Yesterday the pharmaceutical giant Merck asked the Food and Drug Administration to grant emergency use authorization for its new pill, Malnupiravir, that can treat COVID-19 for the eye watering price of $712, and Joe Biden already bought 1.7 million. The drug costs Merck $17.74 to produce.
“Merck said it is asking for authorization for the capsules to treat infected adults who are at risk of progressing to severe Covid-19 disease or hospitalization,” reported CNN. A drug trial for Malnupiravir was reportedly ended early “because the drug was working so well” versus the placebo. “Data from this trial has not yet been peer-reviewed or published,” CNN later noted.
The left wing news outlet also notes that Merck, like Pfizer with its COVID-19 pill, has been producing the drug in large numbers even before studies could be completed or the FDA granted it some form of clearance to enter the market. The company “expects to produce 10 million courses of treatment by the end of 2021,” wrote CNN. “It has already sold 1.7 million treatment courses to the US government.”
It is unclear how many pills are needed per “course of treatment,” but only assuming two pills, the cost to taxpayers is already over $2.4 billion. Most of this is profit to Merck, which sells its pill at a 4,000% markup, as National File recently reported:
Merck, likely looking at competitors Pfizer and Moderna who have made extreme profits selling vaccines during the pandemic, apparently realized this was an opportunity to expand their profits and decided to charge the government $712 for the same amount of medicine. This is nearly a 3913.53% increase from the cost to produce the supposed miracle drug.
The Intercept notes that “the pill could bring staggering profits to both Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics.” Ridgeback is apparently a “small Miami-based company,” that actually “licensed the medicine from Emory University in 2020 and two months later sold the worldwide rights to the drug to Merck for an undisclosed sum.” The company has been accused of “flipping” the drug for a profit.
COVID-19 profits seem to be the guiding factor for some pharmaceutical companies. Moderna, a small and mostly unsuccessful company prior to the pandemic, had already made $12 billion in August of this year, and one of the Pfizer scientists caught on video speaking with Project Veritas revealed his company was now completely dependent on “COVID money.”
