Drug sticker shock
Remdesivir’s $2,340 price called excessive
The maker of a drug shown to shorten recovery time for severely ill COVID19 patients says it will charge $2,340 for a typical treatment course for people covered by government health programs in the United States and other developed countries.
Gilead Sciences announced the price Monday for remdesivir, and said the price would be $3,120 for patients with private insurance. The amount that patients pay out of pocket depends on insurance, income and other factors.
“We’re in uncharted territory with pricing a new medicine, a novel medicine, in a pandemic,” said Gilead’s chief executive, Dan O’Day.
“We believe that we had to really deviate from the normal circumstances” and price the drug to ensure wide access rather than based solely on value to patients, he said.
However, the price was swiftly criticized; a consumer group called it “an outrage” because of the amount taxpayers invested toward the drug’s development.
“This is a high price for a drug that has not been shown to reduce mortality,” Dr. Steven Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic said. “Given the serious nature of the pandemic, I would prefer that the government take over production and distribute the drug for free. It was developed using significant taxpayer funding.”
Peter Maybarduk, a lawyer at the consumer group Public Citizen, called the price “an outrage.”
“Remdesivir should be in the public domain” because the drug received at least $70 million in public funding toward its development, he said.
“The price puts to rest any notion that drug companies will ‘do the right thing’ because it is a pandemic,” Dr. Peter Bach, a health policy expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York said in an email. “The price might have been fine if the company had demonstrated that the treatment saved lives. It didn’t.”
The drug, given through an IV, interferes with the coronavirus’s ability to copy its genetic material. In a U.S. government-led study, remdesivir shortened recovery time by 31% — 11 days on average versus 15 days for those given just usual care. It had not improved survival according to preliminary results after two weeks of followup; results after four weeks are expected soon.
While it may be a sticker shock for many, “from the health system perspective, if remdesivir can shorten duration of hospitalization by four days, then the medicine provides a reasonable value,” Dr. David Boulware, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Minnesota, said in an email.
O’Day said that shortening hospitalization saves about $12,000 per patient. Gilead says it will have spent $1 billion on developing and making the drug by the end of this year.