Fauci Advises Against Price Controls for COVID-19 Products

Anthony Fauci, director of the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), said that forcing price controls on pharmaceutical companies developing COVID-19 products will drive them away, expressing optimism that drugmakers will do the right thing on their own.

Speaking Tuesday during the Biotechnology Innovation Organization’s virtual convention, Fauci said, “I have a lot of experience over the years dealing with pharmaceutical companies in which we’re trying to develop an intervention. The one thing that is clear is that if you try to enforce things on a company that has multiple different opportunities to do different things, they’ll walk away. They will.”

Instead, the government should work with companies to reach an understanding on pricing, Fauci said, particularly if the government helped them to develop it. Some level of profit has to be considered, he said, as long as drugmakers don’t go overboard in a way that makes products unattainable for people who need them.

Fauci said he believes pharma companies will price their products fairly and “in good faith [will make them] available to those groups, countries, nations that really can’t afford it very well.”

“Often … many of these outbreaks disproportionately affect regions of the world that cannot afford a very expensive intervention. So that’s the reason why we’ve got to work with each other in good faith,” he said. “I’ve never seen a successful attempt at doing controls.”

Some Democrats have proposed limits on COVID-19 drug prices through the withholding of patents, exclusivity and intellectual property rights, a strategy that garnered strong pushback from conservative groups worried that the measures would stifle innovation and incentives to develop drugs (DID, June 8).

Fauci also predicted that more than one COVID-19 vaccine will gain approval, noting that the  world will require “billions and billions” of doses.

“I’m almost certain that we’re going to have multiple candidates that make it to the goal line, get approved and get widely used,” he said. — James Miessler