The drug doesn’t prevent the COLVID-19 virus…
But it does lessen the time one takes to fight the virus and recover…
The drug has an emergency ok from the FDA and Gilead, the manufacturer of the medicine is sending over a million doses to HHS and the FA to be prescribed by doctor’s treating patient’s….
BUT?
This IS America …
People ARE looking to make money of others sickness…
We can now talk about the fine print…
For a drug that cost about $10….Some have done cost studies that could set a price for the drug in the thousands of dollars , which would be a sure way for Donald Trump’s political career to go in the toilet for November with media beatdowns…
This should be about saving lives NOT making money for a company’s stock holders…
I’m sure somehow?
Us taxpayers ARE gonna end up paying for this drug and others coming to market…
It ALWAYS comes back to money in this country….
Gilead has rocketed into the public consciousness with one of the most promising coronavirus treatments, but the company’s history of sky high drug pricing is drawing increasing scrutiny from Congress about how much it will charge for remdesivir and who will get access.
But Gilead, which suffered through a spate of bad publicity in 2015 for charging $84,000 for a hepatitis C drug, isn’t just under fire over the potential price of its coronavirus treatment. It’s under pressure from Wall Street investors to recoup the $1 billion investment in remdesivir, which has been proven to accelerate recovery from the coronavirus. How Gilead navigates financial pressures from investors and political pressures from Washington may very well determine the mass production and availability of one of the most promising coronavirus drugs on the market.
“An unaffordable drug is completely ineffective,” Democratic Reps. Lloyd Doggett (Texas) and Rosa DeLauro (Conn.) wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar last week, raising questions about remdesivir.
It’s not clear exactly how much the drug will cost. For context, one non-profit that evaluates drug costs says it costs about $9.32 to manufacture a 10-day course of remdesivir treatment for one patient. Calculating the cost of development and trials, the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review says Gilead could charge as little as $390 for the drug. But Wall Street analysts are on an entirely different page, suggesting a price between $5,000 to $10,000, leading to billions in profits.
Gilead management “remains vague on their plans to recoup the production, distribution, and trial costs — citing a balance between access and sustainability,” said Brian Abrahams, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, in a recent investor note. This reticence, “alongside the unpredictability of the future pandemic/stockpiling continues to make modeling its potential impact challenging,” he said….