No, you're not following this correctly. Remdesivir was developed more than a decade ago as a Hepatitis-C treatment (didn't work well), and then studied as an Ebola treatment. It takes years to develop a drug, so they are testing available drugs already on the market that have anti-viral or anti-inflammatory effects with the potential to counteract some of the known or hypothesized pathways of the disease. As a FYI, the "cost" (before rebates, discounts, etc.) of an average Hepatitis-C drug is over $50K for about 8-12 weeks of treatment. Peter Maybarduk, a lawyer at the consumer group Public Citizen, called the price “an outrage.” “This is a drug that received at least $70 million in public funding” toward its development, he said. “Remdesivir should be in the public domain.” “The price puts to rest any notion that drug companies will ‘do the right thing’ because it is a pandemic,” Dr. Peter Bach, a health policy expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York said in an email. “The price might have been fine if the company had demonstrated that the treatment saved lives. It didn’t.” I find that quite rich out of Dr. Bach considering Gilead basically gave away millions or billions of dollars in profit on Sovaldi to cure HcV. I’m much more ready to criticize the government for being in the back pocket of big pharma for favoring these sketch drugs over hydroxychlorique and other cheaper drugs that pretty much do the same thing. Fauci in particular is in big pharmas pocket.