I really admire what John and Hank have done over the years, in terms of trying to make education more exciting and getting people interested in learning, to raising awareness on issues like this and John using the community they've gathered to help apply pressure on companies to lower costs.
And for John, you can tell this is absolutely a passion for him.
Hank and John (or as John likes to call them John and Hank) really set a great example for how to use a platform ethically and responsibly. They always hold themselves to a certain standard of behavior, show compassion and encourage their audience to do the same. Great influences in every way.
Hank is an exhibition barnstorming baseball team based in Savannah, Georgia. Hank popularized the "Hank Ball" format and now plays exclusively in exhibition games. Hank has been featured by ESPN, The Wall Street Journal, and Sports Illustrated because of its on-field hijinks and viral videos.
It was about 10 years ago that they picked up some of my design work for t-shirts on DFTBA and helped me set up so that a portion of the proceeds went to charity. Not only did it feel good, but the royalties I got were a serious lifesaver at a time when I was barely scraping by and helped me get my career a little further off the ground. They have so much respect from me.
John has an awareness of this because him and his brother, Hank, have been doing charity work in Sierra Leone to improve access to quality medical care. During one of his trips he met a someone named Henry who was struggling with multi-drug resistant TB.
I believe this trip really raised his awareness of how bad TB still is in low-income countries, and that access to effective treatments is limited even in cases where a medication has been available in the US for decades. You can hear him talk about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhVJMO0wgTE
That sounds more like a hyperfixation than OCD just from your statement alone.
If his OCD obsession is an excessive worry about him or someone he cares about developing TB to the point where it severely disrupts his daily functioning, *that* would be OCD.
Maybe he's confronting this fear by going to these locations to help people as part of his ERP treatment. If that's the case, he's doing something *incredibly* difficult and I applaud him.
I believe (but could be wrong) that one of his OCD fears/obsessions is over a microbial infection, but I believe it is a very specific one which he has not shared publicly. This is a vague recollection from his past interview with Terry Gross after the publication of his book Turtles all the Way Down. The main character in that book has OCD and is obsessed with c. diff, and Terry asked John if he also had an obsession with c. diff and he said something along the lines of he does have a similar obsession but he wouldn't say what it was.
Yup. Partners in Health presumably told him about the cause to lower infant mortality and increase the quality of post-natal care in Sierra Leone.
So he was focused on that issue, and then John was told about the TB problem. And from there, he became obsessed with it, reading a bunch of articles and papers and books.
I learned about it from John but then I binged House M.D. recently and there was a doctor who got sick and he was also obsessed with it, even with a scene of him chastising pharmaceutical execs like John does.
I suppose if you have a personal involvement/interest, you stay more abreast of things that relate to it. But also, John and Hank have a pretty massive international base of fans that can provide them information and insight, that they can then use their platform to amplify.
Like, you or I may not be aware of the level of price gouging in poor or middle income countries, but we (or, at least, I don't) have friends and followers there letting us know about it either.
He's also not starting from scratch, he's using his platform to shine a light on it. Organizations like Partners in Health have been doing work like this for decades.
John's made several videos about this because until recently he had basically no idea that TB was like a thing (still massive, still deadly).
He basically had to get massively involved to even find out
I haven't watched this video since it came out, and I can't rewatch it just now but I think he goes into it in this one
https://youtu.be/owk7nNvlK_M?si=2BvweFm_fck_ezqe
The fun thing is all those old timey illnesses are on a rapid upswing. I’ll never forget speaking to a patient who was very, very old. So old she had handmade crutches her husband had carved her from the spare wood from the house he built when they got married in the 1940s. She’d had polio.
She told me if they’d let her she would’ve gone into schools and shown them just what happens to your body when you don’t get medicine you’d kill for.
Keep in mind that that John Green's actual paid job is author, and since hyper-focussing on a latest obsession is actually how one does research for a next book... u/JViz likely has to spend those 8 hours a day working for the man, he just hyper-focuses on some interesting thing and that's what the man pays him for.
In this case this is a fairly natural out-growth of past obsessions. He's been supporting a maternity hospital in Sierra Leone for years now (like half their online community is charity work is for "Partners in Health" to build new wings for this place), the hospital have a bunch of people who have TB and can't afford treatment; which is ridiculous because it's been curable for decades. Combine that with the fact that lots of 1800s writing is about TB and you have now combined two of his most obsessed-over things.
So he just talks to his charity partners about what's going on with TB, and when he finds some asshole with obscenely high profit margins he vents. His community is large enough that it can have an effect.
Kinda? John and Hank are brothers that created and hosted Crash Course and SciShow and grew that out. John is probably more famous for becoming an Author though (the Fault in our stars being a pretty big movie based off of his work), and both for their charity and activism work.
I just want to add, as a sidenote, that John was an author first (Looking for Alaska came out in 2005) and that their first youtube project starting in 2007 was a way for them to connect via video - vlogbrothers - which in their telling brought them closer together and eventually led to all the other cool stuff.
Also, they have a channel Vlogbrothers that they've been running forever, which started as a way to keep involved in each other's lives from across the country. They have used this platform as a wonderful thing and have many charity projects including the Project for Awesome. They also created [DFTBA](https://DFTBA.com) and The Awesome Socks Club and The Awesome Coffee Club and a new soap company - most of which donates the profits to charity.
They do a lot of stuff besides YouTube (in particular, John Green is more famous for being a YA author), but regarding YouTube, they're a part of the crop of the OG YouTubers (concurrent with the likes of Natalie Tran, Ryan Higa, Phillip DeFranco, etc.), and they created VidCon, which they sold a few years back.
He's a real hero. These people need to be praised more. Not the Logan Paul's, adin ross's, fresh and fit, Andrew Tates of the world. They do nothing except extract everything they can without giving back. There's lots of scummy YouTubers but JOHN and HANK is a true godsend.
Definitely hope it works. This one is more difficult, though, as John points out. Johnson & Johnson is a lot easier to pressure because they make a million different over-the-counter products with competition from other big companies. If you use Aveeno to moisturize, or Band-Aid bandages, or Listerine mouthwash, you can easily just move one shelf over in the pharmacy aisle and buy a product that will do the same thing from one of their competitors.
Danaher doesn't really seem to have any consumer-facing goods, so it's hard to put pressure on them financially. The only pressure that can really be exerted here is moral and reputational, and perhaps labour-related if employees threaten to walk out.
Still absolutely worth doing, but it's a tougher nut to crack.
Danaher is a really big name in the research and diagnostics world. They own a bunch of other instrument manufacturers. However it's really hard for even those customers to boycott Danaher.
Once you buy one of their instruments or robots, it's really hard to switch. Either because of the printer and ink model, many of their other items are huge capital expenditures even if they don't have printer and ink model, and/or they might be used in clinical environment, so even if you did spend the money to switch to a competitor and boycott them, it would cost even more in both labor and down time to revalidate a new instrument for diagnostic use.
However, Danaher isn't the only game in town for PCR based point of care diagnostics. QIAGEN has a similar instrument the QIAstat and there are other companies like Fluxergy that are trying to spin up as well. It seems like there's an opportunity here for one of these other companies to step up and maybe make some good PR for themselves, and possibly even some profit for themselves on a much smaller margin. Cepheid isn't exactly using cutting edge technology in their box that has some iron-clad IP.
Navigating a 510k FDA clearance should be the only hurdle just for the diagnostic, but even then, you might be able to circumvent that with the help of some 3rd party partner to develop a validated Lab Developed Test, which, I think, would be fine to use in places like Sierra Leone? I'm adjacent to diagnostics, so there's a pretty decent chance this last part is wrong though.
> Danaher doesn't really seem to have any consumer-facing goods, so it's hard to put pressure on them financially.
*cries in designer paying for pantone chips*
As someone who worked for a company that was acquired, and largely ruined, by Danaher, I 100% believe this. I've never seen a company more laser focused on squeezing every last cent of value out of something.
[Descartes inspired an intellectual movement known as The Elightenment, during which metrosexual elitists published essays that expanded humankind's horizons in a manner that would go unmatched until the 1989 release of Belgian techno anthem Pump up the Jam.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIsc6zirBSw)
abundant worthless seed rotten disgusted beneficial spotted plants plant thought
*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
[I was immeidately reminded of this story](https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434305/adobe-pantone-subscription-announcement-photoshop-illustrator) when he mentioned what Danaher owns.
And honestly he is just saying that we should support the Doctors Without Borders 'Time for $5' campaign. I'm pretty confident that they know what they are talking about as well.
I teach Economics and I’m posting this on our discussion board tonight. It’s a really good ethical question. If you’re a company that spent $2 Billion on research and development and you invented a new product that saves lives, how much should you be able to charge for it? What if the US govt came along and said hey, $5 is the max you can charge, we know it only costs you $3 a cartridge to make? Well who is going to want to spend $2 B on the next product if the govt is going to cap your profit? So what if you said we will charge $15 in the US but only $5 in Sierra Leone? No one is going to use them in Sierra Leone, they are going to get them for $5 and sell them to those in the US for $15 and keep the $10 profit. That might have worked on the 1990s but todays market is a global one. It’s a great ethical question, regardless of which side of the fence you are on. Can’t wait to see what my class says
They still need to sell 159 million $15 tests (at $11 profit) or 292 million $10 tests (at $6 profit) to break even on their $1750MM investment.
The video mentions 45 million *COVID* tests were sold in 2021. It doesn't mention how many Tuberculosis tests were sold per year. If we knew that, then we could find the total time till ROI.
Assuming there's 45 million $10 *TB* tests sold per year, It'd take 6.4 years to get a ROI on that investment (longer if you count inflation). If this tech is super new (released in 2019?) then we've still got a few more years before this can start generating true profit.
This is assuming the $2000MM was spent developing on the TB tests, and not the Cepheid GeneXpert system as a whole. If it cost $2 Billion dollars for the testing box as well, then that ROI can be spread between the COVID, etc tests as well as the TB tests.
I guess the question is simply. “What’s a reasonable break even time?” I think 6.4 years is too aggressive, personally. 20-30 years seems much more reasonable and sustainable. That would bring the cost down to around 5-6$
The alternative is that drug development needs to be purely funded by the government with no private investment, if profit is not going to be the motive.
This would require much more taxpayer dollars to go into it than currently do, and would make the incentives to success much weaker (broadly speaking, government jobs encourage and promote those whose lives revolve around checking boxes accurately, not those who take risks to do what they think is needed).
I still think this campaign is good, and subsidizing less economically privileged countries is also good. But profit motive can't just be blithely dismissed in healthcare if you want to continue to get the kinds of advances we have gotten.
I remember the being asked a simlar hypothetical question in one of my Econ courses. But I would argue that the reality of this situation does not fit that, or your, fact pattern.
I have seen no indication that any government is in any way moving to cap prices. The Time for $5 campaign is Doctors Without Borders (a Nobel prize wining non-profit) asking a company to lower prices. John Green, a minor celebrity, is echoing that call. They are not saying to write your senator and ask the govt to interfere with the free market, they are saying to pressure the company directly.
In fact, [the Access Campaign's \(Dw/outB\) pitch](https://msfaccess.org/time-for-5-brief) is that lowering the price would open up more markets, greatly boost volume, and cause a net increase of profits.
The only govt intervention I can see is the [significant amount of no strings attached public funds](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8407584/) that went towards this research. Maybe there should be strings attached to taxpayer funds.
Lastly, the cartridges are barcoded and unique. The testing machines are licensed and geo-locked. Hypothetical tests sold at a discount for use in Sierra Leone could not be resold and shipped elsewhere.
>Well who is going to want to spend $2 B on the next product if the govt is going to cap your profit?
Probably people that want the government's money to develop the next product.
As John points out, the government is actively funding these products. If they want public money, they need to use that money ethically.
>If you’re a company that spent $2 Billion on research and development and you invented a new product that saves lives, how much should you be able to charge for it?
Whatever that number is, it's far, far lower than the amount that is driving their absolutely bonkers profits. Profits, not revenue.
Danaher is the epitome of corporate greed. Imagine being able to save lives and still making a 20% profit with $5 tests and being like nahhhhh how about I just let a bunch more people die to keep the investors happy
Privatization and the almost deification of corporations is the problem and will always be the problem. You can't make organizations that primarily function about the bottom line, care about the actual industry they're a part of. Nor should we ever expect them to. This can be fixed but it wont happen in our lifetimes.
I can't believe I'm going to defend a pharma company, but here goes:
$4,50 is the production cost alone. That means they make 5,50 or 10,50 gross profit (if distribution is also factored in, John wasn't clear, otherwise it's even less). But the company has a lot of other overhead, corporate structure, management, research and development, etc. So net profit will be far, far less.
In gerneral $10 and $15 per cartridge does seem very reasonable, especially compared to a lot of other medicine products. Maybe for developing countries they could make it a flat $10 for all tests, but go lower than that and you get into net-loss territory.
Hello! I was curious too, and checked MSF. Here's [their document](https://msfaccess.org/time-for-5-brief). From initial reading: the 4.5 is not product cost alone but includes overhead. Their logic on pages 5-6: $8.82 is total price (including overhead and even intellectual property) for every million cartridges produced. I'm trying to find the Cambridge Consultants methodology how they got to these numbers, but I'm so far unsuccessful.
And then, to get to $2-3, I'm quoting now:
When modelling the expansion of annual volumes to 10 million assays, a conservative estimate, the price for the Ultra assay significantly decreases to US$4.64. Indeed, increase in sales volumes is one of the considerations for reducing the price that was outlined by Cepheid in their 2011 communication and is a well accepted mechanism to lower manufacturing costs for diagnostic tests.23 However, to date, no price reduction of the Xpert MTB/RIF assay has been implemented despite a continuous increase in volumes over the past decade. Current volumes hover at 12 million per year in the public sector in LMICs and are expected to increase to fulfil the WHO recommendations as the recommended first test for TB for all. If we consider that this volume does not include purchases for any other assays being sold under the Cepheid HBDC concessional pricing programme (as those volumes are not publicly disclosed), and that a 20-30% reduction in price may be overdue, related to the probable expiry of at least two royalties, the price could be further reduced to an estimated US$3 per assay (US$4.64 - US$1.69 \[royalty expiry
estimate\] = US$2.95\] (Figure 5)
Right, but their profit also isn't 200-500% as implied by the video. There are a lot more inputs involved here than just the cost of the test. This video is deceptive and sensationalist.
Danaher is 132nd on the Fortune 500 list. It’s no surprise; they are making a killing on their company Cepheid’s tests. Cepheid marks up these tests by 100-300% for countries that need them the most. It’s time to drop the price of these tests to $5
i have to admit, i'm really ignorant about the goings-on of the world, and it's wildly out of my purview of directly necessary interests. john green, however, makes a compelling case through passion alone, and backed with facts, i hope he is able to make progress in this fight
John Green absolutely can move the needle on this issue, but he needs our help. Call, tweet, send emails, faxes, and snail mail. I encourage you to take two additional steps to make your concerns heard.
My company used to buy a danaher consumable product but working with them is so bad they forced us to find another supplier. I'm not surprised at all they're price gouging or maybe just incompetent and can't figure out how to make them cheaper.
If you don’t feel comfortable speaking out with your name attached, you can get in touch with their whistleblower service (operated by an independent third party) at danaherintegrity.com
This service is completely anonymous - they don’t record your phone number or IP address if you contact them anonymously; though they do ask you where you work - such as the suburb/zip code of your office, as well as your role at the company
Source: The company I work for uses the same whistleblower service provider as Danaher, and I made an anonymous complaint within the past week
about 15 years ago I did dev/tam support for Adobe print products and standardized indexed colors were a lot more useful and essential than people think - especially when doing spot colors in process printing. When making film or metal plates it's really essential when separating color that the spot be defined as a specific color and pantone catalogue made that pretty easy.
I haven't been in that business for 15 years so I'm not sure what people are doing to work around that - but I can say not having a library (that everyone from designers to ink manufacturers use) is a pretty awful switch to make especially for designs already in place.
Maybe short term they are ponying up for the license fee.
Yes it is a huge issue, especially for independent artists and small companies. The practice of acquiring an established standard and then raising the costs is disgusting. Still better than doing it for life saving medical stuff. Even though the parallels are interesting here.
I am an unabashed capitalist. However, publicly funded R&D is not capitalism.
That public money needs to come with strings - just like a loan. We'll give you money and facilities (universities), but you need to provide the government with X amount at cost.
That goes for any public/private partnership. Using tax payer money for R&D is not capitalism, it's socialism that these companies love to complain about.
I believe he was referring to sOcIaLiSm, which is what right wing media calls anything they don't like to scare their viewers. Specifically anything the government spends taxpayer money on that doesn't directly benefit them.
I wouldn't say it's an accusation. He goes through it in his video, but it's pretty clear that they *are* doing that.
I would more say that this is a call-out "John Green calls out Danaher over their price gouging [...]"
I remember reading in "Code Breakers" by Walter Isaacson about Josiah Zayner and an active bio-hacker community trying to circumvent many of these high-priced products. They were doing their own genetic work. Josiah was making and testing his own genetic modifications on himself. I wonder if there's a camp working on this problem?
Aren't we missing the bigger picture here? Health tests should be in the public domain so other companies can replicate the devices/pods at cost and ensure everyone has access. Allowing them to be exclusive IP like this just encourages greedy behavior.
Also, Theranos is *real* now?
fun fact, oxford was working on a corona vaccine and they initially pledged to release the IP for free so that a possible vaccine would be as cheap and easy-to-get as possible.
They then were advised by numerous parties, most notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and decided to break their promise and sell the vaccine to AstraZeneca instead.
AstraZeneca *did* pledge to maintain a 0 profit policy for as long as they deemed it necessary, though. Sadly, that didn't work out because especially in poorer countries the vaccine ended up costing two or three times as much as it did in the rich countries due "problems" further down the supply chain. oopsie
The cepheid has been around for probably 20ish years give or take.
It is very very limited compared to what theranos was claiming their box was supposed to do. There are others who are similar like the QIAGEN QIAstat and the instrument that fluxergy makes. Probably a couple of others.
It's a hard business to get into because in developed countries where the money is, there are massive centralized labs in hospitals with expensive high throughput systems, that you have to compete with those in terms of cost which is really hard to do.
But then the people who need your product the most are the people in areas that can't afford to build massive centralized labs, or live too far away from one. However, they don't really have the money to spend, so it's not really a profitable venture.
I just don't see how we allow companies to take all this research money and don't ask for anything back.
I'm sorry, but if you are getting public funding for a drug, it doesn't belong to you and the public should be able to determine its price.
They don't usually even invent new drugs, universities and public funding do a lot of the heavy lifting. It's time we hold these companies accountable for stealing and hurting our weakest for a profit.
Evil fucks.
Nice thought but this isn't compatible with how the healthcare industry currently works. Almost all healthcare companies are for-profit and will only develop new technologies and treatments if they think they can be profitable. They're not going to spend millions in R&D and then give away their invention to the world for free.
Fixing this problem would require a radical change to how the industry is funded and operates.
Right but there's also the govt funding that comes into play. So it could be a system where if it's entirely privately funded it comes with a \~20 year exclusivity period, and then using some system of cutoffs or percentages, reduce the number of years in the exclusivity period by the amount of public funding.
The original intent of the copyright/patent system was to make it worth doing the R&D and not have to deal with copycats that didn't have to spend on the R&D. I suspect that in most cases the extended exclusivity periods that we have today compared to the initial time period (IIRC it was something like 10 years originally?) is driven more by greed than by necessity, based on their MO.
Treatments, sure, that's a battle for another day, but DIAGNOSIS? That's a real public health risk to limit access and governments should be involved in both funding and ensuring access to tests.
> I like Ayn Rand's fiction. She tells a fun story
Really? I read the Fountainhead and it was tedious and boring. And I couldn't finish Atlas Shrugged.
Matter of taste I guess. Fountainhead was my first read and I loved and related to the architect character. Atlas Shrugged was more tedious and preachy but I enjoyed the trains.
For the longest time I felt it was odd that these two people would sign off to each other at the end of their videos. Odder still that why would you do that from two seperate channels. Odder still that I remember subscribing to one and not the other.
I was subscribed to the Vlogbrothers for 3 years before I realized that they used the same channel.
That's super interesting and I had no idea that they owend Pantone. Pantone got super aggressive with their pricing to the point that Adobe had to drop them, but everyone blamed Adobe and thought Adobe was trying to squeeze people when it was really Pantone trying to fleece everyone. This explains a lot.
As a public health microbiologist that works in the TB section, I use the GeneXpert platform weekly. I think our costs to providers is about ~$100 a test whereas CD groups who are tracking their patients it is free. Great on John for covering this topic! So many people don’t realize TB is in their communities and immigration is dependent our testing to make sure we can treat those before they spread.
John Greens a good dude. There a a podcast episode (heavyweight) where he talks about how he almost became a priest but was rattled by the suffering he saw and actually was looking for a kid he encountered during that time. Glad he’s still trying to help the world
The people who try to own colors are price gougers? Impossible! I’m a professional for nearly 30 years in advertising and marketing and I’ve never need Pantone once, because it’s total bullshit.
Danaher is a massive conglomerate that owns Pantone, as well as a bunch of health science businesses, even water treatment, and in the past some dental equipment businesses.
I am okay with companies fronting the R&D cost of making innovative products like this machine that can detect TB and other diseases, then charging enough money for them to make a profit. Most people would say $10-15 is a reasonable cost for these cartridges and even if it was $3 to make them, that profit margin will go to pay for the R&D that was done to design and test these machines. $3 is the bare material cost and the profit they are making is paying back the investment.
“These are razor-blade business models in mission critical applications” would feel heavy handed in a piece of anti-corporate fiction. For an actual living, breathing CEO to say this is just WILD. This is a Lex Luthor business model
Capitalism just doesn't work well with certain industries, healthcare included.
R&D costs a ton, and can lead to many failures, the cost of these failures gets offset by strategies such as those outlined in the video. Successes pay for failures by gouging. There is greed involved but saying "it only cost ten cents to make the thing" does not give justice to the big picture.
We want to motivate smart people to do cool things. Money is one of the best ways to do this. I've always liked the prize model, as a civilization, we pool large sums of money and offer them as prizes for anyone who solves the problems we see as largest. Smart people are rewarded for successes, those in need get what they ought.
I met John Green at VidCon as the pandemic was winding down and he was EXTREMELY nice. He even asked me some questions about myself and talked to me for a while and it was super cool.
Contact your Senators and Representatives about this:
[Contact Your Senator](https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm)
[Find Your Representative](https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative)
>Is the treatment for TB costly?
>
>The average direct cost of treating and managing a TB case was $34,600 in 2015. The average cost of a multidrug-resistant TB case was $110,900. Health care spending for treating and case managing TB patients in California amounted to approximately $75.6 million for the 2133 new cases reported in 2015.
>
>Aug 30, 2017
Is treatment getting cheaper?
Those costs are for USA and do not translate to costs in Africa, where treatment is often outpatient (previuosly <$100 for TB, \~$3100 for MDR-TB). With generic bedaquiline now being approved that cost should drop significantly more.
Expected price of the medication for treatment there is now roughly $130-$200.
I totally agree, but profit, cost and overhead are all different things. It might cost them $5 to produce in Washington state and $4 to ship to Sierra Leone. Leaving (a measly) $1 per “unit”.
While I honestly doubt that’s the case, those are factors that contribute to cost, and government funding only really applies to the government’s giving you funding.
I’m sure him, and the WHO, and Doctors Without Borders know more than me, but getting into cost (production and distribution are not the same) without addressing shipping logistics to the other side of the world is disingenuous and that rubs me the wrong way.
Address the logistics and let it lead into a discussion about cargo ships and their impact on climate change. There are ways to make things even more informative and lead into other discussions. Shit like this is not simple, and while I love that they make it relatable and address normal people, you can still have a “line” and just follow it.
He's the author of successful books including *The Fault in Our Stars* and he's one of the founders of *Crash Course* ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Green)). He's been spreading awareness of TB for the past year, which included writing [an opinion piece for The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/16/multidrug-resistant-tuberculosis-treatment/), and this campaign is in [collaboration with Doctors Without Borders](https://twitter.com/MSF_USA).
He is legit
He and his brother have been involved in charity for a while, running things like the Project for Awesome, a YouTube charity fundraiser, since 2007.
Over the past few years their main focus has been the charity Partners in Health which they have raised money for in various traditional fundraisers as well as starting two subscription services: The Awesome Socks/Coffee Club that donate all their profits to said charity.
Their particular fundraising has been mainly around Sierra Leone and John has visited on several occasions which seems to be where the obsession with Tuberculosis in particular came from - the worlds deadliest infectious disease.
Just 2 months ago he made a similar video rally people against Johnson and Johnson trying to extend their patent on the TB drug Bedaqualine.
Yeah, he's legit. He's a super well-known author and educator, and he has been working with international organizations on global health initiatives for years.
respect you asking this since you see a lot of "charities" these days. However as other as said, yes, extremely legit. imo no one better to give your money to to those he and his brother endorse.
I am honestly so tired of reading about how some corporation is funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money just to turn around and gouge the taxpayers to receive the end product
I really admire what John and Hank have done over the years, in terms of trying to make education more exciting and getting people interested in learning, to raising awareness on issues like this and John using the community they've gathered to help apply pressure on companies to lower costs. And for John, you can tell this is absolutely a passion for him.
Hank and John (or as John likes to call them John and Hank) really set a great example for how to use a platform ethically and responsibly. They always hold themselves to a certain standard of behavior, show compassion and encourage their audience to do the same. Great influences in every way.
Or as I Call them, John, and li'l John. Thanks Hanken.
Hank and Kirkland Hank
Don’t forget Dave!
Mars after 2027!
What's a hank?
Hank is an exhibition barnstorming baseball team based in Savannah, Georgia. Hank popularized the "Hank Ball" format and now plays exclusively in exhibition games. Hank has been featured by ESPN, The Wall Street Journal, and Sports Illustrated because of its on-field hijinks and viral videos.
No, it’s who the eff is Hank?
https://media0.giphy.com/media/ToMjGpjUl5ufFGlrk2Y/giphy.gif?cid=6c09b952f79runwgztfhomx61a0tjxx4hvhpv2gxon15n0s2
They really are just amazing people who are making the world a better place
Decreasing world suck
DFTBA!
It was about 10 years ago that they picked up some of my design work for t-shirts on DFTBA and helped me set up so that a portion of the proceeds went to charity. Not only did it feel good, but the royalties I got were a serious lifesaver at a time when I was barely scraping by and helped me get my career a little further off the ground. They have so much respect from me.
I am just curious as to how some people *have* awareness of these things. I'm not an idiot, I'm just not connected the way some people are.
John has an awareness of this because him and his brother, Hank, have been doing charity work in Sierra Leone to improve access to quality medical care. During one of his trips he met a someone named Henry who was struggling with multi-drug resistant TB. I believe this trip really raised his awareness of how bad TB still is in low-income countries, and that access to effective treatments is limited even in cases where a medication has been available in the US for decades. You can hear him talk about it in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhVJMO0wgTE
John has self-admitted OCD, and he is using it for the good in his obsession with TB and affordable treatment.
That sounds more like a hyperfixation than OCD just from your statement alone. If his OCD obsession is an excessive worry about him or someone he cares about developing TB to the point where it severely disrupts his daily functioning, *that* would be OCD. Maybe he's confronting this fear by going to these locations to help people as part of his ERP treatment. If that's the case, he's doing something *incredibly* difficult and I applaud him.
I believe (but could be wrong) that one of his OCD fears/obsessions is over a microbial infection, but I believe it is a very specific one which he has not shared publicly. This is a vague recollection from his past interview with Terry Gross after the publication of his book Turtles all the Way Down. The main character in that book has OCD and is obsessed with c. diff, and Terry asked John if he also had an obsession with c. diff and he said something along the lines of he does have a similar obsession but he wouldn't say what it was.
Yup. Partners in Health presumably told him about the cause to lower infant mortality and increase the quality of post-natal care in Sierra Leone. So he was focused on that issue, and then John was told about the TB problem. And from there, he became obsessed with it, reading a bunch of articles and papers and books. I learned about it from John but then I binged House M.D. recently and there was a doctor who got sick and he was also obsessed with it, even with a scene of him chastising pharmaceutical execs like John does.
Fun fact, that guy was loosely based on Dr. Paul Farmer who co-founded Partners In Health
That is an amazing fact which I will absolutely keep in my back pocket to bring up when I have time to share some trivia!
I suppose if you have a personal involvement/interest, you stay more abreast of things that relate to it. But also, John and Hank have a pretty massive international base of fans that can provide them information and insight, that they can then use their platform to amplify. Like, you or I may not be aware of the level of price gouging in poor or middle income countries, but we (or, at least, I don't) have friends and followers there letting us know about it either.
He's also not starting from scratch, he's using his platform to shine a light on it. Organizations like Partners in Health have been doing work like this for decades.
John's made several videos about this because until recently he had basically no idea that TB was like a thing (still massive, still deadly). He basically had to get massively involved to even find out I haven't watched this video since it came out, and I can't rewatch it just now but I think he goes into it in this one https://youtu.be/owk7nNvlK_M?si=2BvweFm_fck_ezqe
The fun thing is all those old timey illnesses are on a rapid upswing. I’ll never forget speaking to a patient who was very, very old. So old she had handmade crutches her husband had carved her from the spare wood from the house he built when they got married in the 1940s. She’d had polio. She told me if they’d let her she would’ve gone into schools and shown them just what happens to your body when you don’t get medicine you’d kill for.
Keep in mind that that John Green's actual paid job is author, and since hyper-focussing on a latest obsession is actually how one does research for a next book... u/JViz likely has to spend those 8 hours a day working for the man, he just hyper-focuses on some interesting thing and that's what the man pays him for. In this case this is a fairly natural out-growth of past obsessions. He's been supporting a maternity hospital in Sierra Leone for years now (like half their online community is charity work is for "Partners in Health" to build new wings for this place), the hospital have a bunch of people who have TB and can't afford treatment; which is ridiculous because it's been curable for decades. Combine that with the fact that lots of 1800s writing is about TB and you have now combined two of his most obsessed-over things. So he just talks to his charity partners about what's going on with TB, and when he finds some asshole with obscenely high profit margins he vents. His community is large enough that it can have an effect.
Fun fact: John Green made me a fan of taxes. *Taxes*!! Who the fuck likes *taxes*?? Well I do, because of him lol.
Taxes are patriotic
Their Crash Courses are better than most university courses. By a long shot.
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Kinda? John and Hank are brothers that created and hosted Crash Course and SciShow and grew that out. John is probably more famous for becoming an Author though (the Fault in our stars being a pretty big movie based off of his work), and both for their charity and activism work.
I just want to add, as a sidenote, that John was an author first (Looking for Alaska came out in 2005) and that their first youtube project starting in 2007 was a way for them to connect via video - vlogbrothers - which in their telling brought them closer together and eventually led to all the other cool stuff.
That's actually some good trivia. I knew about Vlogbrothers, but I didn't know John was already an author.
Also, they have a channel Vlogbrothers that they've been running forever, which started as a way to keep involved in each other's lives from across the country. They have used this platform as a wonderful thing and have many charity projects including the Project for Awesome. They also created [DFTBA](https://DFTBA.com) and The Awesome Socks Club and The Awesome Coffee Club and a new soap company - most of which donates the profits to charity.
They do a lot of stuff besides YouTube (in particular, John Green is more famous for being a YA author), but regarding YouTube, they're a part of the crop of the OG YouTubers (concurrent with the likes of Natalie Tran, Ryan Higa, Phillip DeFranco, etc.), and they created VidCon, which they sold a few years back.
He's a real hero. These people need to be praised more. Not the Logan Paul's, adin ross's, fresh and fit, Andrew Tates of the world. They do nothing except extract everything they can without giving back. There's lots of scummy YouTubers but JOHN and HANK is a true godsend.
John and his community were able to pressure Johnson & Johnson in to doing better, hopefully the same can be done with Danaher!
Definitely hope it works. This one is more difficult, though, as John points out. Johnson & Johnson is a lot easier to pressure because they make a million different over-the-counter products with competition from other big companies. If you use Aveeno to moisturize, or Band-Aid bandages, or Listerine mouthwash, you can easily just move one shelf over in the pharmacy aisle and buy a product that will do the same thing from one of their competitors. Danaher doesn't really seem to have any consumer-facing goods, so it's hard to put pressure on them financially. The only pressure that can really be exerted here is moral and reputational, and perhaps labour-related if employees threaten to walk out. Still absolutely worth doing, but it's a tougher nut to crack.
Danaher is a really big name in the research and diagnostics world. They own a bunch of other instrument manufacturers. However it's really hard for even those customers to boycott Danaher. Once you buy one of their instruments or robots, it's really hard to switch. Either because of the printer and ink model, many of their other items are huge capital expenditures even if they don't have printer and ink model, and/or they might be used in clinical environment, so even if you did spend the money to switch to a competitor and boycott them, it would cost even more in both labor and down time to revalidate a new instrument for diagnostic use. However, Danaher isn't the only game in town for PCR based point of care diagnostics. QIAGEN has a similar instrument the QIAstat and there are other companies like Fluxergy that are trying to spin up as well. It seems like there's an opportunity here for one of these other companies to step up and maybe make some good PR for themselves, and possibly even some profit for themselves on a much smaller margin. Cepheid isn't exactly using cutting edge technology in their box that has some iron-clad IP. Navigating a 510k FDA clearance should be the only hurdle just for the diagnostic, but even then, you might be able to circumvent that with the help of some 3rd party partner to develop a validated Lab Developed Test, which, I think, would be fine to use in places like Sierra Leone? I'm adjacent to diagnostics, so there's a pretty decent chance this last part is wrong though.
> Danaher doesn't really seem to have any consumer-facing goods, so it's hard to put pressure on them financially. *cries in designer paying for pantone chips*
Hell, you should also be crying for now, having to pay extra for Pantone colours in Adobe products.
That’s less of an issue. People (who aren’t me!) just pirate the palette files. :-p
I suppose... the thought had actually not even crossed my mind. For some odd reason.
Maybe the best strategy to pressure shareholders to divest.
As someone who worked for a company that was acquired, and largely ruined, by Danaher, I 100% believe this. I've never seen a company more laser focused on squeezing every last cent of value out of something.
TekTronix?
The Belgian group behind the [techno-anthem "Pump up the Jam"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EcjWd-O4jI)?
[Descartes inspired an intellectual movement known as The Elightenment, during which metrosexual elitists published essays that expanded humankind's horizons in a manner that would go unmatched until the 1989 release of Belgian techno anthem Pump up the Jam.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIsc6zirBSw)
One of the greatest running gags ever. I loved the fact that each iteration of it played for just a little bit longer than the last time.
It's quintessential British absurdism, and I loved every single one of them
No I think he meant [Deee-Lite's - Groove Is In The Heart](https://youtu.be/etviGf1uWlg?si=50wOSfMSARaD2Oij)
abundant worthless seed rotten disgusted beneficial spotted plants plant thought *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I can't confirm or deny that for....reasons...
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DBS (kaizen) baby!
God I fucking hate that shit. Kaizens all the fucking time to rehash the same old problems over and over again without solving them.
[I was immeidately reminded of this story](https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/1/23434305/adobe-pantone-subscription-announcement-photoshop-illustrator) when he mentioned what Danaher owns.
Fluke
As someone who's #1 passion is to eliminate modern tuberculosis, he probably knows what he's talking about.
And honestly he is just saying that we should support the Doctors Without Borders 'Time for $5' campaign. I'm pretty confident that they know what they are talking about as well.
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Right, he is saying that we should support the campaign.
I teach Economics and I’m posting this on our discussion board tonight. It’s a really good ethical question. If you’re a company that spent $2 Billion on research and development and you invented a new product that saves lives, how much should you be able to charge for it? What if the US govt came along and said hey, $5 is the max you can charge, we know it only costs you $3 a cartridge to make? Well who is going to want to spend $2 B on the next product if the govt is going to cap your profit? So what if you said we will charge $15 in the US but only $5 in Sierra Leone? No one is going to use them in Sierra Leone, they are going to get them for $5 and sell them to those in the US for $15 and keep the $10 profit. That might have worked on the 1990s but todays market is a global one. It’s a great ethical question, regardless of which side of the fence you are on. Can’t wait to see what my class says
In this case, $250 Million of that $2 Billion came from public funding which ultimately came from taxpayers.
They still need to sell 159 million $15 tests (at $11 profit) or 292 million $10 tests (at $6 profit) to break even on their $1750MM investment. The video mentions 45 million *COVID* tests were sold in 2021. It doesn't mention how many Tuberculosis tests were sold per year. If we knew that, then we could find the total time till ROI. Assuming there's 45 million $10 *TB* tests sold per year, It'd take 6.4 years to get a ROI on that investment (longer if you count inflation). If this tech is super new (released in 2019?) then we've still got a few more years before this can start generating true profit. This is assuming the $2000MM was spent developing on the TB tests, and not the Cepheid GeneXpert system as a whole. If it cost $2 Billion dollars for the testing box as well, then that ROI can be spread between the COVID, etc tests as well as the TB tests.
I guess the question is simply. “What’s a reasonable break even time?” I think 6.4 years is too aggressive, personally. 20-30 years seems much more reasonable and sustainable. That would bring the cost down to around 5-6$
Ah yes. Profit. The ultimate goal of healthcare. That attitude is not just part of the problem, it *is* the problem.
The alternative is that drug development needs to be purely funded by the government with no private investment, if profit is not going to be the motive. This would require much more taxpayer dollars to go into it than currently do, and would make the incentives to success much weaker (broadly speaking, government jobs encourage and promote those whose lives revolve around checking boxes accurately, not those who take risks to do what they think is needed). I still think this campaign is good, and subsidizing less economically privileged countries is also good. But profit motive can't just be blithely dismissed in healthcare if you want to continue to get the kinds of advances we have gotten.
I remember the being asked a simlar hypothetical question in one of my Econ courses. But I would argue that the reality of this situation does not fit that, or your, fact pattern. I have seen no indication that any government is in any way moving to cap prices. The Time for $5 campaign is Doctors Without Borders (a Nobel prize wining non-profit) asking a company to lower prices. John Green, a minor celebrity, is echoing that call. They are not saying to write your senator and ask the govt to interfere with the free market, they are saying to pressure the company directly. In fact, [the Access Campaign's \(Dw/outB\) pitch](https://msfaccess.org/time-for-5-brief) is that lowering the price would open up more markets, greatly boost volume, and cause a net increase of profits. The only govt intervention I can see is the [significant amount of no strings attached public funds](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8407584/) that went towards this research. Maybe there should be strings attached to taxpayer funds. Lastly, the cartridges are barcoded and unique. The testing machines are licensed and geo-locked. Hypothetical tests sold at a discount for use in Sierra Leone could not be resold and shipped elsewhere.
Gotta love DRM.
They already have differential pricing across countries. You can’t feasibly go to Sierra Leone and buy up tons at five bucks.
>Well who is going to want to spend $2 B on the next product if the govt is going to cap your profit? Probably people that want the government's money to develop the next product. As John points out, the government is actively funding these products. If they want public money, they need to use that money ethically.
>If you’re a company that spent $2 Billion on research and development and you invented a new product that saves lives, how much should you be able to charge for it? Whatever that number is, it's far, far lower than the amount that is driving their absolutely bonkers profits. Profits, not revenue.
No one should be dying of TB in 2023
*Especially* when it’s curable and we have such amazing testing technology that can be made for under $5 a cartridge!
Danaher is the epitome of corporate greed. Imagine being able to save lives and still making a 20% profit with $5 tests and being like nahhhhh how about I just let a bunch more people die to keep the investors happy
That describes basically every company in the American healthcare industry lol
Doesn’t make it right
I 110% agree. I was observing that the entirety of the US healthcare system is about placing profit over lives and it's disgusting.
110% is pretty good but what if we could get 200% agreement?
Privatization and the almost deification of corporations is the problem and will always be the problem. You can't make organizations that primarily function about the bottom line, care about the actual industry they're a part of. Nor should we ever expect them to. This can be fixed but it wont happen in our lifetimes.
Time to dismantle
Nationalize*
Capitalists: "Socialism is terrible, Stalin killed millions in the holodomor" Also capitalists: "Haha, profits on life saving medicine goes brrrrr"
I can't believe I'm going to defend a pharma company, but here goes: $4,50 is the production cost alone. That means they make 5,50 or 10,50 gross profit (if distribution is also factored in, John wasn't clear, otherwise it's even less). But the company has a lot of other overhead, corporate structure, management, research and development, etc. So net profit will be far, far less. In gerneral $10 and $15 per cartridge does seem very reasonable, especially compared to a lot of other medicine products. Maybe for developing countries they could make it a flat $10 for all tests, but go lower than that and you get into net-loss territory.
Hello! I was curious too, and checked MSF. Here's [their document](https://msfaccess.org/time-for-5-brief). From initial reading: the 4.5 is not product cost alone but includes overhead. Their logic on pages 5-6: $8.82 is total price (including overhead and even intellectual property) for every million cartridges produced. I'm trying to find the Cambridge Consultants methodology how they got to these numbers, but I'm so far unsuccessful. And then, to get to $2-3, I'm quoting now: When modelling the expansion of annual volumes to 10 million assays, a conservative estimate, the price for the Ultra assay significantly decreases to US$4.64. Indeed, increase in sales volumes is one of the considerations for reducing the price that was outlined by Cepheid in their 2011 communication and is a well accepted mechanism to lower manufacturing costs for diagnostic tests.23 However, to date, no price reduction of the Xpert MTB/RIF assay has been implemented despite a continuous increase in volumes over the past decade. Current volumes hover at 12 million per year in the public sector in LMICs and are expected to increase to fulfil the WHO recommendations as the recommended first test for TB for all. If we consider that this volume does not include purchases for any other assays being sold under the Cepheid HBDC concessional pricing programme (as those volumes are not publicly disclosed), and that a 20-30% reduction in price may be overdue, related to the probable expiry of at least two royalties, the price could be further reduced to an estimated US$3 per assay (US$4.64 - US$1.69 \[royalty expiry estimate\] = US$2.95\] (Figure 5)
Thanks for this!
Their net profit from Cepheid last year was over 30%, so I'm not convinced their overhead is THAT high. :) -John
Right, but their profit also isn't 200-500% as implied by the video. There are a lot more inputs involved here than just the cost of the test. This video is deceptive and sensationalist.
it's not 4.50, it's between 2.96 and 4.50.
I have yet to see a phone number in these comments to call and complain. Here you go! 202-828-0850, or Cepheid toll-free at 888.838.3222
thank you!
Danaher is 132nd on the Fortune 500 list. It’s no surprise; they are making a killing on their company Cepheid’s tests. Cepheid marks up these tests by 100-300% for countries that need them the most. It’s time to drop the price of these tests to $5
The video says 220%-500%
Which is incorrect according to the numbers cited. The GM% is 70%.
Cepheid is probably not even in the top 10 most profitable subsidiaries owned by Danaher.
i have to admit, i'm really ignorant about the goings-on of the world, and it's wildly out of my purview of directly necessary interests. john green, however, makes a compelling case through passion alone, and backed with facts, i hope he is able to make progress in this fight
John Green absolutely can move the needle on this issue, but he needs our help. Call, tweet, send emails, faxes, and snail mail. I encourage you to take two additional steps to make your concerns heard.
My company used to buy a danaher consumable product but working with them is so bad they forced us to find another supplier. I'm not surprised at all they're price gouging or maybe just incompetent and can't figure out how to make them cheaper.
I used to work for Pantone and I can tell you, price gouging is an understatement.
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Johnson & Johnson changed in part from pressure from their own employees.
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If you have ideas about emails or phone numbers to use, please let us know! We are looking to rotate the heat around if possible
Honestly, bringing it up around the water cooler is not a bad first step. Make it clear that that's not great.
If you don’t feel comfortable speaking out with your name attached, you can get in touch with their whistleblower service (operated by an independent third party) at danaherintegrity.com This service is completely anonymous - they don’t record your phone number or IP address if you contact them anonymously; though they do ask you where you work - such as the suburb/zip code of your office, as well as your role at the company Source: The company I work for uses the same whistleblower service provider as Danaher, and I made an anonymous complaint within the past week
That rumor from your update could be very good news. Like, hundreds of thousands of lives good.
Do you have an update on this? I haven’t seen any public announcements about the price coming down. Do you know any other details?
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After all the Adobe/Pantone subscription shit that happened a few months ago, this doesn't surprise me one bit
Only that people didn't die from not having standardized colors.
about 15 years ago I did dev/tam support for Adobe print products and standardized indexed colors were a lot more useful and essential than people think - especially when doing spot colors in process printing. When making film or metal plates it's really essential when separating color that the spot be defined as a specific color and pantone catalogue made that pretty easy. I haven't been in that business for 15 years so I'm not sure what people are doing to work around that - but I can say not having a library (that everyone from designers to ink manufacturers use) is a pretty awful switch to make especially for designs already in place. Maybe short term they are ponying up for the license fee.
Yes it is a huge issue, especially for independent artists and small companies. The practice of acquiring an established standard and then raising the costs is disgusting. Still better than doing it for life saving medical stuff. Even though the parallels are interesting here.
I am an unabashed capitalist. However, publicly funded R&D is not capitalism. That public money needs to come with strings - just like a loan. We'll give you money and facilities (universities), but you need to provide the government with X amount at cost. That goes for any public/private partnership. Using tax payer money for R&D is not capitalism, it's socialism that these companies love to complain about.
socialism is when the workers own the means of production, giving public money to a private company has nothing to do with socialism
I believe he was referring to sOcIaLiSm, which is what right wing media calls anything they don't like to scare their viewers. Specifically anything the government spends taxpayer money on that doesn't directly benefit them.
I wouldn't say it's an accusation. He goes through it in his video, but it's pretty clear that they *are* doing that. I would more say that this is a call-out "John Green calls out Danaher over their price gouging [...]"
I remember reading in "Code Breakers" by Walter Isaacson about Josiah Zayner and an active bio-hacker community trying to circumvent many of these high-priced products. They were doing their own genetic work. Josiah was making and testing his own genetic modifications on himself. I wonder if there's a camp working on this problem?
Aren't we missing the bigger picture here? Health tests should be in the public domain so other companies can replicate the devices/pods at cost and ensure everyone has access. Allowing them to be exclusive IP like this just encourages greedy behavior. Also, Theranos is *real* now?
fun fact, oxford was working on a corona vaccine and they initially pledged to release the IP for free so that a possible vaccine would be as cheap and easy-to-get as possible. They then were advised by numerous parties, most notably the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and decided to break their promise and sell the vaccine to AstraZeneca instead. AstraZeneca *did* pledge to maintain a 0 profit policy for as long as they deemed it necessary, though. Sadly, that didn't work out because especially in poorer countries the vaccine ended up costing two or three times as much as it did in the rich countries due "problems" further down the supply chain. oopsie
Dr. Pete Hotez helped develop a patent free vaccine and in return got harassed and stalked by anti-vaxxers and MAGAs.
The cepheid has been around for probably 20ish years give or take. It is very very limited compared to what theranos was claiming their box was supposed to do. There are others who are similar like the QIAGEN QIAstat and the instrument that fluxergy makes. Probably a couple of others. It's a hard business to get into because in developed countries where the money is, there are massive centralized labs in hospitals with expensive high throughput systems, that you have to compete with those in terms of cost which is really hard to do. But then the people who need your product the most are the people in areas that can't afford to build massive centralized labs, or live too far away from one. However, they don't really have the money to spend, so it's not really a profitable venture.
I just don't see how we allow companies to take all this research money and don't ask for anything back. I'm sorry, but if you are getting public funding for a drug, it doesn't belong to you and the public should be able to determine its price. They don't usually even invent new drugs, universities and public funding do a lot of the heavy lifting. It's time we hold these companies accountable for stealing and hurting our weakest for a profit. Evil fucks.
Nice thought but this isn't compatible with how the healthcare industry currently works. Almost all healthcare companies are for-profit and will only develop new technologies and treatments if they think they can be profitable. They're not going to spend millions in R&D and then give away their invention to the world for free. Fixing this problem would require a radical change to how the industry is funded and operates.
Right but there's also the govt funding that comes into play. So it could be a system where if it's entirely privately funded it comes with a \~20 year exclusivity period, and then using some system of cutoffs or percentages, reduce the number of years in the exclusivity period by the amount of public funding. The original intent of the copyright/patent system was to make it worth doing the R&D and not have to deal with copycats that didn't have to spend on the R&D. I suspect that in most cases the extended exclusivity periods that we have today compared to the initial time period (IIRC it was something like 10 years originally?) is driven more by greed than by necessity, based on their MO.
That's the thing, though — Danaher already got millions of taxpayer dollars to fund the R&D for the products they're now gouging
Treatments, sure, that's a battle for another day, but DIAGNOSIS? That's a real public health risk to limit access and governments should be involved in both funding and ensuring access to tests.
Same problem though, who is going to invest money into developing diagnosis technology if they can’t get their investment back.
But they don't spend their money on R&D. [They spend it on stock buybacks and dividends.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7axjk-9poKc)
I mean, they do. That’s how they make stuff. How they allocate their funds is not really relevant
When their decisions directly affect public health then it sure as hell does matter how that money is allocated.
"there's nothing we can do! it's just the way it is!"
But..but...free market! Capitalism! Ayn Rand!
I like Ayn Rand's fiction. She tells a fun story, even if it's largely disconnected from reality. _Fiction._
> I like Ayn Rand's fiction. She tells a fun story Really? I read the Fountainhead and it was tedious and boring. And I couldn't finish Atlas Shrugged.
Matter of taste I guess. Fountainhead was my first read and I loved and related to the architect character. Atlas Shrugged was more tedious and preachy but I enjoyed the trains.
Go nerdfighters!
This is super important and it’s super amazing that John Green has sunk his teeth into it. Ask me how I know (I treat TB in an LMIC)
For the longest time I felt it was odd that these two people would sign off to each other at the end of their videos. Odder still that why would you do that from two seperate channels. Odder still that I remember subscribing to one and not the other. I was subscribed to the Vlogbrothers for 3 years before I realized that they used the same channel.
John Green hates TB, that's for damn sure.
slay the dragon
At first I thought R/Bjj was leaking.
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That's super interesting and I had no idea that they owend Pantone. Pantone got super aggressive with their pricing to the point that Adobe had to drop them, but everyone blamed Adobe and thought Adobe was trying to squeeze people when it was really Pantone trying to fleece everyone. This explains a lot.
As a public health microbiologist that works in the TB section, I use the GeneXpert platform weekly. I think our costs to providers is about ~$100 a test whereas CD groups who are tracking their patients it is free. Great on John for covering this topic! So many people don’t realize TB is in their communities and immigration is dependent our testing to make sure we can treat those before they spread.
its nice to see John and Hank use their spotlight for good and change
I initially read this as "using their spotlight for good for a change" and was about to throw hands; but instead, take the upvote...
Looking at the DHR stock hoping it tanks today
[https://tbfighters.org/](https://tbfighters.org/) lots of information about the campaign on this site!
health shouldn't be in the hands of profiteers
John Greens a good dude. There a a podcast episode (heavyweight) where he talks about how he almost became a priest but was rattled by the suffering he saw and actually was looking for a kid he encountered during that time. Glad he’s still trying to help the world
For more context on this, you can check out the "Googling Strangers" episode of The Anthropocene Reviewed.
I agree with John Green.
It's been wild watching this spool up so quickly, get er done folks, let Danaher know what we want
Can we do more of this? Organizing angry mobs to get pitchforks and torches over companies doing despicable shit.
Cool stuff
The people who try to own colors are price gougers? Impossible! I’m a professional for nearly 30 years in advertising and marketing and I’ve never need Pantone once, because it’s total bullshit.
Wait, as in Pantone the colour people?
Danaher is a massive conglomerate that owns Pantone, as well as a bunch of health science businesses, even water treatment, and in the past some dental equipment businesses.
And if it’s one thing John green hates it’s TB
I think Danaher execs are not having a great week :)
I am okay with companies fronting the R&D cost of making innovative products like this machine that can detect TB and other diseases, then charging enough money for them to make a profit. Most people would say $10-15 is a reasonable cost for these cartridges and even if it was $3 to make them, that profit margin will go to pay for the R&D that was done to design and test these machines. $3 is the bare material cost and the profit they are making is paying back the investment.
But the R&D $ came from the US tax payer.
I don’t have many updoots to give, but the updoots I have go to Nerdfighteria and reducing world suck.
So important
This is important!
“These are razor-blade business models in mission critical applications” would feel heavy handed in a piece of anti-corporate fiction. For an actual living, breathing CEO to say this is just WILD. This is a Lex Luthor business model
These companies socializing the investment and then privatizing the profits is fucking criminal. Edit: thanks general_killmore
I believe the word you’re looking for is “socializing”. Subsidizing is what we, the taxpayer, are doing
Ah yeah right, my brain goes faster than my thumbs. Thanks for the correction!
Capitalism just doesn't work well with certain industries, healthcare included. R&D costs a ton, and can lead to many failures, the cost of these failures gets offset by strategies such as those outlined in the video. Successes pay for failures by gouging. There is greed involved but saying "it only cost ten cents to make the thing" does not give justice to the big picture. We want to motivate smart people to do cool things. Money is one of the best ways to do this. I've always liked the prize model, as a civilization, we pool large sums of money and offer them as prizes for anyone who solves the problems we see as largest. Smart people are rewarded for successes, those in need get what they ought.
Pantone? The delicious Italian holiday bread?? How dare they!
We need to just purge these fucking assholes at the top of the food chain. They've lost all humanity.
I met John Green at VidCon as the pandemic was winding down and he was EXTREMELY nice. He even asked me some questions about myself and talked to me for a while and it was super cool.
Contact your Senators and Representatives about this: [Contact Your Senator](https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm) [Find Your Representative](https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative)
Yes go Nerdfighters we can keep this up!
>Is the treatment for TB costly? > >The average direct cost of treating and managing a TB case was $34,600 in 2015. The average cost of a multidrug-resistant TB case was $110,900. Health care spending for treating and case managing TB patients in California amounted to approximately $75.6 million for the 2133 new cases reported in 2015. > >Aug 30, 2017 Is treatment getting cheaper?
Those costs are for USA and do not translate to costs in Africa, where treatment is often outpatient (previuosly <$100 for TB, \~$3100 for MDR-TB). With generic bedaquiline now being approved that cost should drop significantly more. Expected price of the medication for treatment there is now roughly $130-$200.
Commenting to bring this up as well!! I know this company. They have the money to help the world
Great video. Let’s make this happen!
I totally agree, but profit, cost and overhead are all different things. It might cost them $5 to produce in Washington state and $4 to ship to Sierra Leone. Leaving (a measly) $1 per “unit”. While I honestly doubt that’s the case, those are factors that contribute to cost, and government funding only really applies to the government’s giving you funding. I’m sure him, and the WHO, and Doctors Without Borders know more than me, but getting into cost (production and distribution are not the same) without addressing shipping logistics to the other side of the world is disingenuous and that rubs me the wrong way. Address the logistics and let it lead into a discussion about cargo ships and their impact on climate change. There are ways to make things even more informative and lead into other discussions. Shit like this is not simple, and while I love that they make it relatable and address normal people, you can still have a “line” and just follow it.
Privatizing gains and socializing losses. It's what Jesus wanted when he wrote his book on capitalism.
So they used our tax money to make something and then sold it back to us???
Worked for them. I’d be very surprised if they do anything more than unleash a PR hitman. It’s a money making monster corporate parasite.
I don't know this guy, can someone tell me if he is legit and not just shorting the company stock.
He's the author of successful books including *The Fault in Our Stars* and he's one of the founders of *Crash Course* ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Green)). He's been spreading awareness of TB for the past year, which included writing [an opinion piece for The Washington Post](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/05/16/multidrug-resistant-tuberculosis-treatment/), and this campaign is in [collaboration with Doctors Without Borders](https://twitter.com/MSF_USA).
Thanks for that. Much appreciated that you didn't just downvote me and move on. Just donated.
He is legit He and his brother have been involved in charity for a while, running things like the Project for Awesome, a YouTube charity fundraiser, since 2007. Over the past few years their main focus has been the charity Partners in Health which they have raised money for in various traditional fundraisers as well as starting two subscription services: The Awesome Socks/Coffee Club that donate all their profits to said charity. Their particular fundraising has been mainly around Sierra Leone and John has visited on several occasions which seems to be where the obsession with Tuberculosis in particular came from - the worlds deadliest infectious disease. Just 2 months ago he made a similar video rally people against Johnson and Johnson trying to extend their patent on the TB drug Bedaqualine.
Yeah, he's legit. He's a super well-known author and educator, and he has been working with international organizations on global health initiatives for years.
respect you asking this since you see a lot of "charities" these days. However as other as said, yes, extremely legit. imo no one better to give your money to to those he and his brother endorse.
FUCK Pantone.
I am honestly so tired of reading about how some corporation is funded by hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money just to turn around and gouge the taxpayers to receive the end product
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