Stop thanking Big Pharma for your shot.
Government funded the research, manufacturing, and deployment that got it into your arm.
This post is the first in a weeklong series focused on the most important issue in America right now: The COVID-19 vaccines. We’ll discuss the downsides of the public-private partnerships that helped create them; the problem with how we think about “vaccine hesitancy,” and the lingering challenges we have with supply—even though we have enough vaccine for everyone. Welcome to Vaccine Week at The Incision.
I love seeing pictures of people who have just received their COVID-19 vaccine. Sleeves rolled up to show a fresh bandaid, their eyes bright with a smile under their mask. Not only have they done their part, but those selfies are a reminder, for the hundreds who see them, that the vaccines are safe, effective, and the key to lead us out of this pandemic.
But what I hate about these selfies are the captions:
“Thank you, Moderna!”
“So grateful to Pfizer for bringing me this vaccine.”
Stop it. First, they’re inaccurate. Worse, they perpetuate a dangerous myth in America that idolizes corporate power and minimizes the incredible work of government. We wouldn’t be celebrating these vaccines without the money, time, and effort that faithful, outcomes-oriented government employees do every day.
But this highlights the broader failure underneath “public-private partnerships” that have become so ubiquitous. Our government provides the upfront investment and eats all the risk and private corporations reap the return and the public credit.
In an era where trust in government is at a crisis point, we have to rethink who we thank. And, as we face a global vaccination crisis, we’re facing a unique test over who controls the intellectual property financed by governments and branded by corporations.
The government’s role in the COVID-19 vaccines.
I’m (to put it mildly) no fan of Donald Trump. But I do give credit where it’s due. Operation Warp Speed was critical to getting us where we are today—half of Americans having gotten at least one shot against COVID-19.
Operation Warp Speed worked on multiple fronts. In the initial phase, it invested $10 billion toward the research and development costs of several candidate vaccines, including Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Novavax, Merck, and Sanofi-GlaxoSmithKline. In addition to upfront research and development costs, the companies received guaranteed purchase agreements, essentially eliminating the risk that they might not sell the vaccines they produced. Though Pfizer and its partner BioNTech chose against taking the first tranche of research money, they signed an agreement in July worth $2 billion for 100 million doses—de-risking their research investment. And BioNTech received $445 million from the German government.
Since the first vaccines deployed from a Pfizer facility in West Michigan, the federal government has spent substantially more. Notice how you don’t pay a dime when you get your COVID-19 vaccine? The American Rescue Plan included more than $34 billion in funding for vaccine deployment. Pfizer didn’t pay for that, the government did.
Simply put, the federal government has financed the research, development, manufacturing, distribution, and administration of the COVID-19 vaccines.
The problem with public-private “partnerships.”
The government gets almost zero credit for this work. What’s worse, when government-funded private companies fail, the government gets caught holding the bag. Imagine what might have happened if the vaccine projects Operation Warp Speed aggressively funded had all failed? We would be calling it a colossal waste of government resources—rather than blaming all of the companies who wasted away taxpayer money.
Consider the now infamous case of Solyndra, a solar energy start-up funded by $535 million in government-backed loans through the 2009 stimulus law. The company, which produced solar panels for roofing systems, had announced $1.2 billion in long term contracts in 2008 prior to getting the contracts, suggesting that the loans were a sure-bet investment in a budding, critical new industry. But after the Chinese government began pouring billions in subsidies into its domestic solar panel manufacturers to undercut foreign competition, companies like Solyndra couldn’t compete. Investigations into Solyndra’s finances revealed that the company misled government officials to obtain its funding. Solyndra was hung around President Obama’s neck as an example of government ineptitude—rather than the corporate ineptitude it actually was.
In the ultimate irony, America’s renewable energy industries remain woefully inadequate compared to global leaders like China—where the government continues to pour money into renewable energy research and manufacturing. And guess who gets the blame? The government.
Public-private “partnerships” are all public risk, and private reward. Government makes the initial investment. If the investment succeeds, the private corporation gets all the credit. If it fails, the government takes the blame.
The thumb on our scales.
Amidst the endless energy spent vilifying the government, it’s hard to remember that it's one of the only major institutions whose leaders we choose and whose funding we underwrite. In a democracy, our government is us. There is, in that respect, no institution that is more accountable to the people.
Public trust in government is nearing an all time low. Part of the problem is that the “democracy” part of our government has eroded—because of the ceaseless effort of the very same people who want to give our money to corporations. In truth, they’ve made the government far less accountable to us with time. And that’s because they’ve created and sustained ways for those same public-private “partners” to sway the government.
Corporations spend billions to lobby our elected officials, billions more to help get them elected through campaign contributions. All of this makes them less attuned to what we, as voters and taxpayers, believe and more focused on what they, as donors and lobbyists, want.
That doesn’t even count the billions of dollars in “outside” spending that corporations pump into elections to gas up their chosen candidates. Corporate campaign spending has grown considerably since the disastrous Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United, which, in essence, interpreted the First Amendment to include money as speech, and the Fourteenth Amendment to include corporations as people.
The corporations swaying our elections love public-private partnerships. Consider the pharmaceutical industry, the single biggest industry lobbyist in the country. Big Pharma—the folks now benefiting from Operation Warp Speed—spent more than $4.7 billion dollars lobbying the federal government since 2000.
Why it matters now.
As we race to deploy vaccines to bring this pandemic to heel, it’s important we ask who owns the rights to the products the government paid for. While the US has secured more than enough vaccines to vaccinate every single American, that may not be enough. Every single person on Earth left unvaccinated presents an opportunity for this virus to mutate—and possibly slip past our vaccine-mediated immunity.
Right now, India is facing one of the worst COVID-19 surges since the start of this pandemic anywhere in the world. The surge already allowed for the evolution of the “double mutant,” and threatens to accelerate viral evolution further as more people are infected.
One of the principle barriers to vaccinating billions abroad are the vaccine patents bought and paid for by you and me, the taxpayer. India and South Africa proposed a temporary waiver on the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies at the World Trade Organization. It’s supported by over 80 member countries. The US does not support the waiver, principally because of—surprise, surprise—opposition from major pharmaceutical manufacturers Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson. These corporations are more focused on their bottom line than the public good of vaccinating the globe and ending the pandemic.
The US Government funded the research, development, and manufacturing of those vaccines. And those vaccines are the key to ending the pandemic and preventing the doomsday variant that could evade immunity to the vaccines. It is in our best interest to vaccinate the world. And yet the corporations who hold the patents we funded stand in the way.
If these really are public-private partnerships, the public should come first.