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For Immediate Release
June, 29 2020, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Joe Karp-Sawey, media manager,Tel: +44 (0)7711 875 345,Email:,joe.karpsawey@globaljustice.org.uk
$2,000 Price Tag for Covid-19 Drug Shows Pharma Industry Is 'Out of Touch With Reality'
Reacting to US pharma company Gilead's announcement of its global pricing for its remdesivir drug, Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said:
"Remdesivir is a drug which has been produced with substantial amounts of public money in the US, and which researchers have estimated could be made for $9 per treatment course (1), but here is Big Pharma company Gilead generously only charging over $2,000! While that is reduced to $600 in lower-income countries, these are still vast price tags.
WASHINGTON
Reacting to US pharma company Gilead's announcement of its global pricing for its remdesivir drug, Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, said:
"Remdesivir is a drug which has been produced with substantial amounts of public money in the US, and which researchers have estimated could be made for $9 per treatment course (1), but here is Big Pharma company Gilead generously only charging over $2,000! While that is reduced to $600 in lower-income countries, these are still vast price tags.
Gilead claims this is well below would it would otherwise charge, which goes to show how completely out of touch this industry is with reality. They expect to make a whopping $1.3 billion from sales of the drug in 2020 alone (2). If this is Big Pharma at its most generous, we shouldn't wait around until the pandemic is officially over to find out what outrageous charge they will put on the public purse at that time.
Governments have a right to override this ludicrous patent system under international law, and they should take the opportunity to do that now, saving the NHS and patients around the world from the profiteering of these dysfunctional corporations."
Global Justice Now is a democratic social justice organisation working as part of a global movement to challenge the powerful and create a more just and equal world. We mobilise people in the UK for change, and act in solidarity with those fighting injustice, particularly in the global south.
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'85 Seconds to Midnight': Doomsday Clock Ticks Down as Trump Drags World Toward New Low
"Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time."
Jan 28, 2026
A "failure of leadership" by the world's most powerful governments and leaders, particularly President Donald Trump, has pushed the annually updated Doomsday Clock closer to midnight than ever, said the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the organization that monitors global existential threats including nuclear bombs, on Tuesday.
The clock was set to 85 seconds to midnight—or global destruction—four seconds closer than one year ago.
The Bulletin has updated the clock each year since 1947, when scientists set it at seven minutes to midnight, emphasizing that the world had little time to get the proliferation of nuclear weapons under control following the United States' bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The scientists who announced the latest ticking of the clock on Tuesday stressed that a number of other threats appear closer then ever to dooming humanity and called for urgent action to limit nuclear arsenals as well as creating "international guidelines" for the use of artificial intelligence, solving the climate crisis, and forming "multilateral agreements to address global biological threats."
“The Doomsday Clock’s message cannot be clearer. Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline, and we are running out of time," said Alexandra Bell, president and CEO of the Bulletin. "Change is both necessary and possible, but the global community must demand swift action from their leaders.”
The organization, whose Doomsday Clock is monitored by its Science and Security Board (SASB) and Board of Sponsors, which includes eight Nobel laureates, said that countries including the US, China, and Russia did not heed the Bulletin's warning last year when it moved the clock's hands to 89 seconds to midnight.
Instead, major powers in the past year have become "increasingly aggressive, adversarial, and nationalistic."
"Hard-won global understandings are collapsing, accelerating a winner-takes-all great power competition and undermining the international cooperation critical to reducing the risks of nuclear war, climate change, the misuse of biotechnology, the potential threat of artificial intelligence, and other apocalyptic dangers," said the group. "Far too many leaders have grown complacent and indifferent, in many cases adopting rhetoric and policies that accelerate rather than mitigate these existential risks. Because of this failure of leadership, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Science and Security Board today sets the Doomsday Clock at 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe."
International failures from 2025 include:
- Russia's testing of nuclear-capable weapons as it continued its war on Ukraine;
- The US and Israel's attacks on Iranian nuclear sites;
- China's increase of its nuclear warhead stockpile;
- Fueled by the continued extraction of fossil fuels, the global average temperature was the third-highest on record and the climate crisis caused disasters including deadly flooding and heatwaves;
- The treaty between the US and Russia on Measures for the Further Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms, also known as the New START Treaty, inched closer to its expiration date on February 4, 2026;
- The Trump administration dismantled public health infrastructure and climate regulations, making the US and the world more vulnerable to pandemics and the climate emergency; and
- Artificial intelligence grew more sophisticated as the Trump administration refused to rein in the technology.
Daniel Holz, chair of the SASB, said that the "dangerous trends" outlined by the Bulletin "are accompanied by another frightening development: the rise of nationalistic autocracies in countries around the world."
"Our greatest challenges require international trust and cooperation, and a world splintering into ‘us versus them’ will leave all of humanity more vulnerable," said Holz.
The Bulletin emphasized that with political will, the world's leaders are entirely capable of pulling humanity "back from the brink."
The US and Russia could resume dialogue about limiting their nuclear arsenals, and all nuclear-armed states could observe the existing moratorium on nuclear testing.
Through multilateral agreements and national regulations, the international community could also cooperate to "reduce the prospect that AI be used to create biological threats."
And in the US, Congress could take action to repudiate Trump's "war on renewable energy, instead providing incentives and investments that will enable rapid reduction in fossil fuel use."
Maria Ressa, co-founder and CEO of Rappler and a 2021 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, said that world leaders must also come to an agreement that the climate crisis, nuclear proliferation, and unregulated AI are grave threats, as the majority of the global community has.
“Without facts, there is no truth. Without truth, there is no trust. And without these, the radical collaboration this moment demands is impossible," said Ressa. "We cannot solve problems we cannot agree exist. We cannot cooperate across borders when we cannot even share the same facts. Nuclear threats, climate collapse, AI risks: none can be addressed without first rebuilding our shared reality. The clock is ticking."
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If Trump Really Cared About Fraud in Minnesota, Critics Say, He Would Go After UnitedHealth
"Most of the perpetrators are lodged within large corporations run by white executives with excellent and expensive legal representation," wrote one journalist.
Jan 28, 2026
US President Donald Trump has used unsubstantiated allegations of large-scale fraud in Minnesota's Somali community as a pretext to surge federal agents into the state—with deadly consequences—and cut off federal childcare funding.
But unlike the Somali community, which Trump has subjected to grotesque attacks that have left many fearing for their safety, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group (UHG) has not faced the president's public ire.
One of the nation's largest for-profit health insurance companies, UHG is the leading beneficiary of a long-running Medicare Advantage fraud scheme that could cost US taxpayers $1.2 trillion over the next decade—a sum that dwarfs even the White House's wildest claims about the costs of fraud allegedly committed by Somali-run daycares.
The $1.2 trillion estimate comes from a report published earlier this month by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), which found that federal overpayments to privately run, publicly funded Medicare Advantage plans will total around $76 billion this year in part due to a practice known as upcoding, whereby insurers present patients as sicker than they actually are to reap larger payments.
UnitedHealthcare, UHG's insurance division, is the leading Medicare Advantage provider in the United States. Stephen Hemsley, UnitedHealth Group's CEO, received a base salary of $1 million last year and a one-time equity award worth $60 million.
ICE/CBP swarms into Minnesota to crack down on government fraud. Somehow they sidestep the orders-of-magnitude higher government fraud by Minnesota-based UnitedHealth, who leads a Medicare Advantage fraud that government analyst MedPac estimates as costing America $76 billion/yr pic.twitter.com/dECnwgUCRV
— David Dayen (@ddayen) January 27, 2026
A Senate report released on January 12 found that UnitedHealth Group uses "aggressive strategies" to maximize patients' so-called "risk-adjustment scores" in an effort to receive larger Medicare Advantage payments from the federal government.
"UHG has turned risk adjustment into a major profit-centered strategy, which was not the original intent of the program," states the report, which was based on more than 50,000 pages of company documents obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Senate report cited a 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation showing that "insurer-driven diagnoses by UnitedHealth for diseases that no doctor treated generated $8.7 billion in 2021 payments to the company... UnitedHealth’s net income that year was about $17 billion."
"A real crackdown on fraud would go after those big fish first."
While the US Justice Department—headed by former corporate lobbyist Pam Bondi—is currently investigating UnitedHealth Group over its Medicare billing practices, the Trump administration has enabled the conglomerate's continued expansion and abuses.
Last August, the DOJ settled a Biden-era legal challenge aimed at preventing UnitedHealth Group from absorbing yet another competitor. According to a tracker run by the American Economic Liberties Project, the corporation is still denying necessary care to patients, overbilling the federal government, and engaging in anticompetitive behavior on the Trump administration's watch.
Journalist Merrill Goozner wrote last week that "there is no doubt greedy operators ripped off Minnesota safety net programs," observing that "several of the nearly 100 people under investigation have already pleaded guilty."
"But if federal officials in Minnesota really want to go after industrial-scale fraud, they ought to step up their slow-motion investigation of UnitedHealth Group," Goozner wrote. "The nation’s tattered social safety net, under assault by the Trump administration and shrinking daily, remains prone to abuse by unscrupulous operators. Medicare and Medicaid are especially juicy targets. Most of the perpetrators are lodged within large corporations run by white executives with excellent and expensive legal representation."
"A real crackdown on fraud," he added, "would go after those big fish first."
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Blamed for Fueling Assault on Ilhan Omar, Trump Says ‘She Probably Had Herself Sprayed’
"Nonstop hate and dangerous rhetoric from Trump and his allies has fueled this type of violence," said Rep. Jasmine Crockett .
Jan 28, 2026
President Donald Trump reacted dismissively to news that an assailant sprayed an unidentified substance at US Rep. Ilhan Omar during a town hall meeting, and insinuated without a shred of evidence that she may have staged the attack herself.
ABC News reporter Rachel Scott on Wednesday asked Trump if he had seen video of the incident, in which a man named Anthony Kazmierczak charged toward Omar (D-Minn.) and sprayed her with an unknown substance from a syringe before being restrained by security forces.
Shortly after, Kazmierczak was taken into police custody and charged with third-degree assault.
Trump indicated that he hadn't seen the video, and then started lobbing personal insults at the Minnesota congresswoman.
"I think she's a fraud," Trump told Scott. "I really don't think about that. She probably had herself sprayed, knowing her."
When Scott asked Trump to clarify whether he'd seen the video or not, he said he hadn't, before adding, "I hope I don't have to bother" watching it.
There is no evidence whatsoever that Omar arranged to have someone attack her, and social media posts uncovered by the Daily Beast suggest that Kazmierczak was a Trump supporter.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) pointed the finger at Trump and Vice President JD Vance shortly after the attack on Omar.
"It is not a coincidence that after days of President Trump and VP Vance putting Rep. Omar in their crosshairs with slanderous public attacks, she gets assaulted at her town hall," Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a social media post. "Thank God she is okay. If they want leaders to take down the temp, they need to look in the mirror."
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) said she was "disgusted and outraged" by the attack on Omar, and she laid the blame for the assault on Trump.
"Let’s be clear: nonstop hate and dangerous rhetoric from Trump and his allies has fueled this type of violence," she wrote. "I stand with Rep. Omar. I stand with Minnesota. This must stop."
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz also condemned the attack on Omar, insisting that "the cruel, inflammatory, dehumanizing rhetoric by our nation’s leaders needs to stop immediately."
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