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Law360 (October 28, 2020, 8:18 PM EDT) -- The federal government said it has agreed to pay $375 million for an experimental Eli Lilly and Co. treatment to combat COVID-19, not long after the company said hospitalized patients would no longer get the treatment.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Defense said in an announcement Wednesday that they have reached a deal with Eli Lilly to pay for "the first doses of the company's COVID-19 investigational antibody therapeutic bamlanivimab."
The government noted that the doses will only be able to be given out if the treatment is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
If the FDA gives its approval, then "the federal government will allocate the doses to state and territorial health departments which, in turn, will determine which health care facilities receive the intravenous infusion drug for use in outpatient care," the government said in its announcement.
"More good news about COVID-19 therapeutics is constantly emerging, and the Trump administration's commitment to supporting potentially lifesaving therapeutics will help deliver these products to American patients without a day's delay," HHS Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement.
The initial buy from the government will be for 300,000 doses, according to the departments.
But the government can also spend "up to an additional $812.5 million" on "up to 650,000 additional doses through the end of June 2021," the government said.
Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks said in a statement Wednesday that the FDA is mulling over whether to grant emergency use authorization for the drug as a way to treat "mild to moderate COVID-19 illness in high-risk patients" as a monotherapy.
The company "will offer bamlanivimab monotherapy at $1,250 per vial to wealthy countries, if authorized by the country's regulators," Ricks added.
"In this price range and given volume constraints, we expect all major economies to accommodate the procurement of their share of supply within existing medicines' budgets," Ricks said. "In choosing this price for our monotherapy, we also want to ensure that innovators of the next generation of antibodies, for this virus or the next one, have an incentive to apply their scientific teams and use their investors' resources to create new effective therapies as well."
The government said the deal with Eli Lilly is part of Operation Warp Speed — the official name of the Trump administration's COVID-19 vaccine development initiative.
Lawmakers have been probing Operation Warp Speed for possible conflicts of interest. Democrats on the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis have maintained that the process for choosing vaccine candidates has not been transparent and that "the reasons for selecting or rejecting particular candidates" were not made public.
--Additional reporting by Kevin Stawicki. Editing by Stephen Berg.
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