Superdrug Smash and Grab
Everyone’s worried about Covid-19. Everyone’s desperate for a cure. So when the news broke that big pharma firm Gilead had a wonder drug to deal with the virus, everyone was happy.
Happiness turned to dismay when we heard that the US government under Donald Trump had bought up the entire supply for the world for the next three months. So much for international collaboration to fight the pandemic. This is Trump’s ‘America first’ in action.
The wonder drug is called remdesivir. It doesn’t actually cure you of the virus, but it can help with the care of desperately ill people by shortening treatment time.
It’s produced by Gilead. They have the patent rights, which means that no other firm can produce it without approval, and that involves paying Gilead money. In other words the patent gives Gilead a monopoly on the drug, the right to charge as much as they like. And boy are they taking advantage of that privilege right now.
You may think it’s outrageous that, while hundreds of thousands are dying and millions more suffering from the virus, Gilead uses the crisis as an extra opportunity to gouge money by restricting the supply. If you think that, you may well be a socialist or at least thinking that way.
In fact Daniel O’Day, CEO of Gilead, regards himself as a philanthropist. Here’s his thinking:
“In normal circumstances, we would price a medicine according to the value it provides... earlier hospital discharge would result in hospital savings of approximately $12,000 per patient.”
So if Gilead charges less than $12,000, they say they’re doing us all a favour. But what does the drug actually cost to produce? $9! That’s it. They are actually charging $2,340 per dose when it costs them $9. That’s 260 times what it costs.
There’s a classic argument from big pharma. They do all this research, they argue. Much of it comes to nothing, as is the nature of scientific research. So when they get a ‘hit’ it helps to pay for all the misses, all the false leads they followed up in research.
The problem with this argument is that they don’t do all the research and don’t pay for it either. As Mariana Mazzucato has argued in detail in her book The entrepreneurial state, it is actually government agencies such as universities that undertake a great deal of the basic research later appropriated by private companies. And the government pays for the research.
This was certainly the case with remdesivir. So what big pharma firms like Gilead do is:
· First, rip off the government and claim the results of research as their private property .
· Secondly,rip off consumers with the price of the drug.
Magic!
This has got to stop. There is no clearer example of the way capitalism fattens itself off human hardship and misery than the story of big pharma. If we are really waging a ‘war’ against Covid-19, then we have to deal with the traitors in our midst, who make it impossible to fight the pandemic effectively. It’s high time to take over the big pharmaceutical companies.
