That is bullshit, public spending is really massive here, and this study just looks at investments made by NIH not accounting other governments:
> In this cross-sectional study of 356 drugs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2019, the NIH spent $1.44 billion per approval on basic or applied research for products with novel targets or $599 million per approval considering applications of basic research to multiple products. Spending from the NIH was not less than industry spending, with full costs of these investments calculated with comparable accounting.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10148199/
The industry might spend more overall, but if you look at typical drugs they are typically publicly funded.
Edit: I think the main point people miss is all the research done by universities that is government funded. MRNA vaccines were made possible by decades of university research based on public funding, the private corporations just came in and did the easy part at the end. Novel medicines are mostly based on such research and hence mostly publicly funded, we would continue to make such progress regardless of private investments.