PhRMA Member Company Efforts to Fight COVID-19

In the U.S., Bayer donated $2 million to Direct Relief and $500,000 to the American Red Cross to help fund additional testing centers, medical staff support and blood drives in underserved and disadvantaged communities. In one of its largest U.S. locations, Bayer also made a $250,000 commitment to the Berkeley Relief Fund, an initiative by the Berkeley, California, City Council to provide emergency relief grants for small businesses, nonprofit arts organizations and worker rent support.

Globally, the company has provided substantial financial support and donations of several medicines to the Chinese Red Cross, which has worked with Chinese health authorities to coordinate the deployment of aid measures to support those affected by the outbreak of COVID-19. Bayer has supported hospitals in Lombardy, Italy, with a donation of one million euros. The aid was added to an aid fund that the regional authorities in Lombardy have set up to help procure urgently needed equipment for intensive care units in hospitals with the greatest needs.

Bayer’s Berkeley, California facility provided site and logistical support to the City of Berkeley for COVID-19 vaccination clinics in 2021 and 2022. In addition, in Leverkusen, the company made its cultural events venue available as a COVID-19 vaccination center.

Bayer has continued to provide affected regions and countries with rapid and unbureaucratic assistance as part of its corporate social responsibility.

Bristol Myers Squibb contributed to COVID-19 relief efforts around the world, including $14.1 million in financial support and products in 45 countries. Additionally, the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation, a 501(c)(3) organization, also contributed $20.7 million in support of nearly 50 organizations in the United States and more than 150 organizations globally that cared for patients and supported those on the frontlines of the COVID-19 response.

Given our company’s areas of strength, we participated in several cross-industry groups and public-private partnerships designed to foster collaboration and coordinate industry response efforts, and thereby accelerate the development, manufacture, and delivery of vaccines, diagnostics, and treatments for COVID-19. Partnerships included the Rockefeller University, the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) program and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator. BMS also organized a COVID-19 Testing Industry Consortium with 24 other health care companies to inform, improve, innovate, and accelerate various aspects of testing for COVID-19. 

At Daiichi Sankyo, our top priority is to help protect the well-being and safety of our entire community – our patients, the health care providers who treat them, our employees and our partners.

We remain dedicated to delivering our medicines, ensuring our clinical trials continue safely and appropriately, actively studying potential vaccines to prevent COVID-19, and dedicating charitable funds and partnership to organizations in our communities and beyond. Measures taken to lessen the negative effects of the pandemic also include supporting our employees with a wide variety of programs including a flexible working policy and additional benefits.

By leveraging the best use of our past and present research properties, technologies and accumulated R&D knowledge, and in collaboration with external institutions, our researchers continue development of COVID-19 vaccines. Utilizing novel nucleic acid delivery technology discovered by Daiichi Sankyo, the company set the development of an mRNA vaccine as one of its top priority projects and submitted an application for marketing approval of the vaccine to the regulatory authorities in Japan in January 2023.

The clinical development of the mRNA vaccine is being conducted through the “Vaccine development project” promoted by the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) and the “Urgent improvement project for vaccine manufacturing systems” supported by the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare.

Driven by its human health care (hhc) mission of giving its first thought to patients and the benefits health care provides, Eisai has worked on a variety of global initiatives in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. The company initially focused its efforts on providing millions of dollars in donations and medical supplies globally to aid health care institutions and non-profit patient organizations. In Kenya, Eisai supported a project led by CA Medlynks Kenya, Ltd., which was aimed at building a new structure for the efficient testing framework for the novel coronavirus infection. These efforts, in collaboration with the government of Meru County in Kenya, helped support the setup of PCR testing laboratories and the procurement of equipment necessary for testing and training of screening technicians.

In the area of research and development, Eisai joined a consortium of life science companies called “COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator,” which was initiated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and formed with collaboration from Wellcome and MasterCard. As part of this effort, Eisai provided its unique collection of about 2,650 natural product compounds to the Scripps Institute to be added to a compound library for the development of treatments. Within this same ACT-Accelerator framework, Eisai provided the bulk pharmaceutical E6020 as an adjuvant to be added to vaccine candidates of VBI in the U.S. The company also supplied its Toll-Like Receptor 4 inhibitor eritoran (E5564), created and developed internally as a sepsis treatment, to the international network REMAP-CAP-COVID.

In collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, an international clinical trial with eritoran was initiated in June 2020 in novel coronavirus patients hospitalized and in a progressing disease state; however, this trial was discontinued in May 2022 due to changes in the COVID-19 landscape. The company also provided active pharmaceutical ingredients to the Japanese National Institute of Infectious Diseases, in response to their request for the provision of ingredients applicable for screening of therapeutic agents for novel coronavirus. More information on Eisai’s COVID-19 efforts, can be found here.

Throughout the COVID pandemic, Lilly utilized the full force of its expertise to provide therapy options for all points of a COVID-19 journey, helping to keep patients from progressing to hospitalization, and to offer options to those who have been hospitalized. Lilly developed the first monoclonal antibody authorized for Emergency Use (EUA) by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)- bamlanivimab, followed by the authorization of bamlanivimab with etesevimab and, most recently, bebtelovimab. In addition to three monoclonal antibodies, the FDA has authorized baricitinib under emergency pathways.

Over 700,000 patients were treated with bamlanivimab alone, or combined with etesevimab, potentially preventing more than 35,000 hospitalizations and at least 14,000 deaths during the worst of the pandemic. Additionally, during this same period, approximately 100,000 doses of bamlanivimab alone, or combined with etesevimab, were donated to 9 low- to lower-middle-income countries (LMIC).

In February 2022, bebtelovimab was authorized by the FDA under emergency use authorization, with Lilly providing 750,000 doses to the U.S. Government for distribution to patients at high-risk of progressing to more serious disease and/ or hospitalization. In August 2022, bebtelovimab was commercialized to allow for purchase by U.S. states/territories, hospitals and a broad set of other providers through a sole distributor

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted immediate adaptive innovations within the pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies to quickly provide life-saving therapeutics and vaccines. Lilly’s COVID-19 monoclonal antibody program adapted to the conditions of the pandemic during the development of bamlanivimab alone and in combination with etesevimab, positively impacting the development and FDA emergency use authorization (EUA) of bebtelovimab. The successful development of Lilly monoclonal antibody therapeutics was achieved with anticipatory clinical studies, continuous virus surveillance, and streamlined clinical design.

Lilly has been successful in partnering to identify monoclonal antibodies and accelerating pre-clinical and clinical drug development in close communication with FDA. This includes significant efforts early in the pandemic to focus our manufacturing capacities to quickly provide appropriate treatments to people at high risk of progression to severe COVID-19 upon authorization.

Lilly continues to monitor the global COVID-19 environment, assessing the neutralization activity of potential antibody therapies against a wide array of existing and emerging mutations and variants. Lilly will continue to search and evaluate monoclonal antibodies to identify potential candidates for clinical development against new variants.

Lilly is also closely monitoring its supply chain and does not currently anticipate shortages for any of their medicines, including all forms of insulin. Additionally, Lilly and the Lilly Foundation are actively engaged with community partners to address new and complex challenges arising from the coronavirus, including the economic impact on vulnerable people.

Genentech and Roche have contributed to the fight against the global COVID-19 pandemic by delivering diagnostic tests and solutions, developing treatment options, and forging collaborations. They have devoted their scientific knowledge and research expertise in infectious diseases and antibody-based therapeutics, as well as their skilled workforce and specialized manufacturing capabilities.

They collaborated with Regeneron to manufacture and distribute its COVID-19 antibody cocktail REGN-COV® (casirivimab and imdevimab) to people around the globe. In addition, Genentech received FDA approval for Actemra® (tocilizumab) intravenous (IV) to treat adults with severe COVID-19, providing an important option for hospitalized patients and their health care providers.

Genentech and the Genentech Foundation committed $42 million to help address the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This support included emergency response grants and funds for longer-term recovery efforts, emphasizing low-income households and communities of color.

As a pioneer and leader in antiviral drug development, Gilead developed Veklury® (remdesivir), the first U.S. FDA-approved antiviral treatment to treat hospitalized adults and children with COVID-19, as well as non-hospitalized patients at high risk of disease progression.

Gilead continues to pursue multiple approaches to address the unmet needs of patients with COVID-19. Given the significant need to develop new and effective oral treatment options, Gilead is working to advance an investigational oral nucleoside prodrug, GS-5245.

Gilead established a $20 million philanthropic fund, the Gilead CARES (COVID-19 Acute Relief and Emergency Support) Grantee Fund, to support nonprofit organizations impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, alongside other community donations. We have also donated more than 2 million vials; more than 500,000 of which were donated in response to devastating COVID-19 outbreaks in India, Indonesia, Georgia and Armenia.

Gilead entered into voluntary licensing agreements with nine generics manufacturers to make remdesivir available to patients in low and lower-middle income countries (LLMICs). To date, remdesivir has been made available to more than 8 million people in low and lower-middle income countries. These licenses currently remain royalty-free, reflecting Gilead’s existing commitment to enabling broad patient access to remdesivir.

We have supported our voluntary licensing partners to ramp up production through the addition of local manufacturing facilities, as well as donating active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) to further drive supply.

Gilead remains committed to working to address the unmet needs of people affected by COVID-19 through research and partnerships with governments, academia, physicians, non-profits and communities around the world. We will also bring the full weight of our science to help address potential future viral outbreaks and pandemics.

We established a Patient Council comprised of people representing diverse perspectives and COVID-19 experiences, aimed at understanding the unmet needs of people impacted by this virus and addressing those needs throughout our work.

We collaborated with Morehouse School of Medicine’s Satcher Health Leadership Institute and Google.org to develop the Health Equity Tracker, a first-of-its-kind, public-facing data platform that displays and contextualizes health disparities facing communities of color throughout the United States, with an initial focus on COVID-19.    

Since January 2020, Johnson & Johnson has been working directly with governments and health authorities to help end the COVID-19 pandemic. The Company worked with urgency to advance a vaccine for COVID-19 that served populations globally, with special consideration given to some of the most vulnerable communities. 

Johnson & Johnson developed a vaccine that could be stored and shipped around the world through standard vaccine distribution channels and has shipped over 85 percent of the Company’s vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries. As part of our commitment to global access, we offered our vaccine at a single, non-profit global price during the pandemic period. 

From the beginning, we identified new and impactful ways to optimize clinical trials, reach diverse communities and ensure appropriate representation from all populations in our research. Our COVID-19 vaccine helped protect millions of people, and we continue to focus our efforts on ensuring our vaccine is available for people most in need.

Johnson & Johnson is leveraging learnings and experiences from our pandemic response to tackle some of the world’s most life-threatening infectious diseases and help us prepare for the next pandemic threat.

Early in the COVID-19 global health crisis, Lundbeck’s CEO Dr. Deborah Dunsire, PhRMA Board Member, sounded the alarm that the pandemic would have significant and lasting impact on people's mental health. Two years later, lockdowns, social isolation, fear and grief took a toll, with most countries seeing a sharp spike in new instances of anxiety and depression. Research indicates people with existing mental illness experienced worsening symptoms.

To address the rising challenge, Lundbeck and Mental Health America (MHA), a leading U.S. patient advocacy organization, jointly announced in February 2022 the release of a first-of-its kind dashboard that geographically maps the results of 2.6 million mental health screenings taken during the pandemic. The dashboard provides a view of the risk for suicidal ideation, severe depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and psychosis in every state and county in the United States. Lundbeck and MHA believe analyzing, mapping and sharing this data is critical to helping communities respond in a timely to the current mental health crisis. Typically, this level of demographic data is not available quickly, and it is rarely available at the county level. Beyond the pandemic, the hope is the dashboard can be used to ensure appropriate funding is made available to support quality mental health care for youth, adults, and families.

Watch Deborah Dunsire and Schroeder Stribling, president and CEO of Mental Health America, discuss the need for the dashboard.

In the face of a global crisis, Novartis quickly mobilized research and development capabilities, manufacturing capacities, clinical trial expertise and philanthropic aid to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

Novartis made contributions of upwards of USD 40 million to over 60 projects around the world that supported local communities impacted by this crisis. These included major donations to strengthen medical infrastructure and provide on-site support in many countries. In addition, the Novartis U.S. Foundation established a $5 million U.S. COVID-19 Community Response Fund for immediate response and recovery efforts related to the pandemic in U.S. communities. The Fund supported 40 programs across key geographies with a focus on food security and mental health services.

The company undertook several efforts to leverage our capabilities in discovery, development, and scale-up manufacturing. By leveraging our production facilities, we supported vaccine demand around the world. In addition, Novartis has been active in several key cross-industry research initiatives, including the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator coordinated by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome and Mastercard, as well as a COVID-19 directed partnership supported by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI).

To sustain access during the COVID epidemic, the Novartis generics and biosimilars division Sandoz committed to stable pricing for a basket of essential medicines that were used in the treatment of COVID-19, and entered into a long-term agreement with US-based Civica Rx to support stable supply of essential generic hospital medicines. Novartis also made 15 drugs that treat key symptoms of COVID-19 available to low-and lower-middle income countries at zero profit until a vaccine or curative treatment was available.

More information about the Novartis response to COVID-19 is available at: https://www.novartis.com/diseases.

When Otsuka-people see customers and communities in need, we take care of them by doing what’s right and what matters in ways that are the most meaningful. That’s why we were immediately responsive as an organization in addressing the COVID-19 situation.

• The Sozosei Foundation, a philanthropic arm of Otsuka America Pharmaceutical, Inc., committed more than one million dollars in donations to non-profit organizations providing support for those impacted by COVID-19. These organizations included: local charities providing meals, mental health care, and social services, as well as those addressing the rise in anti-Asian sentiment, the needs of incarcerated people, and building vaccine awareness.
• As frontlines workers faced critical shortages, Otsuka employees mobilized to secure and deliver personal protective equipment (PPE) to local health organizations in greatest need. Further, each Otsuka employee personally received a package shipped to their home with PPE supplies.
• We provided Otsuka-prescribed medication at no cost to patients who lost their job or insurance status due to the COVID-19 crisis.
• Nexus—a working collaborative powered by Otsuka—created a video series entitled “Building Mental Resiliency” to highlight strategies and resources the public could access to care for themselves and their loved ones during COVID-19. The series features insight from people with lived experience, advocates and health care providers as well as leaders of patient advocacy organizations such as National Alliance on Mental Illness, Mental Health America and Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.
• PsychU—an Otsuka-led community comprised of over 59,000 mental health care professionals—developed a COVID-19 resource center for mental health with webinars, interviews and articles aimed at supporting mental health care professionals and their patients in navigating this time.
• Otsuka donated iPads in support of much-needed connection and comfort for COVID-19 patients in New Jersey and in support of continuing online education for foster children in the Washington, D.C. area.

Without question, COVID-19 has made our organization more resilient than ever before. It has reminded us that Otsuka-people will prevail because we are united by our shared purpose to defy limitation, so that others can too.

From the beginning of this deadly pandemic, Pfizer understood that fighting COVID-19 would require unprecedented collaboration among scientists, biopharmaceutical companies, governments, and other health care stakeholders across the world. We also believed that various public health tools – including vaccines and treatments – would be and remain critical to protect lives from death and hospitalization due to COVID-19.

In December 2020, in partnership with Germany-based BioNTech, Pfizer delivered a breakthrough COVID-19 mRNA vaccine to the world in record time. mRNA vaccines have saved millions of lives, tens of billions of dollars in health care costs and enabled people to go about their lives more freely. To date, we have delivered billions of doses to 181 countries and territories in every region of the world, including two billion doses to low-and-middle-income countries.

Pfizer’s novel oral anti-viral PAXLOVID received U.S. FDA Emergency Use Authorization in December 2021 for the treatment of mild-to-moderate COVID-19 in people 12 years of age and older at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19, including hospitalization or death. Through bilateral contracts and agreements with the Medicines Patent Pool, Global Fund, and UNICEF, every low-and-middle-income country in the world, except China, has the potential to access PAXLOVID through one or more supply pathways.

In August 2022, the U.S. FDA authorized Pfizer and BioNTech’s Omicron-adapted bivalent COVID-19 vaccine for individuals aged 12 years and older. The adapted bivalent booster may help to provide improved protection against severe cases and hospitalization due to the circulating Omicron BA.4 and BA.5 sublineages, as well as new sublineages that continue to increase in prevalence.

Today, while clinical and real-world data still show existing COVID-19 vaccine and treatment options can help protect against the virus, we are continuing to follow the science and explore new approaches that may be needed as the pandemic evolves. As we continue to work with non-profit organizations, the private sector, and governments, Pfizer’s goal is to strengthen healthcare systems across the world, so they are more resilient in the face of future threats.

Sanofi is a global health care company that brings together dedicated and talented people and cutting-edge science to transform the practice of medicines. At Sanofi, our purpose is to chase the miracles of science to improve people’s lives. This drive took on increased urgency for everyone in the Sanofi family at the emergence of COVID-19 across the world. Our responsibility to our patients and their caregivers, our employees and their families, health care providers, public health officials and communities around the world drove us to act, leveraging our long history of innovation in bringing our expertise and dedicated people to face this threat.

Sanofi rapidly responded to the evolving challenge of COVID-19, which included maintaining our clinical trials, ensuring the manufacturing and delivery of our medicines, vaccines and consumer health care products, and investigating existing medicines as potential treatments for COVID-19, while researching and developing our own recombinant protein-based COVID-19 vaccine candidate in collaboration with GSK.

As a company committed to public health, we lent our manufacturing support to other vaccine manufacturers to help address global COVID-19 vaccine demands and have produced more than 220 million doses. In addition to donating to relief efforts in the communities where we live and work, Sanofi employees around the country mobilized to volunteer their medical expertise during the COVID-19 pandemic. Any employee who is a licensed medical professional was able to support their community hospital, relief organization, local testing site and more all while maintaining their Sanofi pay and benefits. We are extremely proud of our Sanofi colleagues who worked to help those in need during such difficult times.

The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly impacted our lives, placing tremendous strain on healthcare systems and society at large. UCB remains committed to protecting our colleagues around the world, supporting patients, and helping our communities, in addition to our work contributing to the global response.

During the height of the pandemic, we donated materials and monetarily to relief efforts, supported our communities, and invested in R&D. Examples include:

• Contributing to the COVID Moonshot project, UCB’s medicinal and computational chemists contributed compound designs to this worldwide open-science project to create an orally bioavailable antiviral for COVID-19—with the most potent series of compounds coming from UCB designs.
• Working with the Seattle Structural Genomics Center for Infectious Disease in the United States, Diamond Light Source in the U.K. and the University of Oxford to research COVID-19 for treatment and vaccine development.
• Joining the COVID R&D Alliance, a group of more than 20 leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies that are devoting significant time, insights and company resources to speed the development of potential therapies, novel antibodies and antiviral therapies for COVID-19 and its related symptoms.

Today, UCB continues to support communities around the world through the UCB Community Health Fund. The Fund, launched in 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, aims to support organizations addressing health disparities among vulnerable populations. As of January 2023, nearly 150 organizations worldwide have received grants totaling more than $6.5 million.