Yup, this article isn't great.

As someone close to pharmaceutical manufacturing, the reason why the manufacturing is done in Ireland is for tax benefits for sales in Europe.

So why not have a US factory for US sales? Because it's much more expensive and complex to have two separate factories making the same drug. It's far easier to just scale the Irish factory to serve all global sales.

Even the same companies with Irish factories have US factories as well. It's not like any tax benefit moved that out of the US as well.

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kgwgk 5 days ago | parent [-]

Most of the value is in the patents, not in the manufacturing. Did they also expatriate that “accidentally”?

If Pfizer operates in the US at a loss (or at least they did in 2018-2020) and all the profits are booked elsewhere it was their choice.

https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/wyden_pfizer_in...

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refurb 5 days ago | parent [-]

No, that’s entirely intentional.

The IP and manufacturing are linked because you can’t manufacture something from commercial sale if you don’t have patent rights.

But the licensing of patent rights was done for tax advantage in the EU, not the US (generally).

Taxes are important but not the sole determinant of where they manufacture.

	▲	kgwgk 5 days ago \| parent [-]
		The manufacturing is in one place. The IP in another place. Both places chosen mostly for tax reasons in this case. Paying zero taxes in the US is a lucky side-effect.