140,000 treatments is enough to have some good studies. If remdesivir proves useful, that would just be the tip of the iceberg. They (and maybe others) would have to make a hell of a lot more. We have maybe 300 million people in America who could be potential customers. Not to mention billions of people in other countries.
Yeah sure, at a thousand dollars a pill, right?
It's not a pill. It's delivered by IV.
Anyway, I don't think it is unfair for a drug company to recover R&D costs and make a profit. Of course I don't support outrageous profits but a profit is fair. Without drug companies we wouldn't have 98% of the medications known to man. Would you prefer a world without modern medicines?
Of course it's fair for a company to make a profit.
I'm not a communist.
That said, the main job of the Federal Government, the absolute top priority, is to keep Americans safe.
Even the most die hard anti-government libertarians believe that.
Well, our Federal Government FAILED to do that, because of intentional criminal negligence from the very top levels of our leadership.
Innocent people have been made ill and have died through no fault of their own. And now they should be forced to choose between having a roof over their head and getting an injection that might save their lives?
No.
No...sorry...this is one of those cases where a large chunk of all that money being handed out needs to be directed toward making sure that every living being inside our shores gets this medicine.
And yes, it should be FREE OF CHARGE and available everywhere.
That is the least we can do, it is what we should do, it is what we MUST DO, if we wish to avoid the kind of catastrophe currently happening in Singapore, where entire segments of the population are being ignored, with disastrous results.
Would I prefer a world without modern medicines? No, of course I prefer modern medicines, and I am okay with making a profit.
I am not okay with darwinian laws of the jungle being deliberately applied to vulnerable segments of the population who don't have an extra four or five thousand dollars handy to keep their families alive.
This is a pandemic, it does not care about our politics, our status on the social calendar or our capitalism. Letting vulnerable millions just die because they can't fork over ridiculous sums is beyond despicable.
And to be totally honest, if we continue to allow this sort of thinking to escalate, it will ultimately lead to a spate of violent revolutions around the world, and we will not escape unscathed.
This is the sort of crisis which had damn well better rouse the better angels of our nature or else we can sit back and watch the entire world burn to the ground and wake up with civilization at a dead end.
