Statement from Margarida Jorge, campaign director for Lower Drug Prices Now: 

Big Pharma’s greed knows no limits. While people across the country lost their incomes and healthcare over the last year, the CEOs of these corporations amassed hundreds of millions of dollars on the backs of American families thanks to billions in taxpayers funds that they received for treatments and vaccines. The same corporations that are bragging about the vaccine that people are now getting for free are predictably already plotting about how they’ll make us pay to boost profits later, once the pandemic is over.

This is the same business as usual we see with all prescription drugs. Not only has Big Pharma continued to raise the prices on nearly 600 medicines during the pandemic, they’re now promising their shareholders to make the coronavirus vaccine ‘one of the highest-grossing pharmaceutical products of all time,’ despite the fact that these vaccines and treatments were developed using taxpayer investments and research. There’s just no reason that we should have to pay these companies again for treatments that we paid to develop in the first place.

There’s overwhelming public support for Congress to end Big Pharma’s monopoly control and lower drug prices. Congress must pass the PTAA Act and other reforms that stop Big Pharma companies from continuing to profiteer from public health crises whether it’s COVID, opioids, diabetes or HIV.