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Nicolas: It's time to call out Big Pharma over global vaccine accessibility

Rather than doubt the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, we should turn a critical eye to the profit-driven corporations controlling the supply.

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Dear anti-vaxxers,

It’s OK to distrust Big Pharma and to trust the COVID-19 vaccines.

This is a simple idea, yet it’s one I feel we haven’t unpacked at all.

It’s true that large pharmaceutical companies are corporations like any other; they’re driven by profit. Not “the public good.” Profit.

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But the thing is, it’s actually quite profitable for a company to produce a vaccine that maximizes efficacy with the fewest possible side-effects.

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Look at what’s happened with AstraZeneca. When it was announced in November 2020 that their vaccine might be slightly less effective than its rivals, their stock fell. And after concerns came to light about the extremely rare risk of blood clots after receiving a dose of AstraZeneca, both Pfizer and Moderna were able to up the price of their own vaccines in their supply contracts with the European Union.

There has rarely, if ever, been as much attention on a pharmaceutical product as there is now on the COVID-19 vaccines. With this unprecedented level of scrutiny, it has never been harder to hide even minor issues with a product. And when problems are identified, it hurts both the profitability of the company associated with that specific vaccine and long-term trust in its brand.

Producing a bad product that would make all of us sick is, therefore, not in Big Pharma’s interest. What helps them make even more money, however, is scarcity. And the one thing that has allowed them to keep the supply of COVID-19 insufficient for the world’s needs is intellectual property laws.

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For more than a year, South Africa, India and most other low- and middle-income countries have been pushing the World Trade Organization to implement a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights on COVID-19 vaccines as well as testing technology, helpful therapeutics and relevant medical equipment. To put it simply, they argue that allowing generic companies to access the vaccine “recipes” and manufacture their own versions would accelerate global production and distribution, thereby helping put an end to the pandemic.

The European Union and the U.K., where several pharmaceutical companies are based, have been energetically undermining those efforts. The alternative strategy they’ve pushed for is “compulsory licensing,” which means ensuring that patent-holding pharmaceutical corporations cannot deny a generic company permission to produce its vaccine without good cause. However, since licensing a third party to produce vaccines is usually an extremely long, tedious process, critics have said the approach would fail to reduce vaccine scarcity in the next year or even the following one. The main advantage of this strategy is, of course, to protect the profits that Pfizer, Moderna and others collect every time a dose of their vaccine is produced anywhere in the world.

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The United States, which is now feeling confident about its own vaccine supply, has recently switched gears and started to prudently consider the patent-waiver proposal. It’s still uncertain where Canada stands. Since the WTO is a consensus-based organization, such hesitancy slows down global decision-making.

Meanwhile, dangerous variants of concern continue to develop. The longer we take to vaccinate the world’s population, the more they spread. Since vaccines have been commercialized, countries like Canada have been hoarding doses for their own domestic needs, while promising to redistribute the leftovers to the rest of the world through the COVAX system. Yet, as public health officials ponder recommending a third, booster shot to further protection against the Delta variant, we should start asking when that redistribution will actually begin.

As of mid-July, 99 per cent of people in low-income countries were still waiting to access their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. This horrendous level of global inequality is what happens when profit-driven private actors are allowed to determine the production and distribution of life-saving medical supplies. Big Pharma and the wealthy countries where they’re based have, not surprisingly, organized the response to this pandemic on the good old-fashioned model of the Titanic; there aren’t enough lifeboats, so first class gets them all, and the rest are left to drown.

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Criticism of Big Pharma needs to become more mainstream. We need to call them out when they lobby governments to prioritize their profits over global vaccine accessibility. There should be a public outcry when they raise their prices in the middle of a pandemic. We should ask scathing questions when they demand lower corporate tax levels from the Canadian government while we’re all anxiously waiting for vaccine supplies to stabilize — yes, Pfizer did that ahead of the last federal budget. We should also take issue when they push doctors to overprescribe drugs for certain issues, while overlooking social determinants of health as well as preventative and therapeutic approaches.

We can do all that and, at the same time, trust that receiving two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine is safe and constitutes an effective, necessary protection against the virus. The more information is disseminated about the multiple pitfalls of profit-driven medicine, the more people will know exactly what questions should be asked, where caution should be exercised, what policy changes should be demanded — and where the main issues do not, in fact, reside.

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The alternative to blanket rejection of modern science is not blind trust in self-interested corporations, but rather informed and targeted criticism.

I, for one, am persuaded that if trusted media outlets did more of this necessary, fact-based, pro-science and public interest-driven criticism of Big Pharma, fewer people would be suspicious that we’re hiding the truth about these companies.

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