America’s biopharmaceutical companies are at the heart of a robust research and development (R&D) ecosystem that develops more innovative medicines than any other country in the world. Some critics have claimed that this success is because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) use public funds to discover new therapies which are then just handed off to biopharmaceutical companies to be manufactured, packaged and monetized. This fundamental misunderstanding of the way drug development works has led to policy proposals that could seriously harm the U.S. research ecosystem and jeopardize its longstanding success. Now more than ever, it is critical that both public and private assets can be brought to bear in addressing critical diseases such as COVID-19.