A five-day course of Merck’s new Covid-19 pill costs $17.74 to produce, but the big pharma corporation, heavily invested in by politicians and the ruling caste, will charge the USA (taxpayers) $712.

The US government has already handed to the corporation $29 million of taxpayer funds (at high interest) towards the development of molnupiravir, a drug that the company claims without proof ‘reduced the risk of hospitalization or death by approximately 50%’ in clinical trials on Covid-19 patients.’

Despite this generous funding by hard-working Americans, Merck will still charge the federal government an estimated $712 for a five-day course of pills that costs $17.74 to produce, meaning the US taxpayer will pay for this fortyfold mark-up.

Leena Menghaney of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF/Doctors Without Borders) Global Access Campaign told the media: ‘If you look at the generic price, which ranges from $15 to $20 a treatment, the $700 price is absolutely outrageous.’

The taxpayer-funded drug is Merck’s intellectual property, and can’t legally be copied by other companies. Likewise, Pfizer’s upcoming Covid-19 pill will be its own property. Pfizer’s offering functions as a ‘protease inhibitor,’ which claims to stop coronavirus reproducing inside the body.

The drug is already under generic production and testing in India, where Menghaney said that it will cost between $15 and $20 for a course. However, this generic solution is still awaiting approval, and these cheaper pills will be denied to countries that are deemed by big pharma to be ‘off message’ and refuse to comply with the intellectual property law.

Menghaney, however, reckons that intellectual property laws should simply be disobeyed amid a pandemic. ’Countries like Russia and Brazil, who have the capacity to produce medicines, should go ahead irrespective of patent barriers and produce these medicines,’ she suggested. Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!