Merck is a major pharmaceutical company with offices and laboratories in Boston and Cambridge. Like all big pharma, Merck extracts profits from people by overcharging for drugs that were largely developed using public funds - such as Merck's Covid drug (molnupiravir) which is priced at over 40 times its manufacture cost. As the group Knowledge Ecology International has revealed in October 2021, the US army made a contract with Merck for an advance purchase of 1,696,629 doses of the overpriced drug which would cost $712 per treatment (putting the contract at $1.2 billion).
Merck also has a history of extracting profits from people by overcharging Medicaid, and of selling unsafe drugs and retaliating against doctors that are critical of Merck's products.
Merck is one of the companies contributing to the displacement and ethnic cleansing of working-class communities, especially working-class communities of color, by bringing in a wealthy workforce, which drives up property values and rent prices.
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Merck is one of the corporate sponsors of the bioweapons research lab NEIDL. Merck also has a history of receiving lucrative contracts from the US army.
BioMed Realty Trust, Inc. is an international real estate firm which owns some of the most expensive properties in the Cambridge MA area. As of 2011, BioMed Realty owns the 320 Bent Street facility that "comprises approximately 184,400 rentable square feet of laboratory and office space which is approximately 79% leased to Merck & Co., Inc."
The Broad Institute has licensed its CRISPR patent - which is illegitimate and based on theft from decades of collective, publicly funded work - to the pharmaceutical company Merck.