COVID Medicines Made In China Started To Be Marketed For IDR 659 Thousand Per Bottle

Illustration - Experimental COVID-19 antiviral drug, molnupiravir. (ANTARA/Andi Firdaus)

JAKARTA - Anti-COVID-19 drugs made in China have begun to be marketed in the country with a selling price of 300 yuan or around Rp. 659 thousand per bottle containing 35 tablets.

With a selling price of less than 1,000 yuan per bottle, Azvudine, an anti-COVID-19 drug manufactured by Genuine Biotech Ltd, a pharmaceutical company headquartered in Henan Province, will be easily accessible to Chinese citizens, local media reported. , August 8th.

Several other drugs that have received approval from the Chinese authorities have caused controversy among the public because they are very expensive and unaffordable.

China previously approved Paxlovid, Pfizer's anti-COVID-19 pills, and the domestically produced antibody therapy BRII-196/BRII-198.

Paxlovid sells for 2,400 yuan (Rp5.2 million) per package, while the BRII-196/BRII-198 costs 10,000 yuan (Rp21.9 million) per therapy.

Genuine Biotech is capable of producing 6.8 billion pills per year which is estimated to meet the treatment needs of 200 million patients.

More than 10 types of anti-COVID-19 drugs developed in China are currently under research.

Among these drugs is VV116, which is an oral anti-SARS-CoV-2 nucleoside candidate developed by the Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica with the Wuhan Institute of Virologists in Wuhan, which received emergency use approval from the Ministry of Health of Uzbekistan in December 2021.