 It justified the price—one of the highest in the world for any drug—by explaining that on the one hand, that it can only treat about 4% of CF patients, or about 3,000 people worldwide; as it was only approved for adults and children six and older, there are only about 2,400 people eligible to receive it; with that few people, it needed a high price in order to pay for the research to create it as well as its other programs, which include a drug candidate that could treat many more people with CF.It also pointed out the strong efficacy of the drug, and laid out the costs of managing CF that would be saved for people that the drug could treat; those costs include repeated hospitalizations and lung transplants.Nonetheless the high price led to sharp criticism of Vertex and the CFF.