Hepatitis C Blog

Greg Jefferys Hepatitis C blog deals with all the issues associated with hepatitis C

Hepatitis C Treatment: The Price of Greed

The cost of even generic Hepatitis C treatment is well beyond the reach of about half the people in the world who have Hep C.

Hepatitis C Treatment: The Price of Greed

When I started writing my Hepatitis C Blog back in 2015 it was mostly about my own journey to find affordable Hep C treatment and then about my healing process.

But everything got much bigger than I had ever expected so since those days I have written about lots of subjects, trying to provide useful and easy to understand information about all aspects of Hep C treatment as well as sharing the stories of people around the world who have gone down that path of treating and surviving Hepatitis C.

My story has becomes the story of everyone trying to access affordable Hep C treatment and cure that terrible disease.

Today I would like to share something from my day to day life that is very painful for me, its about the insane greed of Big Pharma and terrible despair caused by the current pricing of Hep C medication, even the generic Hep C medication.

Hepatitis C could be totally eliminated from the planet if it was not for the obscene greed that keeps medication prices high.

Every day  I get emails from people who live in such impoverished conditions that even the cheapest generic Hep C medication is totally beyond their reach.

 

Hi Greg

I have just found your Hepatitis C support website and I would like to ask about getting the medicines.

I learned that I have Hepatitis C about a year ago.

I see that you offer a very good price of US$350 for treatment for poor people but for me it is almost impossible.

My pay in only 20,000 naira per month, about US$60 per month.

How can I get the medicine I need to cure this disease?

Respectfully yours

Gloria

 

So, what can I do? Certainly, I could reduce the price by subsidising it myself. I could even provide the medication for free to a few people, but I could not do this for everyone who needs Hep C medication, not even to one out of the ten or more people who write to me each day asking for help.

The reality is that I cannot give away free medication. Even if I sold my home and everything I own I could not supply even one hundred thousandth of the medication needed.

But here is the weird thing: If the pay of the top executives for Gilead’s top five executives for one year was used to buy Epclusa at GILEAD’s cost price of less than $1 per pill, they could totally eradicate Hepatitis C from the entire planet.

To give you an idea of just how much money just the  top five GILEAD executives have made out of the grossly inflated prices of Hepatitis C medicine here is what these top five GILEAD executives made in the year of 2014-15:

Robin Washington           $26 million

Norbert Bischofberg       $50 million

Gregg Alton                        $56 million

John Milligan                      $89 million

John Martin (CEO)            $189 million

John Martin, the Gilead CEO made almost $200,000,000 in 2014 and nearly double that amount the following year. How? Buy pricing a life saving medication out of reach of most of the people who needed it.

In 2015-16 those incomes nearly doubled for most of these executives.

So on one hand we have good, honest, hardworking people who are dying from Hepatitis C who are earning to 0 per month who have no hope at all of saving or borrowing the money to buy generic Hep C treatment. On the other hand, we have five individuals who are making an inconceivable, obscene amount of money by pricing an essential medication out of the reach of most of the planet’s people.

Over the next 12 months more than half a million people will die from the effects of Hepatitis C. Tends of millions more will suffer the debilitating effects of Hepatitis C. In the future the people who prevented access to the cheap and effective treatment of Hepatitis C will be seen as examples of the very worst of 21st century greed.

To see just how evil Big Pharma is, you should watch the documentary Drug$ on YouTube. This documentary is a fact-dense megalith that shows just how corrupt the medical and pharmaceutical system is in the USA and, by default, the rest of the world. It takes an effort to watch it all the way through but it is worth the effort.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1kWSvglCVg

 

 

 

 

Greg Jefferys

Greg Jefferys

6 Comments

  •    Reply
    Pascariu Maria March 29, 2019 at 3:04 am

    Ași dori să cumpăr un tratament pentru mama mea are hepatita C dar nu știu genotipul .ce trebuiă să fac pentru al cumpăra .

  •    Reply

    FDR suffered from polio and im sure the inventor for the vaccine shared
    the same moral because of the leadership of my country. I wonder
    what they would say about the state we are in now. I know what
    his cousin teddy would say for sure !!! Thank you Gregg for leading
    the way like our true leaders from the past have done. Cheers Gary

  •    Reply

    mavyret is very expensive, even when you export it to other countries consider it to other countries, consider the economic situation you sell, but countries can not get it according to need, you can not make money so you have more money by producing a drug while lowering the value of more people to win the version, because it is expensive only 1 out of 10 countries are treated because you can not make money, it is in your best interest to think

    •    Reply

      HI Burak
      Thanks for your comments. The facts are that Mavyret is not the best treatment for Hepatitis C. The combination of Sofosbuvir 400 mg + Daclatasvir 60 mg is equal to, or slightly superior, to Mavyret across all genotypes of Hep C. The cost of a 12 weeks treatment of Sof + Dac is only US$550 and for people in financial difficulty it is only $350. So Sofosbuvir + Daclatasvir is actually 50th the price of Mavyret and equally effective.
      best wishes
      Greg

  •    Reply

    Pls can you help with your email address……I really need to buy the drugs for my cousin

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