Some people like to claim that we only have a COVID-19 vaccine because greed is the driving force behind technological progress. But the mRNA vaccine comes from a long-term, publicly funded collaborative effort that undermines this logic.
Did greed just save the day? This is what British Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently claimed. "The reason for our vaccine success," he said in a private call to Conservative Party MPs, "is because of capitalism, because of greed."
Although later regressed, Johnson’s comments reflected a wide-ranging but very incoherent innovative view: greed—the unfettered pursuit of profit above all else—is a necessary driving force for technological progress. Call it the demand greed theory.
However, among the many lessons of this pandemic, greed can easily go against the common good. We rightly celebrate the almost miraculous development of effective vaccines, which have been widely used in rich countries. But the global situation does not even show the slightest sign of justice: as of May, low-income countries received only 0.3% of the global vaccine supply. At this rate, it will take 57 years for them to achieve full vaccination.
This difference is called "vaccine apartheid" and is exacerbated by greed. One year after the launch of the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (a program designed to encourage the collaborative exchange of intellectual property, knowledge, and data), “no company has donated its technical knowledge,” wrote a politician from India. , Kenya and Bolivia in an article in the Guardian in June. As of that month, the UN-supported COVAX program is a vaccine sharing program that aims to provide developing countries with fair access to vaccines, but only about 90 million doses have been delivered out of the 2 billion vaccine doses promised. Currently, pharmaceutical companies, lobbyists, and conservative lawmakers continue to oppose patent exemptions that allow local drugmakers to produce vaccines without legal risks. They claim that the exemption will slow down existing production, “facilitate the spread of counterfeit vaccines,” and, as Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina put it, “undermine the innovations we rely on to end this pandemic.”
All these points of view echo the view that patents and high drug prices are necessary driving forces for biomedical innovation. But check this logic carefully, and it soon began to collapse.
In industries and fields lacking patents, a lot of difficult and innovative work has been done. Does the lack of patent protection for recipes lead to lack of innovation in restaurants? An irritating irony is that economists who support the demand greed theory themselves innovate to compare peanuts. For example, in 2018, the median salary of economists was approximately $104,000. At the same time, the total compensation of a typical pharmaceutical CEO that year was as high as $5.7 million. (Practicing innovators are not the greedy people here; the median pay for pharmaceutical employees in 2018-including benefits-was about $177,000.) Even in Silicon Valley, savvy technology insider Tim O'Reilly wrote, "If entrepreneurs do not get billions of dollars in return, the idea that they will stop being innovative is a harmful illusion."
To be sure, it is not greed that produces an effective coronavirus vaccine, but a huge collaborative effort (mainly funded by public funds). The technology behind mRNA vaccines such as those produced by Pfizer and Moderna requires decades of work by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania. You may never have heard of it. According to the New York Times, one of the scientists, Katalin Kariko, "never earned more than $60,000 per year" when conducting innovative basic research. Researchers at the University of Oxford have developed the technology behind the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is mainly publicly funded, with the original purpose of providing a "non-exclusive, royalty-free" license for its vaccine. Only under pressure from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation did they turn their backs on this technology and license it separately to AstraZeneca.
Surprisingly, when AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot stated that intellectual property "is a fundamental part of our industry, if you don’t protect intellectual property, basically any Nobody is motivated to innovate." The work of Oxford scientists authorized by AstraZeneca is really just innovating without the incentives that Soriot claims. Why do journalists put forward such greedy claims as Soriot, but do not take on the specific role of seeking benefits?
It’s no secret that innovators (and ordinary people) are usually not greedy. For example, as Walter Isaacson pointed out in his book about superstar biochemist Jennifer Doudna’s work on Crispr gene manipulation technology, her motivation has never been Mainly motivated by money. In fact, he reported that the company's manipulation of her work made her "unwell." Countless cases like her show that innovation in science and technology is usually not the result of a genius lightning strike, but a full-field effort by multiple teams around the same goal. If someone quits because of lack of greedy incentives, no problem: they are welcome to write their own history. Others will happily master the glory. And we, the public, will not lose anything.
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Perhaps Soriot meant, more generally, that reduced revenues would cut AstraZeneca's overall research and development (R&D) expenditures. But even this statement is obviously suspicious. When drugmakers claim that high prices are essential to innovation, they are “outright lie,” financial expert Yves Smith wrote in 2019. Smith cited data released by the Institute of New Economic Thinking, which showed that the S&P 500's spending on stock repurchases and dividends from 2009 to 2018 was 14% higher than that on research and development. The author writes that these companies can easily increase their investment in innovative drugs by simply controlling the distribution to shareholders. (Don't forget that before the Securities and Exchange Commission under Reagan relaxed its rules in 1982, stock repurchases were actually classified as illegal market manipulation.)
According to a recent report by the U.S. House of Representatives committee, among the funds that pharmaceutical companies do invest in research and development, for many companies, a large part of the funds is not used for innovation research, but used to "find and inhibit generic drugs and biosimilars." Competing while continuing to increase prices.” Supervision and reform. In these cases, the greed of executives and investors clearly hindered innovation. At a recent congressional hearing, California Democrat Rep. Katie Porter questioned the CEO of the biopharmaceutical company AbbVie. She said that the company spent 24.5 on research and development. Billion US dollars, 4.71 billion US dollars are spent on marketing and advertising, and 50 billion US dollars are spent on marketing and advertising each year. Shareholder expenses between 2013 and 2018. She described the idea of R&D to prove astronomical reasonable prices as "a fairy tale of a large pharmaceutical company."
Even if greed makes sense for some for-profit companies, it is not wise for us to rely solely on for-profit companies to use innovation to achieve social goals. Whether it is profitable or not, we have to do a lot of things, and the fiasco of vaccine patents shows us that biotechnology executives and other members of "thinkers" are not putting profits above saving lives. As White House adviser Anthony Fauci pointed out to the Capitol Hill earlier this year, the United States has a "moral obligation" to "ensure that the rest of the world does not suffer and die from things we can help prevent." . If our government allows "your money or your life" to be an acceptable business model, then it has not fulfilled its duty to act in the public interest.
As stated in an open letter signed by more than one hundred intellectual property scholars, intellectual property rights (including patents) "are not, and have never been absolute rights. They are granted and recognized under the condition of serving the public interest." We noticed some precedents, such as the use of the National Defense Production Act last year to increase the production of medical supplies, and the US expropriation of penicillin production during World War II. If the COVID-19 vaccine manufacturer refuses to publicly provide life-saving technologies, the government should issue mandatory licenses or similar measures.
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