Why medications can have such exorbitant prices has long been a huge question for me. I myself am immune deficient and am administered gamma globulins on a weekly basis. These are high on price, but nowhere near the exorbitant amounts that medications can cost.
In any case, I am the author of X-Codex’s article on health insurance companies in the Netherlands. This is because I encountered several people in my patient group where medications were taken away by insurers just like that. Because suddenly there was doubt about the diagnoses (how blood tests that confirm these diagnoses can lie, I still do not understand). Incidentally, in my research for that article I came across not only patients of Dr. Coucke who suffered from this.
Insurers often refuse treatments while one is simply entitled to them
Insurers often refuse to pay for treatments while patients are officially entitled to them. The costs of these medications are pushed up so high by Big Pharma that insurers can’t make normal price agreements. It also appears that for profit reasons, there is frequently a refusal to pay. They then gamble on us patients being gagged and not appealing against it, so they try that again and again. Unfortunately, we as consumers are always the victims of Big Pharma, which is only concerned with filling its own pockets. Not thinking about the sick people, who in this “tug of war” and overly commercialized Big Pharma Bullshit, can suffer unnecessarily through a disease for which the medications are unaffordable. People are dying for this and through it! In the world of X-Codex, this is despicable behavior and in addition, we believe it goes against our human rights.
The medicine Kymriah beats everything
In research for this article, I came across a documentary on Youtube about the drug Kymriah, which sells for $475,000 for 42 ml of medication. Kymriah is a drug where one’s own immunity cells are transformed into cancer “killer cells”, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LelUHLl-xM. For this, blood from the patient goes to the United States, grown and transformed in the lab, flown back, a half-hour infusion and done. The patient gets immunity symptoms such as fever, fatigue, etc., but the side effect of organ failure is also common.
This documentary showed the intense war between the patients and insurance companies, but also the struggle to get these “killer cells” in time. Sometimes the manufacturer Novartis was unable to cultivate the cells, so that the distressed patient had to wait another two months for the next culture. In this process of getting the right number of “killer cells”, but especially in the war for costs, patients die. It is really unbelievable that deathly ill people are treated in this way.
So Novartis the manufacturer has made the price nine times higher
The discoverer of Kymriah Carl June, a professor of immunology affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, was interviewed. He indicated that this drug should cost up to $55,000 per infusion, without any profit. So Novartis raised the price 9 times.
Carl June tells us that Novartis paid $250 million for the sales rights of this drug. For each infusion sold, the university receives 5% of the selling price which amounts to $23,750.
In this documentary, Dr. Emanuele Ostuni was also interviewed. He is the head of oncology for Europe regarding cell and gene therapy at Novartis. In that role, he manages all commercial aspects regarding Kymriah in Europe. Kymriah is the first” FDA-approved CAR-T cell therapy”. The interviewer gave him a hard time, but he didn’t budge. I was shocked by his very impassive, cold answers, but also by his eyes that were as cold as ice. After all, you are talking about terminal sick people for whom this medicine is their last hope, how can you be so harsh and cold!!! According to him, the cost of this drug is so high because they buy the rights to produce the drug from small biotech firms and pay for all the very expensive studies to get the drug “FDA Approved”.
The fact that the drug goes nine times over the top in terms of price was of no concern to him at all. Honestly, I have rarely seen such ruthlessness in an interview. Especially when it comes to patients who die because insurers cannot agree on the pricing of this drug. Where their conscience is in this, I really don’t get it.
Chinese government washes the pig Novartis completely differently
Also featured in this documentary was Jenny Lee, she works for a Chinese investment bank. She was the one who was negotiating the price of Kymriah for the Chinese government. It was with great amazement that I heard what she said. “The Chinese government is just ratcheting up the pressure, saying that the drug will never be prescribed by their doctors with this exorbitant price. The government is demanding that in order for this to happen, the price must drop to $70,000. And Novartis went along with it and delivers the same hugely expensive drug to China for 70,000 dollars. While others simply have to pay the full price of 475,000 dollars.
The amazing results of this drug
Three patients were followed in this documentary. One man finally got the drug for free because the negotiations had taken so long that even then Novartis felt they had to do something. Unfortunately, much too late and the man died. The other two men, elderly by the way, who we see in this docu, were given this drug and left the hospital after a month without any detectable form of cancer. Whereas before that they had no hope of any life extension. So it’s a miracle drug that can really give people their lives back.
So why does this have to be so expensive? Where is the conscience of the pharmaceutical companies? Is earning above our corpses? And isn’t it also the problem of the whole culture of power that has been cultivated by these pharma companies. Like without us, you have nothing and everyone dies of even the simplest disease.
China, however, is showing that it can act forcefully and thus stand for the people instead of going along with this idiocy. Pharmaceuticals take away their power instead of continuing to give power to this unscrupulous money machine.
Disease has become a big business model
Of course it is true that through medications millions of lives are saved every year, but as we pointed out in an article about abuse of power https://xcodexfoundation.com/nl/artikelen/waarom-gaat-macht-over-in-machtsmisbruik/ we think this is very appropriate here. Illness has become too big a business model, and to its extent it no longer knows any limits.
Where in the 1930s you had maybe a handful of medications this was decades later over five hundred different medications. In this day and age there are at least 3 times as many.
Penicillin and later antibiotics alone save millions of lives, so the progress this has given in the length of human life is enormous. Think of the medications for AIDS, but also the smallpox and polio vaccines, and not to forget especially the anti-cancer medications and chemotherapy. Without all these inventions by all those biochemists, our lives would really look different.
But it is exactly this power that is being abused, which is almost delusions of grandeur. You can’t do without us, so just bend and stoop, and we’ll just take all of your money because you just want to live and hey who’s going to stop us? In my experience and what is certainly the case, governments cooperate too much in this, they make themselves too dependent, and they don’t set the borders nearly as tight as China does. Why don’t governments just do this?
Big Pharma are also masters of lies and deceit
Thus, not only are they unscrupulous “money monsters,” but they are also masters of lies and deception. Scientific studies on how medications work, have been and still are manipulated too often and too much. This is to push a medication/vaccination through in acceptance (accelerated) by the watchdogs. It has been proven that when many of these medications are examined by an independent research team, the results are so much less favorable.
Medications are renewed and improved which increases the cost even more. But when looked at very critically, the new drug is hardly more effective than the older one. They are also often nothing more than copies of other existing medications to which something is tweaked. Then they get a new patent. Then doctors and consumers are bombarded with this new drug so that they can grab a market share. Even the smallest market share guarantees a turnover of millions. The fact that the drug often even has a reduced effect is not even mentioned. You know after research we found out that in 2000 alone there was a turnover of 2.4 billion in medications in this industry, which 22 years later is a turnover of more than 5 billion. I mean, we are really only talking about our small country!
Side effects are also often simply concealed
We all know what many of us think about the Covid vaccinations. Wherein indoctrination is absolutely sure to take place with manipulated information regarding the effects and side effects of these vaccinations. If you follow the news it is almost laughable how newspapers and other media outlets always manage to cover up worse news by suddenly shoving very positive articles or broadcasts under our noses. This is to cover up the earlier less positive news immediately. They are undoubtedly being paid handsomely for this and it is almost shocking that newspapers and others are cooperating in this.
For example, we all know the story behind the painkiller Vioxx in the late 1990s, yes painkillers did it and really to perfection. In the first year, sales exceeded $2.5 billion, think about that! What was glossed over was that patients who had to take this drug chronically were many times more likely to have a heart attack, as much as four times more likely. That’s quite a lot! The manufacturer knew this for years, but who is going to throw away billions in sales? Then thousands and thousands of heart attacks, which actually occurred, but who cares?
Suddenly, with the same values, you are also a high blood pressure patient
How about the parameters in blood tests that constantly change, in the sense that you have a disease sooner than before? Or from blood pressure readings? So you are suddenly a high blood pressure patient due to excessive patronage, but also due to influence from the pharma industry, who sell doctors different stories all the time. This when their physician visitors stop by or the symposia they hold to network. But also, of course, the stories are not too tight about how doctors and physicians get all kinds of sums of money and goods from pharma companies when they are especially prescribing their drugs in abundance. Believe then that this absolutely also happens to people who may not really need it.
But well by just listing all the bullshit like above, then you see them acting without much conscience. And everyone gets dragged into it. If you don’t do it then you achieve nothing in that world.
Not everything is bad from this industry, let’s also be honest there are also masterful life-saving discoveries in medicines who also make people suffer so much less. But the conscience of this industry urgently needs to be restored.
They might as well make enough money as we are giving them a helping hand on a massive scale
They might as well make enough money since mankind is destroying itself anyway by wrong food and no right lifestyle. And we all end up being digi-addicts by constantly being glued to a screen which affects our brain chemistry. Or how about the amazing bluetooth earbuds in our ears, which supposedly are totally harmless now? In 10 years we will know better in any case. Brain diseases will reign supreme (not if it’s up to us of course) but our awareness is just too low in this as well. We just do whatever, we also disturb our sleep and biorhythms by those computer and phone screens and that will really have its effect.
Time for change! Not only in the conscience and consciousness of the pharmaceutical industry, but also with us as their consumers. This is because we are just totally unaware of everything we are cramming in and what we are doing to ourselves and our brains. We also give them all the space they need to run the world with their enormous greed. All change always starts with yourself.
Just think!