"Greed and capitalism only come in to harvest the fruits — and how!"
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has come under fire for citing greed and capitalism as the principal triggers for the remarkable speed with which the COVID-19 vaccines were produced and rolled out (mostly among Western nations).
True, Big Pharma — mainly Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and J&J — definitely salivated at the prospect of incredible profits flowing upon producing the vaccine in record time. They dedicated extraordinary time and resources to ramp up their vaccine R & D and manufacturing operations. But, as most scientists and keen observers of the scene contend, without government prodding and substantial public funding, not to mention increasingly unbearable public outcry, these companies would have just as well taken their sweet time before even thinking of putting a dollar into the high-risk world of vaccine manufacture.
Indeed, to a large extent it was public subsidies and public clamor, not greed and private innovation, which produced at warp speed the COVID-19 vaccines in the US and the European Union. That use of public funds and subsidies was even more evident in China and Russia, where the government did the heavy lifting.
As University of Liverpool Professor David Whyte noted in a recent article in The Conversation: “Vaccines are a victory for public research (funding), not greed and capitalism.” Asserting that private ingenuity and naked competition produced the vaccines, Whyte advised, is pure fantasy. After all, as everybody knows, it takes years of heavy investment in research and development before any new vaccine gets manufactured, is brought to market and, yes, provides steady returns.
As late as 2018, before the world even heard of a new coronavirus, Goldman Sachs analysts have reportedly advised for good reason that “providing a one-shot cure for diseases could never be a sustainable business model.” Like all private entities, pharmaceutical companies especially Big Pharma exist for profit. They follow the money and vaccines pale in comparison to other so-called wonder drugs.
As Whyte advised, the global vaccines market in 2019 stood at $47 billion. This was equivalent to the sales volume of just four treatment drugs: Humira for rheumatoid arthritis; Keytruda for cancer treatment; revlimid for multiple myeloma and Imbruvica, also for cancer treatment. So, why should Big Pharma for that matter venture into vaccines when they can just as well dedicate more money into discovering “new” uses for their “wonder drugs” and extract tons of money in just one business cycle.
This is precisely the reason why up to now no vaccines for the earlier coronavirus diseases, SARS and MERS ever got to human trials even after several candidates already got tested successfully on animals. On the other hand, the Ebola vaccine was finally approved in 2019, 16 years after it was first patented and a full six years after the start of the epidemic. And this approval did not even merit a mention from the WHO and other medical bodies. In fact, the global medical community did not even bother to record the infections, hospitalizations and deaths attributed to Ebola and the earlier diseases unlike with COVID-19 which has been monitored 24/7 from the first infection to date.
What prompted the extraordinary effort to get the COVID-19 vaccine rolled out in record time was its heavy impact on the global economy and the fate of nations. As Whyte noted, previous viruses did not threaten the economy of the developed countries to the same extent as COVID-19 did. The estimated cost of Ebola to West African countries was not more than $50 billion. Then SARS cost many Asian economies to lose between 0.5 and 2.0 percent of GDP while the economic fallout of MERS was largely limited to the South Korean economy.
On the other hand, most advanced economies stand to lose at least 4.5 percent of GDP and counting as a result of this pandemic so the COVID-19 vaccines had to be manufactured in record time to save these economies and save the world and many of its current leaders.
Prime Minister Johnson’s handling of the country’s COVID-19 response cost his party two by election contests. US President Biden himself got into office on the wings of his and his party’s hammering of President Trump’s earlier responses before he authorized the launch of Operation Warp Speed which is now considered as the “magic tonic” now saving America from sliding into the abyss.
All others, including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s ruling coalition have come under heavy pressure to shore up confidence in their own response operations. It is clear that COVID-19 brought the whole world and its pre-pandemic systems, relations and infrastructure, to severe stress that it had to be met with an extraordinary treatment push to mitigate heavy losses of lives and properties.
This system of public funding and related subsidies was not limited to direct funding to the companies including the placement of huge orders for the vaccines. It also involved in a very critical way the use of university based talents and laboratories in the pursuit of new methodologies and researches on various fields of public concern.
Said Professor Whyte: “Universities provide trained scientists and a foundation of knowledge that emerges over hundreds of years. It is in universities that the rules for clinical research are developed, and it is university researchers who publish results in academic journals which provide that knowledge foundation. Universities make the largest social contribution to verifying and disseminating scientific breakthroughs. It is knowledge that we hold in common. In economic terms, this knowledge production counts as an ‘externality’ in the business model: an invisible subsidy that never shows up on a corporate balance sheet, because corporations never have to pay for them.”
In conclusion, Whyte noted that the development of the COVID-19 vaccines is part of a vast system of public subsidy nurtured in publicly funded universities, in public institutes and in heavily subsidised private labs. It is a process driven not by private ingenuity and naked competition, as Prime Minister Johnson puts it, but by the scientific knowledge that is part of the “commons” and for this reason should be owned by everyone on the planet.
Greed and capitalism only come in to harvest the fruits — and how!
