Thank you for posting this Goon. As an employee of Gilead, it pains me when people accuse it of "gouging" the public during this pandemic. Here are a few more facts:
Gilead started ramping up 24x7 production of Remdesivir way before any trials showed any results, on the mere potential that it could be impactful in treatment based on their own research, before they had any idea if they would ever get a penny back for the drug. They also, as you pointed out, priced it well below the pricing analysts suggestions and are giving away a bunch of it to countries that can't pay the US rates, just as they've given away many billions worth of AIDS treatments to 3rd world countries across the globe. $2350 for a potentially life saving medicine seems like the bargain of the century, and no, poor people who can't afford $2K will not be left to die, Gilead will give it away or the Govt will step in.
Finally, people who bemoan big pharma's profit levels often simply don't understand how the entire industry life-cycle works. No one starts a bio-pharma research company in their garage with a few grand from mom and pop like Jeff Bezos did with Amazon. It takes millions worth of equipment and talent just to get started with a minimum 10 year road-map to make a penny back - so it takes investors, massive investors, to even have the industry in the first place. No one invests millions/billions in private sector money without some expectation of a return some day. And because there is so much capital at risk, the typical life-cycle is that of the small pharma startup (with many millions already invested) after several years makes its way to "promising" in advance of any clinical trials. At this point they can continue to borrow a ton of money from investors to go from "promising" to stage 1, 2 and 3 trials and then finally to commercial sales, or they can be sold to a bigger more mature pharma that already have the organization to navigate through a giant mountain of regulation to get to the "commercial" phase. The original investors want their money back but the startup still needs a TON of capital to grow into ever making any money, if they ever do because most treatments go bust in trials, a small fraction even make it to commercial. So finally big pharma buys small pharma and dumps a ton of money into to to keep it growing. If big pharma was a non profit, or whatever smaller profit level the hysterical public thinks they deserve, then they don't have the money to buy small pharma, which trickles down to small pharma not having viable life-cycle to attract those initial investors in the first place.
So in the end, if people want to squeeze profit out of pharma, thats fine, here's what it will look like: Virtually no emerging medicines without full government funding, which means billions of taxpayer dollars at risk with minimal results. It would mean rare diseases get no attention - the government already jettisons the small vulnerable populations on a routine basis because they aren't a powerful voting block. There is a reason why most all significant innovations, such as curing AIDS which Gilead has basically done, come from the private sector with some help from govt research. Govt cannot fund research for everything we need, it has to work with the private sector. But there is no private sector without profit because there is no investment in anything without profit as the end reward. Want to duplicate the private sector investment in a non profit govt lead effort? How much are you willing to pay in increased income taxes for that shift? Answer, nothing. No one wants to pay more taxes and no politician who suggests a massive tax increase will get elected on that platform.
Finally, Gilead cured Hepatitis C, and made good money doing it, which funded other research, such as Remdesivir which was abandoned after SARs died off. But after a while, the combination of it being a full on cure and generics cut that profit margin significantly. If that initial profit was artificially restricted, Gilead likely could not have afforded to ramp up Remdesivir with no guarantee of a return on it. Big profit on one drug fuels investment in other drugs, or startups, most of which never make a dime. Its just not the same as selling TShirts on Amazon.
