Gilead Sciences caught my attention in February when the price of the stock fell to $82 from its 2015 high of $125 per share. I wrote it about it then, likening the anxiety that was dragging down the price of pharmaceuticals to the anxiety that dragged down the price of weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin and Boeing during the political talks of sequester.
Gilead, whose signature drug is Sovaldi, has come under scrutiny for pricing its Hepatitis C drug at $1,000 a pill or $84,000 for a three-month regimen. France, Spain, and India have threatened to invalidate Gilead’s patents for Hepatitis C, and the Veterans Administration in the United States has sought to add political pressure to Gilead’s American operations by using media pressure and the threat of congressional regulation to get Gilead to voluntarily the price of Sovaldi.
Unlike Sovaldi, that proposition may prove a tough pill to swallow because … Read the rest of this article!