Who made the vaccine possible? No who

Those naysayers have been proven wrong and it’s worth considering why. Let me invite the reader to answer a short questionnaire. When you are vaccinated in the next few months, who should you be most grateful to for making this possible?

• The initiative sent by the United Nations, the Group of 20, the World Health Organization and COVAX, an affiliate of WHO and the Coalition for Innovations in Epidemic Preparedness, calling for “a ‘popular vaccine’ available and affordable for everyone, everywhere “, in the words of the UN Secretary General, António Guterres?

• Foundations and donors, including the consortium led by the Gates Foundation that established CEPI (the “alliance to finance and coordinate the development of new vaccines”) in Davos, Switzerland, in 2017?

• Federal agency leaders, including the directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the secretary of health and human services, and the assistant secretary for health? ?

• The hundreds of schools of medicine and public health, their research laboratories and associated hospitals, and the tens of thousands of epidemiologists, virologists, and other experts who have been talking endlessly about this plague?

• President Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, led by Moncef Slaoui, a controversial former head of vaccine development at the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline,

that has delivered more vaccines than any other company in the world, that gave billions of taxpayer dollars to biotech and pharmaceutical companies to accelerate vaccine development and manufacture up-front doses should a vaccine prove to be effective?

• Private for-profit corporations, including Pfizer,

BioNTech, Modern, AstraZeneca,

Novavax and its counterparts?

Failure is an orphan; victory has a hundred fathers. In this case, success will surely have thousands of paternity applicants. Many of those listed above will credibly claim to have contributed. But if it were a court that ascribes responsibility for harm caused by a drug, rather than a public offer of thanks, which of the actors would be most liable? Assuming that all the other claimants had done precisely what they did in this case except one, what is the probability that the vaccines will be available today?

The answer is as clear as it is uncomfortable for some readers. If the WHO and the Gates Foundation had not existed, there would have been little difference in the availability of the vaccine. If all departments and agencies of the United States government had been on automatic pilot, this miraculous development would never have happened. This bureaucracy, including the CDC, FDA, and HHS, were unable to provide a coronavirus test for several months after South Korea, Singapore, and others conducted extensive testing under their public health responses.

Universities rightly claim to have built the foundations of knowledge without which other researchers could not have sequenced the virus genome or developed the mRNA delivery systems necessary for Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. But keeping the pre-Covid knowledge base constant, these academic researchers could have slept through the pandemic and it wouldn’t have made much of a difference.

Clearly, there are only two main causes behind the Covid-19 vaccine. The first was the capitalist system, which facilitated competition between for-profit private biotech and pharmaceutical companies to produce a life-saving product.

Like charities, universities, government agencies, and just about everyone else, these organizations want to do good. But companies like Germany-based BioNTech, its Boston-based competitor Moderna, and pharmaceutical giant Pfizer have also been vying for a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. There would be no Covid-19 vaccine today if there had been no venture capitalists willing to invest before a product or benefit was visible, no corporate leadership willing to double companies’ money in the spring to fund a shock effort to produce a vaccine before the end of the year, and no researcher pursues a dream about mRNA as an unprecedented route for vaccines.

The second is Operation Warp Speed. If Trump hadn’t created the initiative, if he hadn’t appointed a man who knows the world of vaccine development as the leader and given him a license to spend $ 10 billion outside of normal hiring procedures, Covid-19 vaccines would still be under construction. Even after they were finally approved, the distribution of the vaccines could have been long delayed. Imagine a world in which Trump would not have appointed as deputy director of the operation a general who knew logistics and had the authority to draw up contracts with FedEx and UPS to reserve space on their planes and in their network of distribution centers.

So, now that Americans hope to get vaccinated and resume our normal lives, we should pause to thank a remarkable group of scientists and entrepreneurs whose competitive drive fueled by capitalism pushed them to venture into the unknown – for fortune and fame. And to a deeply flawed, often dysfunctional disruptor-in-chief, who in this case certainly did a good thing.

Mr. Allison, a professor of government at Harvard, is the author of “Destined for War: Can America and China Escape the Thucydides Trap?” (2017).