Gilead Sciences seems to be leading in the race for a vaccination of Wuhan Virus. Remdesivir, despite recent negative results from preliminary China clinical trials, is GS’s best hope.
If successful, it would likely boost GS’s flailing stock price and give a huge boost to it’s bottom line.
Normally, a sucessful treatment for the over hyped Wuhan Virus would come as a great relief for the 7 billion residents shuttered in place on this tiny planet.
Images of economies coming back to life, full stadiums for sports and the naked cowboy returning to Times Square would bring much needed relief to all.
But hold on. This literal elixer of life may come at a huge cost.
You see Gilead Sciences, has a very disturbing history of overpricing it’s other wonder drugs. Namely Solvaldi a
hepatitis C drug and its HIV treatment known as “combination antiretroviral therapy,” or cART.
It has even been accused of blocking generic HIV treatments to maintain it’s high price for cCART.
With respect to the outrageous high price for the Hep-C treatments of Solvaldi, it has been revealed that the executives at GS knew they could sell the treatment for less and still make a profit but chose to hold their price no matter how great the outrage.
You see at Gilead Sciences as with other members of “Big Pharma”, social conscience and morality never enter the equation. And unlike doctors, whose profession is guided by the Hippocratic oath, many businesses do not adhere to a similar principle. Perhaps this is one of the biggest failings of profit-at-any-cost capitalism. Perhaps not. Each person must decide for themselves.
Whether you believe capitalism should instictively have a social conscience or be mandated by government to grow one, it seems likely that Gilead Science will likely squeeze every last dollar out of the public directly or through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. It’s apparently what they do.
Sir Alexander Fleming published his work on penicillin and did not seek a patent because he thought his discovery was too important to be restricted to all mankind . Some would say he was stupid for doing that.
-Misty Graves
