Letters to the Editor: On paying $3,000 for a COVID-19 drug developed with taxpayer funding
(WorldNews Health)

To the editor: David Lazarus brings up the important point in his column about pharmaceutical industry profiteering during the COVID-19 pandemic that the early development of remdesivir, an antiviral originally developed to treat hepatitis C, was taxpayer-funded. In a letter published in this newspaper in 2016, I raised a similar point about another Gilead antiviral, Solvadi, suggesting that the pharmaceutical companies should be taxed to cover the development costs currently borne by taxpayers. With the pivot away from sponsoring basic science research, the pharmaceutical industry is essentially choking off innovation by overly relying on others to make basic discoveries. I hope that people...