theintercept--2020-06-02--A Short History of U.S. Law Enforcement Infiltrating Protests

When the warrant for the warehouse raid was unsealed , it finally confirmed that Harry , George , Tom , and Joe had been state troopers assigned to infiltrate the group and produce a pretext for a raid .
All of the charges against the puppeteers were eventually dropped , and the saga would eventually cost the city millions in lawsuit settlements ( with much of the legal work led by radical attorney Larry Krasner , who is now Philadelphia district attorney ) .
On August 1 , the first full day of the Republican convention , police surrounded the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Puppetganda , ” executed mass arrests , and confiscated the puppets , floats , signs , and other materials to be used in upcoming marches .
The police lied , publicly saying that organizers had been planning violent demonstrations and hinting darkly at bomb-making materials being hidden in the warehouse .
That roundup presaged other mass arrests of protest leaders throughout the week , followed by beatings inside the jail and even a $ 1 million bond .
The four carpenters were good with a hammer , but much about them had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In conversation , “ they were not very political or well informed , ” recalled Kris Hermes , an organizer , in “ Crashing the Party , ” his memoir of the affair .
They were older and more muscular than most protesters , he wrote , and they insisted on drinking beer while working , despite the organizers ’ ban on drinking in the warehouse .
In discussions and meetings , they asserted the right of protesters to destroy property and to physically resist arrest .
The movement ’ s intentional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ability to act on their suspicions of infiltration , even as they were becoming more deft at sussing out such provocateurs .
One of the hallmarks of the social justice movement at the time was its puppets .
Organizers were coming off successful protests in Seattle in November 1999 against the World Trade Organization , and in Washington , D.C. , in April 2000 , against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank , and had managed to reshape the politics of globalization .
Soaring papier-mache puppets , rolled through the streets on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ air , capturing sympathetic media coverage and countering the authorities ’ narrative that the protesters were nihilists simply relishing in property destruction .
When Harry , George , Tom , and Joe showed up at a warehouse outside Philadelphia rented by protesters , organizers were immediately suspicious .
The men claimed to be “ union carpenters ” from the Scranton , Pennsylvania , area who built stages — just the kind of help the protesters needed .
They were preparing for the Republican National Convention in 2000 , where the party would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country , allied organizers were planning similar protests for the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles .
In protests across the country over the past week , the clear actor escalating the violence generally hasn ’ t been a protester or even a right-wing infiltrator , but the police themselves .
In rally after rally , people have observed that looting and destruction only began after police charged and beat a crowd , or fired tear gas or rubber bullets into it .
In other cases , it can take just one act @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Given the chaotic nature of the protests , it ’ s probable that everyone being blamed for property damage has played some role .
But as the protests continue , and President Donald Trump calls for ever more violent methods of repression , the possible role of police provocateurs in protests is worth bearing in mind .
The intensity of the conversation around protests that turn violent , and the life-or-death consequences of winding up on the wrong side of public opinion , leaves little room for a nuanced discussion .
Were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be easy to talk about the difference between the anger of a crowd and the actions it ultimately takes .
An angry crowd that remains nonviolent and engages in zero property destruction is no less legitimately angry than one that does .
Often the only difference is in whether and how the anger is triggered and escalated .
The media pays little attention to such infiltrators , for a variety of reasons .
On the one hand , corporate media has never taken much enthusiasm in questioning government action in the midst of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ action goes wildly over the line or targets members of the media .
The subject of provocateurs is also fraught from the perspective of protesters and movement organizers , as it can lead to paranoia that undermines solidarity and movement building .
It is often conflated with the trope of “ outside agitators ” and used by authorities or other opponents of the protesters to delegitimize the anger on display , giving some protesters or their supporters an incentive to downplay the reality of the provocations .
It is a historical fact , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enforcement frequently infiltrates progressive political movements using agent provocateurs who urge others to engage in violence .
It is also a historical fact that , more rarely , such provocateurs commit acts of violence themselves .
Francesco Cossiga , one of the most important political figures in post-World War II Italy , provided a rare glimpse behind the curtain at how the world looks to people at the top of governments facing large-scale protests .
Cossiga had served as prime minister and then president of Italy .
Before that , in the late @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Interior .
During that period , he was notorious for the brutality with which he put down left-wing demonstrations led by students .
This is how the New York Times reported the situation in 1977 : “ Extremists among the students have created chaos in a number of Italian cities with a wave of shooting and destruction.
” As Silvio Berlusconi ’ s administration faced similarly threatening protests , Cossiga urged them to rerun his playbook : The Times appears to have mentioned the possibility that government provocateurs were behind some @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not as fact , but as an accusation of “ leftwing parties and newspapers.
” Cossiga had been a professor of constitutional law and was a centrist Christian Democrat .
When he became prime minister in 1979 , Jimmy Carter ’ s ambassador to Italy saw this as an “ excellent development , ” and Cossiga maintained a strong relationship with America .
There is no direct line between Cossiga and today ’ s protests in the U.S .
But his example indicates that it ’ s no fevered conspiracy theory to believe @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as legitimate — even if most of them are more circumspect in public .
documented use of provocateurs by the U.S. government occurred during the Federal Bureau of Investigation ’ s Counter-Intelligence Program , or COINTELPRO , from 1956 to 1971 .
The reason the documentation is available is because a group of citizens broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania — coincidentally , just a short drive from the warehouse targeted by police in 2000 — and stole files that they then passed to the media .
This , in turn , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ loose more information .
In one notorious example in May 1970 , an informant working for both the Tuscaloosa police and the FBI burned down a building at the University of Alabama during protests over the recent Kent State University shootings .
The police then declared that demonstrators were engaging in an unlawful assembly and arrested 150 of them .
In another well-known case , a man nicknamed “ Tommy the Traveler ” visited numerous New York State colleges , posing as a radical member of Students for a Democratic Society .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offered training in Molotov cocktails .
Two students at Hobart College acted on his suggestions and firebombed the campus ROTC building .
Eventually it came out that his full name was Tommy Tongyai , and he had worked both for local police and the FBI .
The list goes on and on from there .
A John Birch Society member turned FBI informant helped assemble time bombs and placed them on an Army truck .
An FBI informant in the radical political organization Weather Underground took part in the bombing of a Cincinnati @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Vietnam Veterans Against the War — and FBI informant — pushed for “ shooting and bombing , ” and his advocacy apparently did indeed lead to a bombing and a bomb threat .
An FBI informant in Seattle drove a young black man named Larry Ward to a real estate office that engaged in housing discrimination and encouraged him to place a bomb there ; the police were waiting and killed Ward .
Thirteen Black Panthers were accused of a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty after receiving 60 sticks of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 28 people broke into a federal building to destroy draft files in 1971 , an FBI informant bragged , “ I taught them everything they knew.
” All 28 were acquitted when his role was revealed .
The FBI also allowed informants within right-wing organizations to participate in violence against progressive activists .
Gary Thomas Rowe , who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1960 , provided the FBI with three weeks warning that the Klan was planning attacks on Freedom Riders arriving in Alabama from the north .
The FBI stood by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Local police gave the Klan 15 minutes to assault the activists .
In those 15 minutes , the white supremacists — including Rowe — set the Freedom Rider bus on fire in an attempt to burn them alive .
Rowe may also have played a role in the infamous 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham , Alabama , which killed four young girls .
He was in the car with three other Klansmen in 1965 when they chased down and murdered Viola Liuzzo , a mother of five from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Rowe received immunity for testifying against his compatriots , and was given a job as a U.S. Marshall by Lyndon Johnson ’ s attorney general .
Local police informants without apparent connections to the FBI got into the act too .
A deputy sheriff enrolled as a student at SUNY Buffalo and helped students build and test bombs .
Another informant posed as a student at Northeastern Illinois State College , led sit-ins for Students for a Democratic Society , and encouraged compatriots to sabotage military vehicles .
Soon after COINTELPRO was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it was halting all such activities .
Mark Felt , the assistant FBI director now also known to be the infamous “ Deep Throat ” source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein , later said that the bureau had made no effort to see that “ constitutional values are being protected.
” When and whether the FBI ever stopped , however , is an open question .
In 1975 an informant told the New York Times that he had engaged in COINTELPRO-like activities until he ’ d left the previous year .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ blow up a bus at the 1972 GOP convention in Miami .
In any case , police forces in the U.S. continued the same tactics .
In 1978 , an undercover officer encouraged two hapless young activists to seize control of a television tower in Puerto Rico .
When they arrived , they were gunned down by 10 policemen .
Tellingly , when Puerto Rican government asked the FBI to investigate what happened , the FBI gave the government a clean bill of health .
A top FBI official later called this a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ FBI got back in the business of encouraging violent acts in a big way — although they were generally much more careful to step in before the violence actually occurred .
When journalist ( and Intercept contributor ) Trevor Aaronson examined U.S. prosecutions for international terrorism in the decade after the attacks , he found five examples of actual plots .
By contrast , 150 people were indicted in sting operations that existed only thanks to the encouragement of the FBI and its informants .
According to Aaronson , “ the FBI is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is at catching terrorists.
” The same tactics have been used to generate purported domestic terrorism plots .
In 2008 environmental activist Eric McDavid was sentenced to 20 years in prison for plotting to damage the Nimbus Dam in California .
Eight years later , a judge ordered him released because the FBI had withheld evidence regarding a government informant .
In 2012 , the FBI and its informant essentially created a plot to blow up a bridge in Cleveland out of whole cloth , and dragged five Occupy activists into it .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Counterterrorism Division invented something called the “ Black Identity Extremism ” movement .
As portrayed by an FBI report , the threat from the imaginary movement reads as strikingly similar to that allegedly posed by black organizations during the days of COINTELPRO .
The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives said this “ resurrects the historically negative legacy of African American civil rights leaders who were unconstitutionally targeted and attacked by federal , state , and local law enforcement agencies.
” That brings us to the present day .
On the one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mean that the FBI or local police are currently acting as provocateurs during the current unrest .
But it does mean that such activity is clearly one avenue that is open to U.S. police forces looking to undermine protests and escalate violence .

When Harry, George, Tom, and Joe showed up at a warehouse outside Philadelphia rented by protesters, organizers were immediately suspicious. The men claimed to be “union carpenters” from the Scranton, Pennsylvania, area who built stages — just the kind of help the protesters needed. They were preparing for the Republican National Convention in 2000, where the party would be nominating George W. Bush. Across the country, allied organizers were planning similar protests for the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.
One of the hallmarks of the social justice movement at the time was its puppets. Organizers were coming off successful protests in Seattle in November 1999 against the World Trade Organization, and in Washington, D.C., in April 2000, against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and had managed to reshape the politics of globalization. Soaring papier-mache puppets, rolled through the streets on individually constructed floats, projected a festive air, capturing sympathetic media coverage and countering the authorities’ narrative that the protesters were nihilists simply relishing in property destruction.
The four carpenters were good with a hammer, but much about them had protesters wary they were in fact infiltrators. In conversation, “they were not very political or well informed,” recalled Kris Hermes, an organizer, in “Crashing the Party,” his memoir of the affair. They were older and more muscular than most protesters, he wrote, and they insisted on drinking beer while working, despite the organizers’ ban on drinking in the warehouse. In discussions and meetings, they asserted the right of protesters to destroy property and to physically resist arrest. The movement’s intentional lack of hierarchy left organizers with little ability to act on their suspicions of infiltration, even as they were becoming more deft at sussing out such provocateurs.
On August 1, the first full day of the Republican convention, police surrounded the warehouse, known as the “Ministry of Puppetganda,” executed mass arrests, and confiscated the puppets, floats, signs, and other materials to be used in upcoming marches. The police lied, publicly saying that organizers had been planning violent demonstrations and hinting darkly at bomb-making materials being hidden in the warehouse. That roundup presaged other mass arrests of protest leaders throughout the week, followed by beatings inside the jail and even a $1 million bond.
When the warrant for the warehouse raid was unsealed, it finally confirmed that Harry, George, Tom, and Joe had been state troopers assigned to infiltrate the group and produce a pretext for a raid. All of the charges against the puppeteers were eventually dropped, and the saga would eventually cost the city millions in lawsuit settlements (with much of the legal work led by radical attorney Larry Krasner, who is now Philadelphia district attorney).
It is a historical fact, as this episode illustrates, that law enforcement frequently infiltrates progressive political movements using agent provocateurs who urge others to engage in violence. It is also a historical fact that, more rarely, such provocateurs commit acts of violence themselves.
The media pays little attention to such infiltrators, for a variety of reasons. On the one hand, corporate media has never taken much enthusiasm in questioning government action in the midst of riots or major demonstrations, unless that action goes wildly over the line or targets members of the media. The subject of provocateurs is also fraught from the perspective of protesters and movement organizers, as it can lead to paranoia that undermines solidarity and movement building. It is often conflated with the trope of “outside agitators” and used by authorities or other opponents of the protesters to delegitimize the anger on display, giving some protesters or their supporters an incentive to downplay the reality of the provocations.
The intensity of the conversation around protests that turn violent, and the life-or-death consequences of winding up on the wrong side of public opinion, leaves little room for a nuanced discussion. Were such a conversation possible, it would be easy to talk about the difference between the anger of a crowd and the actions it ultimately takes. An angry crowd that remains nonviolent and engages in zero property destruction is no less legitimately angry than one that does. Often the only difference is in whether and how the anger is triggered and escalated.
In protests across the country over the past week, the clear actor escalating the violence generally hasn’t been a protester or even a right-wing infiltrator, but the police themselves. In rally after rally, people have observed that looting and destruction only began after police charged and beat a crowd, or fired tear gas or rubber bullets into it. In other cases, it can take just one act by a protester to light the spark. Given the chaotic nature of the protests, it’s probable that everyone being blamed for property damage has played some role. But as the protests continue, and President Donald Trump calls for ever more violent methods of repression, the possible role of police provocateurs in protests is worth bearing in mind.
Photo: Alberto Roveri/Mondadori Portfolio by Getty Images
In 2008, Francesco Cossiga, one of the most important political figures in post-World War II Italy, provided a rare glimpse behind the curtain at how the world looks to people at the top of governments facing large-scale protests.
Cossiga had served as prime minister and then president of Italy. Before that, in the late ’70s, he led the Ministry of the Interior. During that period, he was notorious for the brutality with which he put down left-wing demonstrations led by students. This is how the New York Times reported the situation in 1977: “Extremists among the students have created chaos in a number of Italian cities with a wave of shooting and destruction.”
As Silvio Berlusconi’s administration faced similarly threatening protests, Cossiga urged them to rerun his playbook:
[They] should do what I did when I was interior minister. … Pull back police from streets and colleges, infiltrate the movement with provocateurs ready for anything [emphasis added], and for ten days let protesters devastate shops, burn down cars, and set cities aflame. Then, emboldened by popular support … police should have no mercy and send them all to the hospital. Not arrest them, because prosecutors would just free them right away, but beat them all and beat the professors that encourage them.
The Times appears to have mentioned the possibility that government provocateurs were behind some of the violence once — and then not as fact, but as an accusation of “leftwing parties and newspapers.”
Cossiga had been a professor of constitutional law and was a centrist Christian Democrat. When he became prime minister in 1979, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to Italy saw this as an “excellent development,” and Cossiga maintained a strong relationship with America. There is no direct line between Cossiga and today’s protests in the U.S. But his example indicates that it’s no fevered conspiracy theory to believe reasonable, reputable figures see provocateur tactics as legitimate — even if most of them are more circumspect in public.
The best documented use of provocateurs by the U.S. government occurred during the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Counter-Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO, from 1956 to 1971. The reason the documentation is available is because a group of citizens broke into an FBI office in Pennsylvania — coincidentally, just a short drive from the warehouse targeted by police in 2000 — and stole files that they then passed to the media. This, in turn, led to congressional investigations, which pried loose more information.
In one notorious example in May 1970, an informant working for both the Tuscaloosa police and the FBI burned down a building at the University of Alabama during protests over the recent Kent State University shootings. The police then declared that demonstrators were engaging in an unlawful assembly and arrested 150 of them.
In another well-known case, a man nicknamed “Tommy the Traveler” visited numerous New York State colleges, posing as a radical member of Students for a Democratic Society. He encouraged acolytes to kidnap a congressman and offered training in Molotov cocktails. Two students at Hobart College acted on his suggestions and firebombed the campus ROTC building. Eventually it came out that his full name was Tommy Tongyai, and he had worked both for local police and the FBI.
The list goes on and on from there. An FBI informant, who said he was also a member of the John Birch Society, helped assemble time bombs and placed them on an Army truck. (The John Birch Society now says it has no record of his membership.) An FBI informant in the radical political organization Weather Underground took part in the bombing of a Cincinnati public school. A prominent member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War — and FBI informant — pushed for “shooting and bombing,” and his advocacy apparently did indeed lead to a bombing and a bomb threat. An FBI informant in Seattle drove a young black man named Larry Ward to a real estate office that engaged in housing discrimination and encouraged him to place a bomb there; the police were waiting and killed Ward. Thirteen Black Panthers were accused of a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty after receiving 60 sticks of dynamite from an FBI informant. After 28 people broke into a federal building to destroy draft files in 1971, an FBI informant bragged, “I taught them everything they knew.” All 28 were acquitted when his role was revealed.
The FBI also allowed informants within right-wing organizations to participate in violence against progressive activists. Gary Thomas Rowe, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in 1960, provided the FBI with three weeks warning that the Klan was planning attacks on Freedom Riders arriving in Alabama from the north. The FBI stood by and allowed the attacks to occur. Local police gave the Klan 15 minutes to assault the activists. In those 15 minutes, the white supremacists — including Rowe — set the Freedom Rider bus on fire in an attempt to burn them alive.
Rowe may also have played a role in the infamous 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four young girls. He was in the car with three other Klansmen in 1965 when they chased down and murdered Viola Liuzzo, a mother of five from Detroit who’d traveled to Selma. Rowe received immunity for testifying against his compatriots, and was given a job as a U.S. Marshall by Lyndon Johnson’s attorney general.
Local police informants without apparent connections to the FBI got into the act too. A deputy sheriff enrolled as a student at SUNY Buffalo and helped students build and test bombs. Another informant posed as a student at Northeastern Illinois State College, led sit-ins for Students for a Democratic Society, and encouraged compatriots to sabotage military vehicles.
Soon after COINTELPRO was uncovered in 1971, the FBI announced that it was halting all such activities. Mark Felt, the assistant FBI director now also known to be the infamous “Deep Throat” source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, later said that the bureau had made no effort to see that “constitutional values are being protected.”
When and whether the FBI ever stopped, however, is an open question. In 1975 an informant told the New York Times that he had engaged in COINTELPRO-like activities until he’d left the previous year. This included encouraging a Maoist group to blow up a bus at the 1972 GOP convention in Miami.
In any case, police forces in the U.S. continued the same tactics. In 1978, an undercover officer encouraged two hapless young activists to seize control of a television tower in Puerto Rico. When they arrived, they were gunned down by 10 policemen. Tellingly, when Puerto Rican government asked the FBI to investigate what happened, the FBI gave the government a clean bill of health. A top FBI official later called this a “coverup.”
After 9/11, the FBI got back in the business of encouraging violent acts in a big way — although they were generally much more careful to step in before the violence actually occurred. When journalist (and Intercept contributor) Trevor Aaronson examined U.S. prosecutions for international terrorism in the decade after the attacks, he found five examples of actual plots. By contrast, 150 people were indicted in sting operations that existed only thanks to the encouragement of the FBI and its informants. According to Aaronson, “the FBI is much better at creating terrorists than it is at catching terrorists.”
The same tactics have been used to generate purported domestic terrorism plots. In 2008 environmental activist Eric McDavid was sentenced to 20 years in prison for plotting to damage the Nimbus Dam in California. Eight years later, a judge ordered him released because the FBI had withheld evidence regarding a government informant. In 2012, the FBI and its informant essentially created a plot to blow up a bridge in Cleveland out of whole cloth, and dragged five Occupy activists into it.
Most recently, the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division invented something called the “Black Identity Extremism” movement. As portrayed by an FBI report, the threat from the imaginary movement reads as strikingly similar to that allegedly posed by black organizations during the days of COINTELPRO. The National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives said this “resurrects the historically negative legacy of African American civil rights leaders who were unconstitutionally targeted and attacked by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.”
That brings us to the present day. On the one hand, this history doesn’t mean that the FBI or local police are currently acting as provocateurs during the current unrest. But it does mean that such activity is clearly one avenue that is open to U.S. police forces looking to undermine protests and escalate violence.
Update: June 10, 2020
After publication, a representative of the John Birch Society told The Intercept that the society had no record of George Demmerle having been a member. Demmerle, an FBI informant, had told FBI and others that he was a society member. The piece has been updated to reflect this.


theintercept--2020-06-02--Big Pharma Attacks Efforts to Guard Against Coronavirus Price Gouging

announced a plan to ensure that drugs and vaccines for Covid-19 are affordable and accessible to all , a coalition of conservative groups began quietly working to undermine that effort .
On April 15 , Rep. Jan Schakowsky , D-Ill. , along with Reps. Peter DeFazio , D-Ore. , Rosa DeLauro , D-Conn. , and Lloyd Doggett , D-Texas , laid out basic principles for the development and pricing of coronavirus therapies and vaccines .
Their demands were simple : Pharmaceutical companies should have to set reasonable prices for their drugs and vaccines used to treat or prevent Covid-19 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ costs of research and manufacturing of these products public .
During the pandemic , the legislators said , companies should not be able to profit exclusively from these potentially lifesaving drugs .
“ Exclusivity determines who has access , who can manufacture , and how we scale up production to meet the need , ” the members of Congress noted in a press release at the time .
“ We can not leave these decisions up to a single , profit-motivated private company.
” Few have spoken out against the protections that were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ medicines — at least publicly .
But privately , a coalition of conservative groups attacked the proposed patient protections as “ dangerous , disruptive , and unacceptable.
” In a May 7 letter , representatives of 31 groups , including Hudson Institute , the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste , and Consumer Action for a Strong Economy , called on Congress to reject the drug pricing guidelines and defended patents and the exclusive right to profit from drugs as “ America ’ s great assets.
” It ’ s worth noting that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the rights of pharmaceutical companies to exclusively profit from coronavirus-related products have received funding from the pharmaceutical industry .
Among the organizations that signed the letter and also received donations from either drug companies or the trade groups that represent them are the American Legislative Exchange Council Action , whose parent organization , ALEC , received at least $ 530,000 from the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America , or PhRMA , since 2015 ; Americans for a Balanced Budget , which has received more than $ 375,000 from PhRMA @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Policy Innovation , which received $ 374,500 from PhRMA during the same period .
In all , 15 of the 31 groups received $ 2.5 million in pharmaceutical industry contributions between 2015 and 2019 , according to an analysis of tax filings and other records by Public Citizen .
PhRMA , Hudson Institute , Council for Citizens Against Government Waste , Consumer Action for a Strong Economy , ALEC , Americans for a Balanced Budget , and the Institute for Policy Innovation did not respond to inquiries from The Intercept for this story @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 295 million on lobbying in 2019 , far more than any other sector in the U.S. , has defended the present system of drug development and pricing as an effective way of incentivizing needed investment in pharmaceutical innovation .
Currently drug companies can obtain patents , which typically grant them 20 years of property rights .
Separately , they can obtain exclusivity for their drugs , which can prohibit the sale of competing products .
Either way , according to PhRMA , which represents biotech research companies , intellectual property rights are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drugs .
The May 7 letter argued that denying companies exclusive rights to profit from their products or requiring them to disclose proprietary information would benefit China and hurt people with Covid-19 and other diseases .
But according to Doggett , chair of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee and one of the authors of the guidelines , it is pharmaceutical greed that poses the real danger .
“ To know what interests these groups truly represent : Follow the money .
Just like their generous campaign contributions , Big Pharma-funded propaganda @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the highest price — whatever the sick and dying will pay , ” Doggett wrote in a statement emailed to The Intercept .
“ This letter only encourages continued inaction to protect the taxpayer investment from a Congress that has remained completely impotent in the face of Big Pharma.
” The April 15 guidelines , which have yet to be codified into proposed legislation , were not the Democrats ’ first effort to guard against price gouging during the pandemic .
In March , Schakowsky and others attempted to insert language into the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drug makers ’ intellectual property rights and allowed the federal government to take action if it had reason to believe that treatments or vaccines developed with public funds were priced too high .
But while an early draft of the bill included these provisions , lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry succeeded in getting them removed from the final legislation .
Perhaps most galling to the Democratic lawmakers is the fact that the vast majority ( if not all ) of the drugs they seek to protect from exorbitant pricing have been developed at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Between 2010 and 2016 , every drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration benefited from science funded with federal research through the National Institutes of Health , according to the advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs .
During that time , taxpayers spent more than $ 100 billion on that research .
Although American taxpayers are the “ angel investors ” of pharmaceuticals , as Doggett put it , many can not afford the treatments they ’ ve bankrolled .
Some 58 million people in the U.S. reported being unable to afford @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Gallup poll , which also found that 34 million people reported knowing someone who had died after not getting treatment .
The problem isn ’ t new .
“ We have seen it time and again : The government does all the work through Phase III trials , and then licenses it over to a manufacturer to finish the approval .
It is like those years of government investment did not exist , ” DeLauro wrote in a statement to The Intercept .
“ As the Chair of the subcommittee that funds the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Advanced Research and Development Authority , I am all deeply aware of just how much money the U.S. government invests in the critical , life-saving biomedical research in this country.
” People with HIV and hepatitis C are also painfully familiar with the failings of the U.S. drug pricing system .
Although medicines have become available over the past 10 years to treat these viral infections , tens of thousands of people still die because they are unable to afford them .
“ We have watched as those epidemics continue to spiral out @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said James Krellenstein of the PrEP4All Collaboration , a group that formed in 2018 to advocate for universal access to lifesaving HIV medications and expanded its work to include Covid-19 in February .
“ In both of these cases , we see we have highly , highly effective drugs in many cases funded by public money and we see drug companies pricing these as exorbitant prices.
” Some of the companies that are receiving government funding to develop coronavirus treatments and vaccines have offered assurances about their pricing .
Stéphane Bancel , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 486 million of federal funding to speed its work on a coronavirus vaccine , promised to be “ very thoughtful ” when it comes to pricing .
And Johnson & Johnson , which received more than $ 600 million in federal funding for its coronavirus treatment and vaccine work , said that its vaccine , at least , would be “ affordable.
” But Krellenstein said that leaving decisions about coronavirus drug pricing in drug companies ’ hands — the approach taken with HIV and hepatitis C — would be a grave mistake @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decade that the current approach of doing nothing results in the perpetuation of epidemics and the perpetuation of mass death , ” he said .
In the case of remdesivir , an antiviral therapy made by Gilead Sciences that is being tested as a treatment for Covid-19 , PrEP4All argues that because U.S. government scientists appear to have contributed in various ways to its creation , the government may actually co-own the patents .
If remdesivir proves to be effective in fighting the virus , which is an open question , the group @ @ @ @ @ @ @ access to it .
Gilead donated its initial supply of the drug to the federal government and is now preparing to sell it .
The company ’ s CEO Daniel O ’ Day told CNBC , “ We understand our responsibility both to patients and also to shareholders and we ’ ll be balancing that.
” Regardless of its ownership of remdesivir , the U.S. government has the right to override any patent as long as it provides the company “ reasonable compensation ” through a legal provision known as Section 1498 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ eminent domain for patented products , allowing the government to break a company ’ s monopoly on a product and permit low-cost competition .
An increasing group of people could benefit from this and other steps to make Covid-19 drugs affordable .
When Schakowsky and her colleagues first unveiled their proposal in April , there were just over 600,000 confirmed coronavirus infections in the U.S. By the time the pharmaceutical industry-funded groups sent their letter to House members , that number had doubled .
Less than a month later , it has tripled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more than 105,000 people have died from Covid-19 .
But U.S. lawmakers have yet to enact protections from price gouging .
And while the American pharmaceutical industry is pushing to maintain its ability to exclusively set drug prices and profit from pharmaceutical products , much of the world is moving in the other direction .
On Friday , the World Health Organization unveiled a global effort to pool intellectual property , data , and research related to Covid-19 .
While 36 countries have already announced their support for the project , the U.S. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ WHO was detailing its plan to broadly share the benefits of scientific advancement , President Donald Trump was announcing his plan to withdraw from the global organization .

After House Democrats announced a plan to ensure that drugs and vaccines for Covid-19 are affordable and accessible to all, a coalition of conservative groups began quietly working to undermine that effort.
On April 15, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., along with Reps. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., and Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, laid out basic principles for the development and pricing of coronavirus therapies and vaccines. Their demands were simple: Pharmaceutical companies should have to set reasonable prices for their drugs and vaccines used to treat or prevent Covid-19. They should be required to make the costs of research and manufacturing of these products public. During the pandemic, the legislators said, companies should not be able to profit exclusively from these potentially lifesaving drugs.
“Exclusivity determines who has access, who can manufacture, and how we scale up production to meet the need,” the members of Congress noted in a press release at the time. “We cannot leave these decisions up to a single, profit-motivated private company.”
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Few have spoken out against the protections that were designed to ensure equitable access to lifesaving medicines — at least publicly. But privately, a coalition of conservative groups attacked the proposed patient protections as “dangerous, disruptive, and unacceptable.” In a May 7 letter, representatives of 31 groups, including Hudson Institute, the Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, and Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, called on Congress to reject the drug pricing guidelines and defended patents and the exclusive right to profit from drugs as “America’s great assets.”
It’s worth noting that at least 15 of the groups arguing for the rights of pharmaceutical companies to exclusively profit from coronavirus-related products have received funding from the pharmaceutical industry. Among the organizations that signed the letter and also received donations from either drug companies or the trade groups that represent them are the American Legislative Exchange Council Action, whose parent organization, ALEC, received at least $530,000 from the trade group Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, since 2015; Americans for a Balanced Budget, which has received more than $375,000 from PhRMA since 2015; and the Institute for Policy Innovation, which received $374,500 from PhRMA during the same period. In all, 15 of the 31 groups received $2.5 million in pharmaceutical industry contributions between 2015 and 2019, according to an analysis of tax filings and other records by Public Citizen.
PhRMA, Hudson Institute, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, Consumer Action for a Strong Economy, ALEC, Americans for a Balanced Budget, and the Institute for Policy Innovation did not respond to inquiries from The Intercept for this story.
The pharmaceutical industry, which spent $295 million on lobbying in 2019, far more than any other sector in the U.S., has defended the present system of drug development and pricing as an effective way of incentivizing needed investment in pharmaceutical innovation. Currently drug companies can obtain patents, which typically grant them 20 years of property rights. Separately, they can obtain exclusivity for their drugs, which can prohibit the sale of competing products. Either way, according to PhRMA, which represents biotech research companies, intellectual property rights are the key to the creation of needed drugs.
The May 7 letter argued that denying companies exclusive rights to profit from their products or requiring them to disclose proprietary information would benefit China and hurt people with Covid-19 and other diseases.
But according to Doggett, chair of the House Ways and Means Health Subcommittee and one of the authors of the guidelines, it is pharmaceutical greed that poses the real danger. “To know what interests these groups truly represent: Follow the money. Just like their generous campaign contributions, Big Pharma-funded propaganda seeks to protect monopoly power to extract the highest price — whatever the sick and dying will pay,” Doggett wrote in a statement emailed to The Intercept. “This letter only encourages continued inaction to protect the taxpayer investment from a Congress that has remained completely impotent in the face of Big Pharma.”
The April 15 guidelines, which have yet to be codified into proposed legislation, were not the Democrats’ first effort to guard against price gouging during the pandemic. In March, Schakowsky and others attempted to insert language into the coronavirus aid package that would have limited drug makers’ intellectual property rights and allowed the federal government to take action if it had reason to believe that treatments or vaccines developed with public funds were priced too high. But while an early draft of the bill included these provisions, lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry succeeded in getting them removed from the final legislation.
Perhaps most galling to the Democratic lawmakers is the fact that the vast majority (if not all) of the drugs they seek to protect from exorbitant pricing have been developed at least in part with taxpayer dollars. Between 2010 and 2016, every drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration benefited from science funded with federal research through the National Institutes of Health, according to the advocacy group Patients for Affordable Drugs. During that time, taxpayers spent more than $100 billion on that research.
Although American taxpayers are the “angel investors” of pharmaceuticals, as Doggett put it, many cannot afford the treatments they’ve bankrolled. Some 58 million people in the U.S. reported being unable to afford medicines, according to a November 2019 Gallup poll, which also found that 34 million people reported knowing someone who had died after not getting treatment.
The problem isn’t new. “We have seen it time and again: The government does all the work through Phase III trials, and then licenses it over to a manufacturer to finish the approval. It is like those years of government investment did not exist,” DeLauro wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “As the Chair of the subcommittee that funds the National Institutes of Health and the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, I am all deeply aware of just how much money the U.S. government invests in the critical, life-saving biomedical research in this country.”
People with HIV and hepatitis C are also painfully familiar with the failings of the U.S. drug pricing system. Although medicines have become available over the past 10 years to treat these viral infections, tens of thousands of people still die because they are unable to afford them. “We have watched as those epidemics continue to spiral out of control and kill people,” said James Krellenstein of the PrEP4All Collaboration, a group that formed in 2018 to advocate for universal access to lifesaving HIV medications and expanded its work to include Covid-19 in February. “In both of these cases, we see we have highly, highly effective drugs in many cases funded by public money and we see drug companies pricing these as exorbitant prices.”
Some of the companies that are receiving government funding to develop coronavirus treatments and vaccines have offered assurances about their pricing. Stéphane Bancel, the CEO of Moderna, which received $486 million of federal funding to speed its work on a coronavirus vaccine, promised to be “very thoughtful” when it comes to pricing. And Johnson & Johnson, which received more than $600 million in federal funding for its coronavirus treatment and vaccine work, said that its vaccine, at least, would be “affordable.”
But Krellenstein said that leaving decisions about coronavirus drug pricing in drug companies’ hands — the approach taken with HIV and hepatitis C — would be a grave mistake. “We know from the past decade that the current approach of doing nothing results in the perpetuation of epidemics and the perpetuation of mass death,” he said.
In the case of remdesivir, an antiviral therapy made by Gilead Sciences that is being tested as a treatment for Covid-19, PrEP4All argues that because U.S. government scientists appear to have contributed in various ways to its creation, the government may actually co-own the patents. If remdesivir proves to be effective in fighting the virus, which is an open question, the group argues that the government could easily expand access to it.
Gilead donated its initial supply of the drug to the federal government and is now preparing to sell it. The company’s CEO Daniel O’Day told CNBC, “We understand our responsibility both to patients and also to shareholders and we’ll be balancing that.”
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Regardless of its ownership of remdesivir, the U.S. government has the right to override any patent as long as it provides the company “reasonable compensation” through a legal provision known as Section 1498. The law functions as a sort of eminent domain for patented products, allowing the government to break a company’s monopoly on a product and permit low-cost competition.
An increasing group of people could benefit from this and other steps to make Covid-19 drugs affordable. When Schakowsky and her colleagues first unveiled their proposal in April, there were just over 600,000 confirmed coronavirus infections in the U.S. By the time the pharmaceutical industry-funded groups sent their letter to House members, that number had doubled. Less than a month later, it has tripled to more than 1.8 million, and more than 105,000 people have died from Covid-19.
But U.S. lawmakers have yet to enact protections from price gouging. And while the American pharmaceutical industry is pushing to maintain its ability to exclusively set drug prices and profit from pharmaceutical products, much of the world is moving in the other direction. On Friday, the World Health Organization unveiled a global effort to pool intellectual property, data, and research related to Covid-19. While 36 countries have already announced their support for the project, the U.S. was not among them. Just as WHO was detailing its plan to broadly share the benefits of scientific advancement, President Donald Trump was announcing his plan to withdraw from the global organization.