That would be the same redesivir from Gilead which is being discussed in
this interview between Amy Goodman from Democracy Now and Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen:
AMY GOODMAN: Rob, I want to ask you about Gilead. Facing mounting pressure from elected officials and dozens of groups, including yours, Public Citizen, Gilead scientists backed down from holding onto the exclusive status the Trump administration granted it for a drug it’s developing to treat COVID-19. Joe Grogan, a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, worked as a Gilead Sciences lobbyist from 2011 to 2017. The status would have allowed the corporation to profit exclusively off the drug for seven years and blocked manufacturers from developing generic versions that can be more accessible to patients and control the drug’s price. Senator Bernie Sanders tweeted, quote, “It is truly outrageous that after taxpayers put tens of millions of dollars into developing remdesivir, Trump’s FDA is exploiting a law reserved for rare diseases to privatize a drug to treat a pandemic virus. The Trump Administration must rescind this corporate giveaway to Gilead and make any treatment and vaccine free for everybody.” Again, that was presidential candidate Bernie Sanders’ statement. But can you explain what this whole controversy is about, what the role of Trump’s — one of his top advisers, his domestic security adviser, Grogan, is now and was as a Gilead lobbyist?
ROBERT WEISSMAN: Yeah, this is extraordinary. So, Gilead has one of the possible treatments under study. So this is not a vaccine. The treatment very well may not work, but it’s one of the ones that has the best promise, among a not very good group. So, what Gilead did was it sought protection, what’s called orphan drug status, which is available for rare diseases, for drugs that treat populations of under 200,000. And they submitted their application for this rare disease status when there were fewer than 200,000 identified cases of COVID-19 in the United States. Obviously they knew the population was going to go far higher than that, but they got in under the wire. And the way the law is written, not taking into account a situation like this, if you apply when the population is under 200,000, you get this orphan drug designation, whether or not the population later on goes above 200,000. It was astounding. What you get for orphan drug designation is a seven-year exclusivity, a monopoly that’s separate from and in some ways more powerful than a patent monopoly. So we and others protested that. They quickly backed down, because there’s just no way they were going to be able to get away with that. They still have patents and other monopolies. So, if the drug turns out to be useful, they will have a monopoly, unless we impose more pressure on them or the government takes action to override the monopoly and ensure that other generic producers are able to get the drug on the market in the United States and around the world.
The last element of this, which is so important, and it applies to this product and most of the vaccine efforts that are underway, and Senator Sanders’ tweet points this out, this drug has benefited from a huge amount of government funding on the research and development side. The vaccines have been overwhelmingly researched [inaudible] and its development overwhelmingly provided by U.S. federal government. So, in the case of Gilead, who’s trying to receive this special grant of exclusivity from the U.S. government for a product that the U.S. government had actually paid for most of the R&D on. And we’re facing the same possibility with a vaccine, if we get one anytime soon.
The pharmaceutical industry, always standing by to make a killing - aided by the swamp that is the Trump administration.