In November 2020 several pharmaceutical companies announced successful trials of COVID-19 vaccines, with efficacy
of 90 to 95% in preventing infection.  Per company announcements and data reviewed by external analysts, these vaccines are priced at $3 to $37 per dose.  The Wall Street Journal ran an editorial calling for this achievement to be recognized with a Nobel Peace Prize.
Doctors Without Borders warned that high prices and monopolies on medicines, tests, and vaccines would prolong the pandemic and cost lives. They urged governments to prevent profiteering, using compulsory licenses as needed, as had already been done by Canada, Chile, Ecuador, Germany, and Israel.
On 20 February, 46 US lawmakers called for the US government not to grant monopoly rights when giving out taxpayer development money for any coronavirus vaccines and treatments, to avoid giving exclusive control of prices and availability to private manufacturers.
In the United States the government signed agreements in which research and development and/or the building of manufacturing plants for potential COVID-19 therapeutics was subsidized.  Typically, the agreement involved the government taking ownership of a certain number of doses of the product without further payment.  For example, under the auspices of Operation Warp Speed in the United States, the government subsidized research related to COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics at Regeneron, Johnson and Johnson, Moderna, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Pfizer, and GSK. Typical terms involved research subsidies of $400 million to $2 billion, and included government ownership of the first 100 million doses of any COVID-19 vaccine successfully developed.
American pharmaceutical company Gilead  sought and obtained orphan drug status for remdesivir from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on 23 March 2020. This provision is intended to encourage the development of drugs affecting fewer than 200,000 Americans by granting strengthened and extended legal monopoly rights to the manufacturer, along with waivers on taxes and government fees. Remdesivir is a candidate for treating COVID-19; at the time the status was granted, fewer than 200,000 Americans had COVID-19, but numbers were climbing rapidly as the COVID-19 pandemic reached the US, and crossing the threshold soon was considered inevitable. Remdesivir was developed by Gilead with over $79 million in U.S. government funding. In May 2020, Gilead announced that it would provide the first 940,000 doses of remdesivir to the federal government free of charge.  After facing strong public reactions, Gilead gave up the "orphan drug" status for remdesivir on 25 March. Gilead retains 20-year remdesivir patents in more than 70 countries. In May 2020, the company further announced that it was in discussions with several generics companies to provide rights to produce remdesivir for developing countries, and with the Medicines Patent Pool to provide broader generic access.