of their lives and have no interest in vaccines.

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Yeah. The one thing that bugged me about a dancer in the dark was it was too naturalistic. I think von Trier needed to pluck the heartstrings of his audience, and he just threw that opportunity away. Shame on you, Lars!.

I so wanted to come out of that movie feeling used. Alas, that was not to be. Next up, Antichrist.

If you’ve got a personal fortune and unlimited wealth, then you too are entitled to the luxury of Luxturna!

“Substantially higher?” I don’t think you are comparing like for like. If someone doesn’t get treatment because they can’t afford it, is that a positive or a negative outcome? If someone stays sick and can’t afford more treatment and has to stop, is that positive or negative? Directly charging people who are sick to get well is evil.

Yeah, no. There are plenty of great medical treatments for cancer and all sorts of other conditions that you can’t afford because the NHS doesn’t provide them.

I love our socialised medicine, but it’s far from perfect, and it’s only liable to get worse as time goes on. Look at the massive fucking struggle before we could get PrEP over the NHS, and imagine how much worse it would be for something like this medicine.


Honestly my source is a personal friend, who is something of a hired gun for pharmaceutical process control documentation and spends most weekdays preparing papers for FDA review. But that’s not independently verifiable, of course! Don’t worry, there’s lots of corroborating sources.

You can start with Demythologizing the high costs of pharmaceutical research by Warburton and Light, I think. You might also want to look into the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, which will illustrate how baffling the laws are (that act gave big pharma companies the ability to repatriate billions of dollars they’d held offshore to avoid US taxation). And this link is interesting.

So no medicine for anyone then?

Or do you have an alternate means of getting people to work to save lives?