#molnupiravir

Merck & Co. said Friday that its experimental COVID-19 pill reduced hospitalizations and deaths by half in people recently infected with the coronavirus and that it would soon ask health officials in the U.S. and around the world to authorize its use.

If cleared, Merck's drug would be the first pill shown to treat COVID-19, a potentially major advance in efforts to fight the pandemic. All COVID-19 therapies now authorized in the U.S. require an IV or injection.

Merck and its partner, Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, said early results showed patients who received the drug, called molnupiravir, within five days of COVID-19 symptoms had about half the rate of hospitalization and death as patients who received a dummy pill. The study tracked 775 adults with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 who were considered higher risk for severe disease because of health problems such as obesity, diabetes or heart disease.

Among patients taking molnupiravir, 7.3 per cent were either hospitalized or died at the end of 30 days, compared with 14.1 per cent of those getting the dummy pill. There were no deaths in the drug group after that time period compared with eight deaths in the placebo group, according to Merck.

Taxpayers paid for the Covid pill, but Merck is pocketing a 4,000% profit. The pill costs $17.74 to produce, but Medicaire and US insurers will pay $712 to receive it.

If government should be run like a business–a typical slogan repeated by naive neoliberals who rip off taxpayers and enrich billionaires–then the American public are the angel investors, and we should get paid first.

But that’s not what people who say “we should run the government like a business” mean. The business in question isn’t a startup with shrewd investors.

Rather, it’s more like a schlock Hollywood film, the kind that’s funded by star-struck midwestern dentists who are stupid enough to agree to a share of the “net profits” and get nothing, not even a free ticket to the premiere.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufy2AweXRkc

The extraordinarily cheap off-patent ivermectin has basically the same action for treating Covid-19 as the new very very expensive drugs from Pfizer and Merck.

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Ought not public funding that yields outcomes translate into affordable medicines, especially in a global pandemic?

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Excerpt:

A small Miami-based company, Ridgeback 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. Although Ridgeback remains involved in the development of the drug, some have described the deal as “flipping.”

Like the vast majority of medicines on the market, molnupiravir — which was originally investigated as a possible treatment for Venezuelan equine encephalitis — was developed using government funds. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, provided more than $10 million of funding in 2013 and 2015 to Emory University, as research done by the nonprofit Knowledge Ecology International has revealed. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, also provided Emory with more than $19 million in additional grants.

Yet only Merck and Ridgeback will reap the profits from the new antiviral, which according to Quartz could bring in as much as $7 billion by the end of this year.

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Note: the Australian Government has just committed to purchasing 300,000 courses of these pills presumably also being held over a barrel financially by Merck.