173
Syphilis Is Killing Babies. The U.S. Government Is Failing to Stop the Disease From Spreading.
(www.propublica.org)
this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2024
173 points (98.3% liked)
News
23424 readers
2623 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The medication, Bicillin (penicillin G benzathine) is a mold byproduct. It's produced by fermentation. The only reason pfizer wouldn't be producing enough of it is that the profit margins aren't high enough.
You could convert a brewery to a Bicillin "factory" and have enough of it to supply the nation.
Pfizer wants to act like this is somehow a result of not enough employees or equipment or whatever. But the real problem is they haven't spent the probably $100k to buy a new vat to produce the stuff.
This is why there shouldn't be drug companies. It's criminal that such an old and well known drug is being left in the hand of these crooks trying to rob the public in dire health straights.
Oh, and yes, it is THAT penicillin. The one discovered by Alexander Fleming in 1928.
Normally, I'm all for getting out the torches and pitchforks for pharma companies, but there are some other considerations when it comes to penicillins. Due to the prevalence and severity of penicillin allergies, penicillin drugs basically have to be made in facilities dedicated to just that to avoid cross-contamination. If they used any of the same equipment (even packaging equipment) there would be too high a risk of causing allergic reactions via contamination of other medications, and there would be no way to tell which ones are contaminated.
The fix to this problem is to spread out the licensing and allow more companies to produce penicillins in appropriate facilities as opposed to leaving it in the hands of a single conglomerate.
Certainly, however the long tale of making penicillin is the fermentation process. That requires bigger or more vats on site in the existing facilities in the existing contamination free zones. Maybe there isn't room in those... but then perhaps there is in the several company sites Pfizer purchased to create a monopoly on Bicillin.
I'm definitely being too flippant about "purchasing a brewery", however not by much. They certainly have higher requirements for safety and sterility but beyond that, it really is just the same dumb process of "Put in the right food and bacteria, keep the temps consistent, mix, wait for 50 days, separate the Bicillin from everything else".
Things only get complicated if the pfizer execs decide they need to "optimize" the use of facilities to maximize profits. Reusing fermentation barrels for other more profitable drugs. Or reclaiming space for other processes/office space. But like I said, because the process is that dead simple and the amount of Bicilin needed for the population is so little (We need less than 2.5ml per dosage).
We are talking about 200,000 cases, to treat all them we need a vat that can hold ~500L of materials to generate enough Bicillin for everyone in 50 days.
To get a picture of how much equipment that is, https://www.micetcraft.com/500l-micro-beer-brewing-equipment/
Yet Pfizer wants to tell use it costs them 38 million dollars to build out enough capacity? That's some high bullshit to allow them to ramp up the price.
Part of what I was saying is that the fermentation barrels cannot be reused for other drugs. Also, with any biologically produced product in pharmaceuticals, they need to do extensive testing on each batch to ensure that there have not been any mutations or other contamination or production errors. The manufacturing of medicine is a highly regulated and monitored process that requires the manufacturer to meet a rather long list of criteria before the drug can be sold. Also, with bacterial populations, the larger the vat, the higher likelihood that a problematic mutation will occur and spread to a degree that would cause problems.
Certainly certainly. But breadth and scope of the amount equipment needed is important here. I grant everything that you are saying. I'm just saying that the physical dimensions of these fermentation barrels (see the image) is not high. Even if you shrink this down to 1000 500mL cans (soda can sized), the actual physical space that'd be occupied simply isn't all that much.
It's the equipment used to sterilize the primary equipment that can take up an absurd amount of space. Autoclaves are not small.
Fun fact: Pfizer spent $2 billion in stock buybacks in March of 2022.