Why Big Pharma Shouldn’t Have Any Control Over COVID-19 Vaccines

At the heart of the desperate stampede to obtain vaccines is one simple dilemma: there aren’t enough vaccines against COVID-19 being produced. Variants of the virus are developing faster than nations are able to inoculate their populations, and plummeting infection rates in the U.S. have now leveled off.

Part of the problem is that former President Donald Trump, who quietly got vaccinated recently and wants all the credit for vaccine development, last year turned down the chance to purchase additional Pfizer vaccines beyond the first 100 million doses. After President Joe Biden threatened to invoke the Defense Production Act to force Pfizer and Moderna to produce more vaccines, the companies agreed to sell more doses faster than had been agreed upon.

Also showcasing that governments can indeed force private companies to do what is needed, Biden more recently brokered a deal with the pharmaceutical company Merck to produce extra doses of a new vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson. Merck is being paid handsomely with $268.8 million of taxpayer funds. Biden has also invoked the Defense Production Act to help the company obtain the supplies it needs. Had Trump last year used the might of the U.S. government against these private companies, we might not be fighting to sign up for vaccines today.

Pharmaceutical companies whose vaccines were funded by massive public investments still refuse to share their intellectual property with the world. The Open COVID Pledge, created by a group of academics and scientists to make virus-related technology freely available, has urged corporations to prioritize public health over profit. But notably absent from the pledge’s list of signatories are Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, or Merck.

The United States and other nations where these pharmaceutical companies are based could force them to share the life-saving information, especially because doing so keeps all of us safe. Unless nations stop all international travel across borders, hoarding vaccine technology from the rest of the world will not help anyone. The old adage of “no one is safe until everyone is safe” applies especially well to the pandemic.

Journalists with the Associated Press say they found three factories on three continents that could begin manufacturing “hundreds of millions of COVID-19 vaccines on short notice if only they had the blueprints and technical know-how.” Except that such “knowledge belongs to the large pharmaceutical companies who have produced the first three vaccines.”

Instead of blaming and shaming one another over the frustrating lack of vaccine availability and the individual race to obtain it, Americans ought to turn their gaze to the companies that are manufacturing the products. Pfizer and Moderna have earned near-mythical status for the life-saving vaccines, but it behooves us to remember that these private entities were paid handsomely to do their job and cannot be allowed to hold humanity hostage over their profits.

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.