Investigative journalist Sharon Lerner has an important article at The Intercept explaining how U.S. 
pharmaceutical companies, enabled by the recent Corona Relief Bill approved by Congress, are planning to make a killing (pun intended) during the covid19 pandemic. It is entitled, “Big Pharma Prepares to Profit From the Coronavirus.”
Warning: prepare to be disturbed, very disturbed.
Here is an excerpt:
“’Pharmaceutical companies view Covid-19 as a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity,’ said Gerald Posner, author of ‘Pharma: Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America.’ The world needs pharmaceutical products, of course. For the new coronavirus outbreak, in particular, we need treatments and vaccines and, in the U.S., tests. Dozens of companies are now vying to make them.
“’They’re all in that race,’ said Posner, who described the potential payoffs for winning the race as huge. The global crisis ‘will potentially be a blockbuster for the industry in terms of sales and profits,’ he said, adding that ‘the worse the pandemic gets, the higher their eventual profit.’
“The ability to make money off of pharmaceuticals is already uniquely large in the U.S., which lacks the basic price controls other countries have, giving drug companies more freedom over setting prices for their products than anywhere else in the world. During the current crisis, pharmaceutical makers may have even more leeway than usual because of language industry lobbyists inserted into an $8.3 billion coronavirus spending package, passed last week, to maximize their profits from the pandemic.
“Initially, some lawmakers had tried to ensure that the federal government would limit how much pharmaceutical companies could reap from vaccines and treatments for the new coronavirus that they developed with the use of public funding. In February, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., and other House members wrote to Trump pleading that he ‘ensure that any vaccine or treatment developed with U.S. taxpayer dollars be accessible, available and affordable,’ a goal they said couldn’t be met ‘if pharmaceutical corporations are given authority to set prices and determine distribution, putting profit-making interests ahead of health priorities.’
“When the coronavirus funding was being negotiated, Schakowsky tried again, writing to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on March 2 that it would be ‘unacceptable if the rights to produce and market that vaccine were subsequently handed over to a pharmaceutical manufacturer through an exclusive license with no conditions on pricing or access, allowing the company to charge whatever it would like and essentially selling the vaccine back to the public who paid for its development.’
“But many Republicans opposed adding language to the bill that would restrict the industry’s ability to profit . . .
“The truth is that profiting off public investment is also business as usual for the pharmaceutical industry. Since the 1930s, the National Institutes of Health has put some $900 billion into research that drug companies then used to patent brand-name medications, according to Posner’s calculations. Every single drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration between 2010 and 2016 involved science funded with tax dollars through the NIH, according to the advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs. Taxpayers spent more than $100 billion on that research.”
Read the entire article here.
