It’s a good read, here’s a snippet. It’s worth reading the whole thing, if you didn’t know how useless these companies are at developing new drugs & therapies.
​
>It’s been very contradictory. At the beginning of the pandemic, the pharmaceutical industry was totally unable to deal with what was happening because it had shown zero interest in pandemics. The World Health Organization [WHO] had been raising concerns for years, because other strains of coronavirus had already caused health epidemics in other parts of the world, but pharmaceutical companies had done basically nothing.
>
>Big Pharma is generally not interested in vaccines, because vaccines are meant to inoculate you for life or for a long period of time. Stopping somebody from getting ill is what we want as a society, but it’s not a good way of making money. The number of companies producing vaccines had gone down from twenty-six in 1955, to eighteen in 1980, to four in 2020 pre-pandemic.
>
>What saved us during the pandemic was the public money that had been put into researching pathogens like coronaviruses. But we then let the pharmaceutical industry privatize that knowledge and build a monopoly on it. In fact, we gave them tens of billions of dollars to do this.
>
>The fact that we call it “Pfizer’s vaccine” is surely the biggest marketing coup in the history of American pharmaceuticals. Those aren’t my words, but a phrase used by a former US government official understandably peeved that Pfizer was trying to charge his administration $100 a shot for this vaccine.
>
>Its vaccine was actually developed by a smaller company called BioNTech with public funding. The Moderna vaccine was to some degree developed by Moderna, but almost entirely with public money. AstraZeneca’s vaccine has very little to do with AstraZeneca. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was similarly built on many, many years of public research. All of these companies that we’ve now come to associate with the vaccines put very little of their own money into research and development.
>
>Of course, governments faced a genuine problem. It’s true that during this recent period of financialization, pharmaceutical corporations have reduced their investment in production, but most of them can still produce pills, and some can still produce vaccines. But despite the constriction of manufacturing and capacity from Big Pharma, we haven’t developed anything else, so we’re still dependent on them.
>
>During the pandemic, we could have done deals with generic factories, but governments panicked and turned to these companies, which allowed Big Pharma to claim credit.
>
>During the pandemic, we could have done deals with generic factories, but governments panicked and turned to these companies, which allowed Big Pharma to claim credit for ending the pandemic. It was a phenomenal boon for Pfizer and Moderna and their image in the West.
>
>But those companies only sold to the richest countries in the world. Additionally, because they wanted to keep the monopolies on the mRNA technology that underlay those vaccines, pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t share how to make vaccines with countries across the world. We could have ended the pandemic much sooner, and certainly more fairly, if we just shared that technology with everybody who was able to use it safely around the world, and that was prevented by these companies. That story is well known in the Global South.
1 comment
It’s a good read, here’s a snippet. It’s worth reading the whole thing, if you didn’t know how useless these companies are at developing new drugs & therapies.
​
>It’s been very contradictory. At the beginning of the pandemic, the pharmaceutical industry was totally unable to deal with what was happening because it had shown zero interest in pandemics. The World Health Organization [WHO] had been raising concerns for years, because other strains of coronavirus had already caused health epidemics in other parts of the world, but pharmaceutical companies had done basically nothing.
>
>Big Pharma is generally not interested in vaccines, because vaccines are meant to inoculate you for life or for a long period of time. Stopping somebody from getting ill is what we want as a society, but it’s not a good way of making money. The number of companies producing vaccines had gone down from twenty-six in 1955, to eighteen in 1980, to four in 2020 pre-pandemic.
>
>What saved us during the pandemic was the public money that had been put into researching pathogens like coronaviruses. But we then let the pharmaceutical industry privatize that knowledge and build a monopoly on it. In fact, we gave them tens of billions of dollars to do this.
>
>The fact that we call it “Pfizer’s vaccine” is surely the biggest marketing coup in the history of American pharmaceuticals. Those aren’t my words, but a phrase used by a former US government official understandably peeved that Pfizer was trying to charge his administration $100 a shot for this vaccine.
>
>Its vaccine was actually developed by a smaller company called BioNTech with public funding. The Moderna vaccine was to some degree developed by Moderna, but almost entirely with public money. AstraZeneca’s vaccine has very little to do with AstraZeneca. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was similarly built on many, many years of public research. All of these companies that we’ve now come to associate with the vaccines put very little of their own money into research and development.
>
>Of course, governments faced a genuine problem. It’s true that during this recent period of financialization, pharmaceutical corporations have reduced their investment in production, but most of them can still produce pills, and some can still produce vaccines. But despite the constriction of manufacturing and capacity from Big Pharma, we haven’t developed anything else, so we’re still dependent on them.
>
>During the pandemic, we could have done deals with generic factories, but governments panicked and turned to these companies, which allowed Big Pharma to claim credit.
>
>During the pandemic, we could have done deals with generic factories, but governments panicked and turned to these companies, which allowed Big Pharma to claim credit for ending the pandemic. It was a phenomenal boon for Pfizer and Moderna and their image in the West.
>
>But those companies only sold to the richest countries in the world. Additionally, because they wanted to keep the monopolies on the mRNA technology that underlay those vaccines, pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t share how to make vaccines with countries across the world. We could have ended the pandemic much sooner, and certainly more fairly, if we just shared that technology with everybody who was able to use it safely around the world, and that was prevented by these companies. That story is well known in the Global South.