A quick follow-up to my
post on criminality.
A five-day course of
molnupiravir, the new medicine being hailed as a huge advance in the treatment
of Covid-19, costs $17.74 to produce, according to drug pricing experts at the
Harvard School of Public Health and King’s College Hospital in London.
So how much is the drug
company Merck charging for it? $712 for a course of treatment, or 40 times the cost to produce.
The drug is administered in
a pill making it easily accessible. But to be effective the drug needs to be
taken in the period when the COVID symptoms first appear. Health officials
estimate that the high cost of the drug will discourage many individuals from using
it until it is too late.
It turns out that
molnupiravir was developed, in part, using government funds. The US government provided
more than $29 million to Emory University for basic research which was later used
to develop the drug.
And what will Merck do
with its obscene profits from selling the drug? It will reward its CEO with a “well
deserved” pay raise, it will buy back some of its stock (rewarding its wealthy
stockholders) and it will buy another few politicians in Washington.
Allowing more people to
die in the COVID pandemic, when they could be saved, should be a crime. Under
our current system it is rewarded rather than punished.
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