A recent study has concluded, the recombinant shingles vaccine is associated with a lower risk of dementia. There is a history of dementia in the male side of my family, and since I also am unlucky enough to suffer from five-of-seven of the dementia risks, I elected to take up the two-dose shingles vaccine.
It cost $400, which is a fair amount for an old aged pensioner on a fixed income like myself. If I was to contract shingles, I would cost the Medical Services Plan (MSP) between $450 and $1,525 if I had to visit my GP and the emergency room just once each.
It would be logical for the MSP to pay for some or all of the $400 to encourage more vaccine take-up.
A controversy in ѻý, is the recent decision by the bureaucrats at the ѻý Expensive Drug Disease program to discontinue the funding of the drug “Brineura” at a cost of $800,000 for infusions for 10-year-old Charleigh Pollock of Langford who suffers from Batten disease. Tragically, Batten disease is a rare terminal neurogenerative disease. This decision has been highly criticized.
I am not qualified to comment one way or another on the decision. What does surprise me, is the lack of push back against “Brieura” maker BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc. which specializes in enzyme replacement treatment for rare diseases. I understand research and development of drugs is expensive. If a company has to recoup its investment from a small cohort of afflicted patients, the cost per dose is expensive. It is estimated only 14,000 children worldwide have Batten disease. The yearly cost of Brineura treatment for all of them at a cost of $800,000CDN each would be over $11 billion. A more humane and practical pricing model would be to reduce the price, increase the uptake and net the same overall income.
The tragedy is “return on investment” and our capitalist society and the need to pay dividends to investors. Many medical solutions are discovered by research in publicly funded universities, especially in the U.S. Think of Insulin developed at the University of Toronto.
Convicted felon Donald Trump has by executive order withheld funding from many academic institutions such as Harvard and Columbia for reasons which are too stupid to repeat here.
How many little children will die as a result of defunded lab work which could result in life saving drugs? Shame on him.
John Dorn is a retiree from Summerland.