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⏱2021 Drug prices are through the roof

Jan 4, 2021

Good morning everyone. Happy Monday to you all! It’s time to make this year a good one.

In a tradition that’s nowhere near as fun as the ball dropping, pharmaceutical companies raise their drug prices every year on Jan 1st, and this year didn’t break the trend. In a study conducted by Rx Savings Solutions, they found that more than 70 drugmakers raised their prices on hundreds of drugs by an average of 3.3%. The main culprit? Pfizer, who raised their prices by up to 5% on more than 200 different therapies. Luckily though, most consumers won’t be affected too much as the insurance providers typically take on the majority of the increase.

Facebook released their data on NYE yesterday, and the numbers were shocking. More than 1.4 billion video and voice calls were placed on WhatsApp alone. That number represents a 50% increase over the year before, and was even larger than last March when the pandemic lockdowns were at their peak. Facebook Messenger had its highest total video calls as well, and there were more than 55 million live broadcasts on Facebook and Instagram live.

In a recent interview, Kevin Frisch, the former CRM for Uber, disclosed that at one point Uber discovered that they were being defrauded by a performance marketing company. They only found this out by turning off $100M of the $150M budgeted spend, and observing no noticeable change. It turns out that companies were both faking the impact of their advertising, and hacking consumer’s phones to click on their ads automatically, upping their “click-through-rate.” Oof.

Yesterday the US death toll from Covid passed more than 350k, as the rolling seven day average daily cases hit 205k. In other news, the US has distributed the first vaccine dosage to roughly 2.8M people, and Florida became the third state to have a confirmed case of the new, faster spreading variant of Covid.

With a polar bear costume on! Two grandparents, Clive and Barbara Walshaw, got creative over the weekend and bought two inflatable polar bear costumes to act as a “covid-shield” so they could visit with their grandkids.

Have a great rest of your day, and we’ll see you tomorrow bright and early!

-The 90 Second News Team

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