In a profit-driven business, vaccines have a problem. They are not very profitable, at least not without government subsidies. Pharmaceutical companies favor expensive drugs that must be taken repeatedly and generate income for years or decades. Vaccines are often given just one or two times.
Last year, only four companies made vaccines for the US market, up from more than 20 in the 1970s. As recently as February 11, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s leading infectious disease expert, complained that no major pharmaceutical company had committed to “stepping up” manufacturing a coronavirus vaccine, calling the situation “very difficult and frustrating.”
The University of Oxford surprised and pleased proponents of the vaccine business review in April by promising to donate the rights to its promising coronavirus vaccine to any pharmacist.
The idea was to provide drugs for the prevention or treatment of COVID-19 at little or no cost, the British university said. That made sense to people looking for a change. The coronavirus was raging. Many agreed that traditional vaccine development, characterized by long lead times, manufacturing monopolies, and weak investments, was broken.
“We actually thought they were going to do that,” James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit organization working to expand access to medical technology, said of the Oxford pledge.
A few weeks later, Oxford — at the behest of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — changed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant exclusive rights and no guarantee of low prices, with the less publicized potential of Oxford eventually making millions from the deal and great prestige.
Other companies working on coronavirus vaccines have followed suit, raising billions in government grants, racking up patents, disclosing as little as possible about their deals, and planning to charge up to $ 37 per dose for potentially hundreds of millions of injections.
Even when governments waste money on an industry that has not made vaccines a priority in the past, critics say, if the basic model is not changed, pharmaceutical industry executives and their shareholders will get rich with no guarantee that future vaccines will be available at low cost to all. .
“If ever there was an opportunity” to change the economics of vaccine development, “this would have been it,” said Ameet Sarpatwari, an epidemiologist and attorney at Harvard Medical School who studies drug price regulation.
Pharmaceutical company officials say that only decades of industry research could have made it possible to produce a coronavirus vaccine at current rates.
“The federal government cannot research, develop and manufacture vaccines and other new treatments on its own,” said Andrew Powaleny, spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a lobby group. Large, early government investment “is a well-accepted approach to addressing public health crises,” he said.
Many argue that a health crisis is not the time to worry about overpaying for vaccines or endorsing some candidates who won’t deliver. Getting a good vaccine as quickly as possible requires upping the stakes, they say.
“Spending a few extra billions on vaccines is the right choice when human lives are at stake and billions in economic losses are at risk,” said Edward Scolnick, a senior scientist at the Broad Institute and a former head of research at Merck. It does not own shares in Merck or other drug companies, he said.
