I just bought Covid test kits in Bangkok for $2.50ea retail. In Australia they are selling for 33x more. Here’s why.

January 17, 2022 

Going to Australia, I’m required to take a rapid antigen test within 24 hours to prove that I’m not a risk to the community and won’t add to the 80,000+ new infections yesterday. Like Djokovic, I have had Covid and therefore don’t present a risk to society. Like Djokovic, I am against vaccine mandates and therefore present a risk to society. Unlike Djokovic, I’m vaccinated, which we all know makes no difference.

What’s crazy though, is that if I wanted to source a Rapid Antigen Test (RAT) in Melbourne, I’d be out of luck. Sure, I saw a headline saying that 3 million just landed in Melbourne. If everyone went and bought five, we’d only have a shortfall of 20 million. Crazy times.

The problem in Australia is that the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) needs to approve each of these test kits twice: once for use by a person with medical training and once for individual use by untrained plebs who just happen to be experts on their own bodies.

This approval consists of the TGA reviewing whatever the manufacturer wrote about the tests, rubber stamping the application, and granting ONE company a complete monopoly on the import of that product.

They are now up to 22 approved testing kits (including the Testsealabs up the nostril RAT which I purchased for $2.50 a piece). This is double the number of approvals at the end of October. (How much does it cost to pay a temp with a rubber stamp?)

What’s crazy is that the government grants monopoly import rights for each product. If I had a monopoly on one product (which I actually do) I’d charge a crazy markup on it.

Unsurprisingly, the Australian wholesale price of the same RAT I purchased today for $2.50 (AUD3.02) is between A$4-12. So the monopoly importers have obviously tacked on around 200% markup. Great business if you can get it.

Strangely, Australian politicians are trying to blame retailers for selling the kits for A$100.

Sorry mate. That’s how the world works. You grant someone a market and he’ll make as much as he can before the competition arrives. Grant someone a monopoly and he’ll “look out for shareholders’ interests.” Oh, did you say “consumer interests”? Nah, we don’t care about that any more than you care about citizens’ rights to protect their bodies.

Australian politicians and bureaucrats have nobody but themselves to blame (or their mates to thank) for the shortage and insane prices of these Covid tests.

I am limited to bringing in 3-months’ personal supply, otherwise I’d be happy to take orders and offer them for sale at the “wholesale” price of A$11.45

This is just another example of Australian politicians stepping in to “protect Australians” and effectively handing their mates billions in free money.

But we do have to protect the vulnerable.

Without them, we’d have nobody to profit from.

Peter.

The Ostrich Head