FDA approves AbbVie's new, cheaper hepatitis C drug

Charles Williams / Flickr Creative Commons

The Food and Drug Administration gave the green light Thursday to Mavyret, a hepatitis C drug made by AbbVie. Mavyret's list price is $26,400 for an eight-week treatment, the most common, and $39,600 for 12 weeks, an AbbVie spokesperson told Axios.

Why it matters: AbbVie's latest hepatitis C drug is a lot cheaper than Harvoni, the dominant hepatitis C medication made by Gilead Sciences. Harvoni retails for about $63,000 for eight weeks, although Gilead gets only about half of that after rebates and discounts. Even still, the lower-cost Mavyret could force pharmacy benefit managers and health insurers to consider putting it on their preferred drug lists in addition to, or instead of, Gilead's drugs.

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Axios
Updated 1 hour ago - Politics & Policy

Coronavirus dashboard

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Tropical Storm Zeta has killed at least two people, triggered flooding, downed powerlines and caused widespread outages since making landfall in Louisiana as a Category 2 hurricane on Wednesday.

The big picture: A record 11 named storms have made landfall in the U.S. this year. Zeta is the fifth named storm to do so in Louisiana in 2020, the most ever recorded. It weakened t0 a tropical storm early Thursday, as it continued to lash parts of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle with heavy rains and strong winds.

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Taiwan reaches a record 200 days with no local coronavirus cases

Catholics go through containment protocols including body-temperature measurement and hands-sanitisation before entering the Saint Christopher Parish Church, Taipei City, Taiwan, in July. Photo: Ceng Shou Yi/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Taiwan on Thursday marked no locally transmitted coronavirus cases for 200 days, as the island of 23 million people's total number of infections reported stands at 550 and the COVID-19 death toll at seven.

Why it matters: Nowhere else has reached such a milestone. While COVID-19 cases surge across the U.S. and Europe, Taiwan's last locally transmitted case was on April 12. Experts credit tightly regulated travel, early border closure, "rigorous contact tracing, technology-enforced quarantine and universal mask wearing" and the island state's previous experience with the SARS virus for the achievement, per Bloomberg.

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