COVID Vaccines: Calling the Shots
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- Published on Wednesday, 02 December 2020 16:56
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COVID Vaccines: Calling the Shots
Michael Roberts
Before the COVID-19 pandemic engulfed the world, the big pharmaceutical companies did little investment in vaccines for global diseases and viruses. It was just not profitable. Of the 18 largest US pharmaceutical companies, 15 had totally abandoned the field. Heart medicines, addictive tranquilizers, and treatments for male impotence were profit leaders, not defences against hospital infections, emergent diseases, and traditional tropical killers. A universal vaccine for influenza – that is to say, a vaccine that targets the immutable parts of the virus’s surface proteins – has been a possibility for decades but never deemed profitable enough to be a priority. So, every... year, we get vaccines that are only 50 per cent efficient.
But the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the attitude of big pharma. Now there are billions to be made in selling effective vaccines to governments and health systems. And in double-quick time, a batch of apparently effective vaccines has emerged with every prospect of them being available for people within the next three to six months – a record result.
Authorization of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines is expected to be completed by year-end in the EU and the UK, with the deployment of an initial 10-20 million doses for each (5-10 million treatments) underway through the turn of the year. Widespread vaccination for COVID-19 beyond high-risk groups is likely to be underway across Europe by the spring, with a sufficiently large share of European populations vaccinated by the end of the summer.
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