DeSantis Says He Would Sue the Drug Company Gilead for Trying to Save Lives

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Dean Baker

Co-Director at Center for Economic and Policy Research

Contributor's Links: Beat The Press Center for Economic and Policy Research

Dean Baker co-founded CEPR in 1999. His areas of research include housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security, Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several books, including "Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better bargain for Working People", "The End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive", "The United States Since 1980," Social Security: The Phony Crisis", and "The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer." His blog, Beat the Press, provides commentary on economic reporting. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan. His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the London Financial Times, and theNew York Daily News. He received his Ph.D in economics from the University of Michigan. Dean has written several books, his latest being Getting Back to Full Employment: a Better Bargain for Working People. His other books includeThe End of Loser Liberalism: Making Markets Progressive, Taking Economics Seriously (MIT Press), which thinks through what we might gain if we took the ideological blinders off of basic economic principles, and False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy (PoliPoint Press, 2010) about what caused - and how to fix - the current economic crisis. In 2009, he wrote Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy (PoliPoint Press), which chronicled the growth and collapse of the stock and housing bubbles and explained how policy blunders and greed led to the catastrophic - but completely predictable - market meltdowns. He also wrote a chapter ("From Financial Crisis to Opportunity") inThinking Big: Progressive Ideas for a New Era (Progressive Ideas Network, 2009). His previous books include The United States Since 1980 (Cambridge University Press, 2007); The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer (Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2006), and Social Security: The Phony Crisis (with Mark Weisbrot, University of Chicago Press, 1999). His book Getting Prices Right: The Debate Over the Consumer Price Index (editor, M.E. Sharpe, 1997) was a winner of a Choice Book Award as one of the outstanding academic books of the year. Among his numerous articles are "The Benefits of a Financial Transactions Tax," Tax Notes 121, no. 4, 2008; "Are Protective Labor Market Institutions at the Root of Unemployment? A Critical Review of the Evidence," (with David R. Howell, Andrew Glyn, and John Schmitt), Capitalism and Society 2, no. 1, 2007; "Asset Returns and Economic Growth," (with Brad DeLong and Paul Krugman), Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2005; "Financing Drug Research: What Are the Issues," Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2004; "Medicare Choice Plus: The Solution to the Long-Term Deficit Problem," Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2004; The Benefits of Full Employment (also with Jared Bernstein), Economic Policy Institute, 2004; "Professional Protectionists: The Gains From Free Trade in Highly Paid Professional Services," Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2003; and "The Run-Up in Home Prices: Is It Real or Is It Another Bubble," Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2002. Dean previously worked as a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and an assistant professor at Bucknell University. He has also worked as a consultant for the World Bank, the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, and the OECD's Trade Union Advisory Council. He was the author of the weekly online commentary on economic reporting, the Economic Reporting Review (ERR), from 1996 - 2006.less

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DeSantis Says He Would Sue the Drug Company Gilead for Trying to Save Lives

Date: Sunday, July 23, 2023 4:38 AM EST

I’m serious, you just have to carry through with a little bit of logic. (I know Governor DeSantis is opposed to logic, but this is for the rest of the country.)

Governor DeSantis is on the warpath against whatever he decides is “woke.” DeSantis decided that it was woke when Anheuser-Busch signed a contract with Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender influencer, to promote Bud Light, one of the beers it markets. DeSantis joined with other right-wingers to push a boycott of Bud Light.

The boycott was effective in that it had a measurable impact on the sales of Bud Light. Now, DeSantis is calling for the Florida State Board of Administration to sue Anheuser-Busch because its decision to contract with a transgender influencer lowered its stock price and thereby hurt Florida’s public employee pension fund. (Never mind that Governor DeSantis played a big role in pushing the boycott that hurt sales.)

DeSantis’ basis for the lawsuit is the claim that by concerning itself with something other than profits, the management of Anheuser-Busch hurt its stockholders. He says that companies should only be concerned about maximizing profit, not doing “woke” things like making deals with transgender influencers.

Okay, we’ll ignore the fact that Anheuser-Busch’s management may actually have thought they were maximizing profits when they signed the deal with Mulvaney. After all, there are a significant number of people who are transgender, have friends or family members who are transgender, or just think that transgender people should be able to be accepted as normal, and think it’s cool that Anheuser-Busch agrees.

Maybe it’s not fair to blame Anheuser-Busch’s management for not recognizing the fact that an ambitious Florida governor thinks that his path to the presidency depends on convincing Republican primary voters that he is more right-wing than Donald Trump. But, we’ll leave that issue aside.

DeSantis made it clear that he thinks companies should only maximize profit and be subject to shareholder lawsuits if they do anything other than maximizing profits. So how does this get us to suing Gilead?

According to a New York Times article today, Gilead (GILD) may have delayed bringing an HIV drug onto the market, because it didn’t want to jeopardize the sales of its blockbuster HIV drug Truvada. It wanted to delay bringing the new drug on the market because it wanted Truvada to get the full benefit of its patent monopoly and to only introduce the new drug as Truvada’s patent was about to expire. This would then allow it to benefit from the full length of patent protection for its new drug.

The newer drug would have been safer for patients, since it posed less risk of kidney and bone damage. Gilead is now being sued, based on this allegation, by patients who were harmed by Truvada.

Gilead denies it was motivated by profit considerations in the timing of its introduction of the Truvada replacement. The article tells readers:

“Gilead’s top lawyer, Deborah Telman said in a statement that the company’s ‘research and development decisions have always been, and continue to be, guided by our focus on delivering safe and effective medicines for the people who prescribe and use them.’”

Okay, so now we have Gilead’s top lawyer asserting that the company is not being run to maximize profit, but rather is “guided by our focus on delivering safe and effective medicines for the people who prescribe and use them.”

That sounds dangerously woke. Seems like Gilead is crying out for a lawsuit from Mr. DeSantis. Their top lawyer is openly claiming that the company might be jeopardizing profits, and thereby giving lower returns to shareholders, because it is concerned with people’s health.

Presumably, Mr. DeSantis will be pushing his lawsuit against Gilead any day now.

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