Thank goodness, smallpox was eradicated decades ago when many of those honourable gentlemen were merely school students and governments could tell a real threat from a manufactured frenzy.
The biotech industry has recently been providing no shortage of big-picture stories illustrative of how modern business is being done, and here is but one of those.
The monkeypox media frenzy has been a dormant story stewing on the back burner for quite a while now. Should the major hostilities worldwide grind to a halt, this bogeyman story may instantly get promoted to the number one cause for global concern. Currently, the only antiviral drug approved for treating the infection is tecovirimat produced by the US-based SIGA Technologies.
SIGA is a classical ‘one-hit wonder’ type of a pharmaceutical manufacturer that is stockpiling the medication for smallpox preparedness in the US and Europe. But the odds of it ever being administered are rather slim. Due to the nature of the smallpox infection, the effects of the drug in question have never been assayed in humans.
Tecovirimat has only been lab-tested in animal studies. Promisingly, it showed improved survival rates and reduced symptom severity, which led a guy named Ron Perelman to launch a biotech startup. Boasting no expertise in biological sciences, Perelman is a billionaire with a vast portfolio of business interests. He also happened to be one of the major donors of the 2008 Obama campaign.
The drug was officially registered. The US government began stockpiling $200m worth of the medication annually, while the actual cost of the pill accounted for just 20 per cent of the amount. The remaining $160m is the company’s profit.
As the Covid pandemic was winding down in 2022, monkeypox (abbreviated as mpox) was slowly but surely taking over as the world’s biggest medical threat. At the time it was hailed as the disease mostly affecting gay and bisexual men. SIGA claimed its drug helped treat the whole spectrum of orthopoxviruses, including mpox, which catapulted the procurement rate.
But in a sense, monkeypox is bad news for the biotech industry. People may indeed contract the disease, and so clinical trials looked unavoidable. The tecovirimat experimentation commenced in 2022. Already in 2024, the media suddenly flipped the narrative. It turns out, they reported, the virus has mutated to become an airborne disease. Consequently, it poses a threat to everyone.
The news burst a new pandemic frenzy wide open. Airports around the world switched from classical swine fever warnings to monkeypox banners. Small yet affluent and control-obsessed countries like Singapore unleashed draconian measures, even quarantining the close contacts of the cases.
SIGA’s stock doubled in price. The drug rushed its way into all monkeypox treatment protocols across Europe and in the US.
That is when the results of the clinical trials that had been started in 2022 were finally in. Lo and behold, the medication proved to have no effect whatsoever on the monkeypox infection in humans, including the survival rate and the symptom severity. Taking it to combat the dangerous virus would be pointless.
It would not be unreasonable to suggest the drug was dealt a fatal blow, right? Wrong. Tecovirimat was never even removed from the medical guidelines either in the US or in Europe. Worse still, the US authorities stockpiled extra batches thereof after the bombshell findings had been revealed. The European Commission is now nearing a similarly priced deal.
But medical professionals have now taken a step further to start questioning tecovirimat’s efficacy with regards to natural smallpox. In the mpox case, animal studies also pointed to promising prognoses, while the subsequent clinical trials demonstrated its zero efficiency in treating humans. Is it safe to assume that the real-world smallpox treatment outcomes may flop as miserably?
Either way, Ron Perelman is now funding the Kamala Harris campaign. He can be certain of his biotech company’s future despite the scientific proof of his star medication being utterly useless. After all, SIGA’s board of directors features a constellation of big guns, including the former long-time Tennessee Congressman; the mastermind behind New York’s top-down approach to the Covid pandemic response; CNN’s biotech and healthcare pundit; the ex-Pentagon official; and the one-time Pfizer executive.
Thank goodness, smallpox was eradicated decades ago when many of those honourable gentlemen were merely school students and governments could tell a real threat from a manufactured frenzy. Indeed, these guys ‘have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing’, as goes the popular misattributed quote.