Updated; 14/Apr/22
One of the first used drugs to treat the virus just announced its price.
Most major drug companies are named after founding families, e.g., Bayer, Glaxo Smith-Klein, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Abbott, Boehringer Ingelheim. Gilead’s use of a heavenly-inspired name is testament to its marketing savvy.
Gilead Sciences says it will charge the US government $390 per vial for its virus drug Remdesivir. That’s over $2,300 dollars for a typical five-day treatment. Per person. The longer 10-day treatment course will cost governments $4,290 per patient, and $5,720 for a US patient with private insurance.
Gilead’s announcement settles the lingering question of pricing about a drug that has been shown to have a modest benefit but remains the only therapy authorized by the Food and Drug Administration to treat hospitalized patients. A clinical trial sponsored by the government showed the drug — invented by Gilead but developed largely by taxpayer-funded agencies — sped up hospital recoveries by four days. It had no statistically significant impact on survival for COVID-19 patients.
The price has been swiftly criticized; a consumer group called it “an outrage” because of the amount taxpayers invested toward the drug’s development – a $70,000,000 grant from the federal government.
A study, conducted by the Center for Integration of Science and Industry at Bentley University and posted on a preprint server, found the development of Remdesivir was supported by a whopping $6.5 billion dollars of tax payer’s money in funding for basic research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over several decades. Clearly an audit of Gilead Sciences is warranted, but in the current climate, there’s little hope of it ever being legitimate.
The company says it will offer this one price model to developed countries so it doesn’t get slowed down in negotiations. Once the supply is opened up the company will increase the list price for private insurance companies and other commercial payers they will charge five hundred twenty dollars per vial in the US, that’s over three thousand dollars for a five-day course.
US regulators authorized it in May after a trial found it’s speed recovery by about four days. The price decision is important because it sets the precedent for how much future COVID medicines might cost.
“We’re in uncharted territory with pricing a new medicine, a novel medicine, in a pandemic,”
Gilead CEO, Daniel O’Day.
“We wanted to make sure that nothing gets in the way of remdesivir getting to patients,” The price “will make sure all patients around the world have access to this medicine.”
“At the level we have priced remdesivir and with government programs in place, along with additional Gilead assistance as needed, we believe all patients will have access,”
Howver, U.S. Representative Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat from Texas, said it was “an outrageous price for a very modest drug, which taxpayer funding saved from a scrap heap of failures.” Remdesivir had previously failed as an Ebola treatment and has not shown that it can reduce COVID-19 deaths.
Remdesivir is expected to be in high demand as one of the only treatments so far shown to alter the course of COVID-19. After the intravenously administered medicine helped shorten hospital recovery times in a clinical trial, it won emergency use authorization in the United States and full approval in Japan.
Analysts at Royal Bank of Canada forecast the drug could generate $2.3 billion in revenue 2020, helping offset more than $1 billion in development and distribution costs. They said additional profits could be limited because vaccines and better treatments are on the horizon.
The journal of Virus Eradivtainod published an artcilce titled; ‘Minimum costs to manufacture new treatments for COVID-19’ it states;
Minimum estimated costs of production were US $0.93/day for remdesivir, $1.45/day for favipiravir, $0.08/day for hydroxychloroquine, $0.02/day for chloroquine, $0.10/day for azithromycin, $0.28/day for lopinavir/ritonavir, $0.39/day for sofosbuvir/daclatasvir and $1.09/day for pirfenidone. Costs of production ranged between $0.30 and $31 per treatment course (10–28 days). Current prices of these drugs were far higher than the costs of production, particularly in the US.
Journal of Virus Eradication
Gilead has linked up with generic drugmakers based in India and Pakistan, including Cipla Ltd and Hetero Labs Ltd. Cipla’s version is priced at less than 5,000 Indian rupees ($66.24), while Hetero Lab’s version is priced at 5,400 rupees ($71.54).
“This is a high price for a drug that has not been shown to reduce mortality,” Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic said. “Given the serious nature of the pandemic, I would prefer that the government take over production and distribute the drug for free. It was developed using significant taxpayer funding.“.
Peter Maybarduk, a lawyer at the consumer group Public Citizen, called the price “an outrage.“… “Remdesivir should be in the public domain” because the drug received at least USD 70 million in public funding toward its development, he said.
“The price puts to rest any notion that drug companies will ‘do the right thing’ because it is a pandemic,” – Dr Peter Bach, a health policy expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
Gilead’s Other Greatest Hits
Tamiflu;
This is not the first time Gilead sciences has been involved in exorbitant treatments. The company has long been tied to politics, as well as to Dr. Fauci, who named its CEO, John C. Martin, to his NIAID advisory council over 14 years ago, in March 2000.
Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of the operating board of Gilead from 1997 to January 2001, when he resigned to accept a position in George W. Bush’s cabinet as Secretary of the Dept. of Defense, which, several years into Rumsfeld’s tenure, stockpiled millions of units of Gilead’s best-selling Tamiflu, now regarded by many experts as a nearly or completely worthless flu palliative. Rumsfeld held a stake in Gilead valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.
Fauci’s PrEP, Truvada & HIV;
One scam in particular stands out, involving Dr Anthony Fauci.
Fauci, director of the NIAID, decided to collaborate with Gilead on what came to be called PrEP experiments. In HIV research-gone-wild, Dr. Fauci began to finance clinical trials of the toxic drug Truvada in HIV “negatives,” on the theory the therapy would “protect” them from becoming “positive.” Employing another HIV-AIDS drug marketing acronym, aggressive misuse of the chemotherapy drug was called “pre-exposure prophylaxis”, or the benign-sounding “PrEP.”
Tens of millions of dollars in federal outlays from NIAID to study test-and-treat and PrEP (plus grants engineered by Fauci from other agencies like the CDC and USAID, and from non-profits like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) have been accrued to the benefit of Gilead Sciences – a little-known pharmaceutical company.
Fauci is also part of the Gates Foundation cabal. In 2012 Fauci was named one of the five Leadership Council of the Gates Foundation-created Global Vaccine Action Plan.
The FDA ignored two of the four Truvada tests that had failed and been halted. Despite that and owing to data manipulation by Fauci’s NIAID and Gilead, the FDA approved the dangerous Truvada for PrEP. Today Gilead lists the side effects of Truvada: Kidney problems, including kidney failure, worsening Hepatitis B, too much lactic acid in your blood (lactic acidosis), which can lead to death, severe liver problems, which can also lead to death, bone density problems, and more. [Full report]
They state that Truvada; “can help reduce the risk of getting HIV-1 through sex, when taken every day and used together with safer sex practices.” Clearly it’s the latter that works, and the former is just a dangerous placebo at best.
Without insurance, PrEP costs about $15,000 a year per patient.
The Fauci-Gilead scam of promoting Truvada for healthy people to “reduce risk” of HIV is a marker for medical malpractice, and in some cases, evident criminal abuse of humanity. Fauci, up to the time of the first claims of a virus in Wuhan China, was still promoting a 35-year fraud around HIV.
For the full write-up on Fauci’s scams around the HIV industry going back to 1984 – The Fraudulent Dr Fauci – Part I: The AIDS Racket
Redfield, Birx & HIV fraud
While on the subject of fraudulent practices around HIV research, relevant also is the fact that all top scientific advisers to the US President’s Task Force on COVID-19 are tied since decades to the bogus and destructive HIV/AIDS research and propagation of false theories. Alongside Tony Fauci of NIAID stands Robert Redfield, CDC Director, and Deborah L. Birx, M.D., Obama appointee as US Global AIDS Coordinator who worked under Tony Fauci at NIAID from 1983-1986.
Dr. Robert Redfield and Dr. Deborah Birx were the targets of a damning Department of Defense investigation in 1994 after colleagues in the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force blew the whistle on scientific fraud during clinical trials of a HIV/AIDS vaccine. [Report – PDF].
Redfield was the lead on the Army’s HIV/AIDS vaccine project, and was assisted by Birx. According to the DOD documents, the project was plagued by manipulation of data, inappropriate statistical analyses, falsified data presentation and publication, all in an attempt to get a faulty vaccine approved by the FDA to treat HIV patients.
The Cash register that is Gilead Sciences, Inc.
The earthly publicly held corporation, Gilead Sciences, Inc., has long been politically tied to the Republican Party, as well as to Dr Fauci, who named its CEO, John C. Martin, to his NIAID advisory council over 20 years ago, in March 2000. Donald Rumsfeld was chairman of the operating board of Gilead from 1997 to January 2001. In addition to Rumsfeld, who had been on Gilead’s board since 1988, also on the board have been Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz; George H. W. Bush’s Special Trade Representative, Carla Hills; and the wife of former California Republican Gov. Pete Wilson.
–The Fraudulent Dr Fauci – Part II: The Remdesivir Scam – CHI.
“Fauci quoted a second study in support of his mandating the use of Remdesivir, a study conducted by the makers of Remdesivir titled; ‘Compassionate Use of Remdesivir for Patients with Severe Covid-19‘, wherein 53 patients with covid were administered the drug for 10 days. 23% of them suffered from multiple organ disfunction syndrome, septic shock, and acute kidney injury. 8% of them had to be taken off the drug after only 5 days because it was killing them..”
The Heretic 