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CVS Announces Super Cheap Generic Alternative To EpiPen (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Pharmaceutical giant CVS announced Thursday that it has partnered with Impax Laboratories to sell a generic epinephrine auto-injector for $109.99 for a two-pack -- a dramatic cut from Mylan's Epipen two-pack prices, which list for more than $600 as a brand name and $300 as a generic. The lower-cost auto-injector, a generic form of Adrenaclick, is available starting today nationwide in the company's more than 9,600 pharmacies. Its price resembles that of EpiPen's before Mylan bought the rights to the life-saving devices back in 2007 and raised the price repeatedly, sparking outcry. Helena Foulkes, president of CVS Pharmacy, said the company felt compelled to respond to the urgent need for a more affordable alternative. "Over the past year, nearly 150,000 people signed on to a petition asking for a lower-cost epinephrine auto-injector option and millions more were active in social media searching for a solution," she said in a statement. The price of $109.99 for the alternative applies to those with and without insurance, CVS noted. And Impax is also offering a coupon to reduce the cost to just $9.99 for qualifying patients. Also in the press statement, Dr. Todd Listwa of Novant Health, a network of healthcare providers, noted the importance of access to epinephrine auto-injectors, which swiftly reverse rapid-onset, deadly allergic reactions in some. "For these patients, having access to emergency epinephrine is a necessity. Making an affordable epinephrine auto-injector device accessible to patients will ensure patients have the medicine they need, when they need it."
I'm now clinical cardiac pharmacist, but I still follow the industry news.
This is a generic for the Adrenaclick, not the Epi-pen. It's the same drug but it not AB rated. It's easily fixable by a call from the filling pharmacist to the prescriber of they write for Epi-pen. We do it all the time.
Still $55/pop. I would have gone with 'cheaper'. "Super Cheap" is a bit of hyperbole.
FYI: Epinephrine is $4.79/vial.
This.
For many years, my wife insisted on brand-name aspirin, changing products in step with the most convincing advertisements.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Had their excess profit been less than the short term amortized cost of entering the market, they could have milked it for decades.
American capitalism hasn't thought that far forward in a long time. The CEO has an EPS target to meet so his golden parachute kicks in. Next quarter is someone else's problem, and the next decade might as well not even exist.
"BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
the patent lasts like 5 or 10 or 20 years (I don't know)
Uh, it's 20 years, sometimes including an additional exclusivity period of up to 5 years (or apparently up to 10 years for certain antibiotics) offered by the FDA in some situations such that competitors' products will not be approved during that time. The exclusivity period isn't guaranteed to run consecutive to the patent period, although the drug companies obviously attempt to engineer it that way if possible.
I just thought that was worth clarifying. Like, "I'm don't recall if Joe was two or four or eight feet tall [and it turns out he might've been as much as twelve feet tall]"... that's not something you should hand-wave away. Yes, it's a complicated situation, but the government-created barriers to entry here (of which drug patents are just a tiny piece) are significant. We do need some barriers, obviously, along with some method of incentivization, but given the high or wildly fluctuating prices of some generics when there doesn't appear to be much of a marginal cost involved (I'm not necessarily saying that's the case with the epi-pens), the system as a whole does not appear to be functioning terribly well.
You must be young. My dad is allergic to bees. His doctor prescribed him a preloaded syringe in the 80s. This is how it used to be done.
Image of an old "bee sting kit":
http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/dirtheartwitch/files/2015/07/old-style-sting-kit.jpg
They expire.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Looks like the 18 months is aggressive tho. Might depend on storage conditions too.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
$110 is still way too expensive. Syringe = $0.05. Epinephrine = $2.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The audio instructions are NOT for you you dumb fuck, they are for the person in the cubicle next to you who finds your swollen unconscious ass on the floor with a half eaten shrimp hanging from your puffy lips, and has no idea how that funny square thing works, or how to use it. You really thought that recording was for you? Seriously, the reason your allergist wasn't impressed is because he/she just knows that your gonna be a dead man due to your own ignorance.
Side note, my kid has one because he might have to rely on another 8 year old to save his life. HE understands what that recording is for, but it has escaped you.
The specific rule about EpiPens was the result of private sector lobbying of the government. Please, tell us more about how corporations aren't attempting to undermine public ownership of the state.
In less "free" countries like the UK and France, the Epipen two-pack (the real one, not the generic) costs $70 and $100 respectively. And that's before healthcare.
So between the fact that you can't get oxygen into your lungs, and the fact that your blood can't deliver oxygen to your brain, and the fact that you feel like shit, and know very well that you're in the middle of a life-threatening emergency... you don't really have the capability to perform tasks requiring concentration and fine motor skills, such as would be required to manually draw up a precise dose of medication into a syringe and inject it into yourself.
An EpiPen or similar device is "necessary" because it is an incredibly simple mechanical device that you can operate even while in extremis. You pop a cap off both ends, and push it against your butt check. Its something that anyone, even children, can be trained to do, and to practice (obviously with a dummy device with no needle or medication). And practice until using it practically becomes a reflex, and not something that requires concentration to perform. Its easy enough to do that, even when overcome with anxiety and decrease oxygenation, people can usually manage to work an EpiPen.
I suspect you probably haven't actually experienced anaphylaxis, if people had time to talk to you and for you to convince them that everything was fine. Anaphylaxis requires rapid administration of epinephrine. So you may have had an allergic reaction, maybe even a bad one, but unless you actually experienced the sensation of being unable to force air in and out of your lungs, even when trying with all your might, you haven't truly experienced anaphylaxis. I'd also take issue with your assumption that administering an EpiPen is a "high risk emergency procedure." I suppose there is some risk of local infection, but I'm not aware of any documented cases of infection, at least anything requiring treatment, as a result of an EpiPen. (There are other risks associated with Epi administration, but infection is effectively not one of them.)
So some sort of autoinjector device, be it an EpiPen or a similar competitor, is effectively required to be able to safely manage anaphylaxis.
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