"Overwhelming" Profit For Smallpox Drug !

U.S. government health officials involved in negotiating a contract for a smallpox antiviral were taken aback by the high drug price sought by a pharmaceutical company whose leading shareholder has links to the Democratic Party and the Obama administration, CNN reported on Friday(Nov. 28).

SIGA Technologies in May received a single-bid $443 million contract to manufacture 1.7 million doses of the smallpox drug ST-246 for inclusion in the Strategic National Stockpile.

The New York-based pharmaceutical firm's top shareholder is Ronald Perelman, a wealthy fundraiser for the Democratic Party and supporter of President Obama. The one-time president of the Service Employees International Union, Andy Stern, who also has ties with the White House, serves on the SIGA board of directors.

Smallpox has been declared eradicated from nature and samples are formally held only by Russia and the United States. However, some U.S. biodefense officials are concerned that certain nations might have secretly retained strains of the highly virulent virus that could be acquired by extremists or accidentally loosed into nature.

The Health and Human Services Department ultimately agreed to pay SIGA $225 for each dose of the drug -- a price tag that is substantially greater than what contracting experts had said was reasonable, according to previous reports.

E-mails swapped between HHS officials that were viewed by CNN demonstrate that a contracting specialist was taken aback the expense of the deal. An HHS official involved in the negotiations wrote that the price the pharmaceutical firm was seeking would leave it with "an overwhelming 180 percent" profit.

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