And you're mad because when the government funded 0.01% of the total cost of development you can't get it for free?
That’s also discounting the fact that they aren’t paying for all the projects that don’t make it to the “works in a lab” stage. That a significant chunk of risk that they aren’t exposed to.
You can just look at the budget of the NIH versus private and corporate investment in drug development. What the government spends is a fraction of what private companies invest.
To get a drug approved you're looking at $5k-$15k/person/year in a Phase 3 trial (depending on the monitoring needed). You can call up an CRO and ask for a quote. I did this several jobs ago.
Just to give you a sense, the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine was 47,000 patients [1]. These patients were followed for 2 years. For a rough estimate, that's $5,000 x 47,000 x 2 years = $470M.
Half a billion dollars, just for one clinical trial.
That's already 3 orders of magnitude larger than a typical $500,000 grant for basic lab research like this paper.
And that's just the clinical trials. It doesn't include the trials leading up to the pivotal trial, the manufacturing development costs, the health authority submissions costs across 130 countries, etc. Then add on top the cost to make the actual drug and put it in a vial and ship it around the world.
And sure, "they aren’t paying for all the projects that don’t make it to the “works in a lab” stage". But conversely, the government never bears the risk for later development that fails. I remember Pfizer a couple decades ago spent $1B on a new manufacturing plant for a drug that never got approved.
[1]https://www.pfizer.com/science/coronavirus/vaccine/about-our...