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Joe Biden’s lobbyists are helping Big Pharma profiteers

The pharmaceutical industry wants Americans to continue paying far more for medicines than people in any other country, to protect their tremendous profits. And one of Joe Biden’s top campaign consulting firms is helping them.
 
by Andrew Perez
 
Part 3 - “What’s at Stake Isn’t Corporate Profits”
 
Canal Partners Media also started buying ads late last month for the Coalition to Protect Access (CPA), another apparent pharma front group.

Business incorporation records from Washington, DC show that CPA is being led by executives from Purple Strategies, a corporate communications firm that worked with BP after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill as well as Purdue Pharma, the notorious OxyContin manufacturer widely accused of helping fuel the opioid crisis.

Purple Strategies wrote in a 2019 press release that the firm has been a “longtime partner” to PhRMA, a lobbying powerhouse for drugmakers that generated a staggering $573 million in revenue in 2020.

Today, vaccines and antivirals are helping fight the pandemic, because scientists and researchers in America’s biopharmaceutical industry acted fast, after investing billions over years to achieve breakthroughs,” says the new ad from CPA. “But now, Congress is threatening legislation that will devastate private industry’s ability to fund treatments just like these. What’s at stake isn’t corporate profits — it’s public preparedness. Tell Congress to oppose legislation that would harm our ability to fight pandemics.

PhRMA CEO Stephen Ubl made the same argument in November, claiming that Democrats’ drug pricing measure would “upend the same innovative ecosystem that brought us lifesaving vaccines and therapies to combat COVID-19.

This is totally false: the federal government invests billions each year to subsidize pharmaceutical companies’ research and development costs, and the government has poured tens of billions of dollars into efforts to develop COVID vaccines and treatments.

Indeed, a team of government scientists helped develop Moderna’s mRNA-based COVID vaccine — a fact the company fittingly decided to leave out of the patent application for its vaccine technology.

Then there’s the newly approved COVID antiviral treatment from Merck, which “was made possible by government-funded innovation,” according to Stat News. That didn’t stop the company from charging the US government $712 per course of the treatment, or forty times the $17.74 that it costs to produce.

CPA and Purple Strategies did not respond to requests for comment.

While the public is served up TV ads warning about threats to drugmakers’ innovation, the reality of the situation is that the US government funds pharmaceutical companies’ research and development, and the industry rewards that investment by charging Americans the highest prices for medicines in the world.

Pharmaceutical companies are not losing money on their products in countries that negotiate lower prices. They only charge Americans more because they can — because US politicians barred the government from negotiating prices, while also eliminating the requirement that government-funded drugs be sold at a “reasonable price.” Companies can also game the US patent system to preserve drug monopolies even as generic or biosimilar versions are being offered in other countries.

This is why drugmakers have “targeted the United States for price increases for many years while maintaining or cutting prices in the rest of the world,” according to the recent report by House Democrats.

So far, CPA is running ads in Arizona, West Virginia, Nevada and the DC area. Arizona Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema already played a key role in watering down the party’s prescription drug measure, while a pharma-funded front group ran ads promoting her at home.

Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) has publicly supported the idea of allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, but he has pushed Democrats to stall the broader Build Back Better reconciliation bill, despite having personally negotiated down the scope of the legislation substantially.

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