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Who doesn’t like racing? A great global race, like the competition to run the first mile in less than four minutes. Or the race to climb the highest mountain in the world. Or be the first to walk on the moon.
Now we are in a race of much greater importance: the race to develop an effective vaccine for Covid-19. The world now watches with that legendary bated breath. Pfizer, a giant of Big Pharma, is side by side with Moderna, a generously funded upstart company.
Pfizer, the first to announce the results of the trials, reports 90 percent effectiveness rates for its pandemic. Moderna, not to be outdone, reports 95 percent success rates. In fact, we hit that brass ring too, Pfizer replies. And ours even works with older people!
What career! Interesting! More specifically: how lucrative!
This race is minting billionaires. The founder of Pfizer’s sister company, BioNTech, achieved billionaire status earlier this year. Earlier this month, that founder and his two top investors saw their personal fortunes rise to a total of $ 2 billion. At Moderna, three major players, including CEO Stéphane Bancel, have become billionaires so far this year.
Several other pharmaceutical industry movers and shakers, such as the hedge fund behind Vaxart, a San Francisco company, have made hundreds of millions.
“Every day, Americans wake up and make sacrifices during this pandemic,” says Ben Wakana, executive director of Patients for Affordable Drugs. “Pharmaceutical companies see this as a payday.”
Headlines that trumpet coronavirus wastes have, in effect, become rain on our vaccine yes-now-we-have-a-vaccine! parade. How can some be making billions from the horror that is killing millions?
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The greatest tragedy of all: things don’t have to be this way. More than half a century ago, we beat polio, and no one got fabulously rich in the process. We could have done the same with Covid-19.
We could have brought together all the nations of the world, channeled resources into multiple beat-corona approaches, and committed to sharing, with researchers around the world, the latest medical advances in real time. The Trump team had no interest in that approach, and Democrats in Congress made little effort for an alternative. A missed opportunity.
“The Trump administration chose to pursue a patent monopoly investigation route, as opposed to collaborative open source research,” explains Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Instead of paying the research costs of a company like Moderna and then telling them that they could get a monopoly on patents so they could charge whatever they wanted, we could have made the funding condition that all their findings would be completely public and patents would be in the public domain. “
With patents for Covid-19 vaccines under private control, adds Global Justice Now policy advisor Heidi Chow, powerful players in big pharma can decide “who gets the vaccine and at what price.”
And now we have some promising vaccines, but not a global game plan to ensure that every person on Earth has ready and timely access to a future without Covid. Millions more of us will suffer while a lucky few win several billions. We can do better, and advocacy groups like Global Justice Now are organizing to make that happen better.
About 78 percent of Moderna’s vaccine doses, Global Justice Now notes, have already been sold to wealthy nations with just 12 percent of the world’s population.
“In this global health emergency, vaccines must be available to everyone, everywhere, free of charge,” says a new Global Justice Now campaign for Covid-19 justice. Manufacturers should work together to produce enough doses for everyone, distributed in order of need. And companies and governments should cooperate through the World Health Organization to make this happen. “
