Intellectual Property Monopolies Block Vaccine Access — Anis Chowdhury

Yves here. The press and commentors have only occasionally deigned to notice that the makers of Western Covid vaccine candidates have made at most only minor, short-term financial concessions in the interest of not arousing too much public ire. This vaccine profiteering is offensive, not simply for public health reasons, but because so much medical R&D is government funded, and that before getting to the ample subsidies for many of the Covid vaccines listed below. And that’s before getting to the fact that in the US, the government is also far and away the biggest buyer of medications, between Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA.

Like arms makers, Big Pharma enjoys so much in the way of public support that it should not be regarded as private enterprise, yet company pretenses otherwise go almost entirely unchallenged.

Naked Capitalism

Intellectual Property Monopolies Block Vaccine Access
Anis Chowdhury, Adjunct Professor at Western Sydney University and University of New South Wales (Australia), who held senior United Nations positions in New York and Bangkok and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, a former economics professor, who was United Nations Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development, and received the Wassily Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. Originally published at Jomo Kwame Sundaram’s website

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Particularly concerning with respect to the over 55 cohort.

Naked Capitalism

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As COVID-19 cases continue to spread across the globe, the repercussions in healthcare extend across the value chain from patients and families to clinicians and pharmaceutical companies.

The industry faces a dual challenge. As well as helping to tackle COVID-19 spread by developing and distributing new vaccines and tests, it must continue to deliver innovative therapies and diagnos­tics to clinicians, patients, and healthcare systems—even as R&D, manufacturing, and supply chains are struggling to maintain business as usual.

An earlier McKinsey article considered how pharma companies can reorient their commercial model to respond to the new environment. Below, we focus on launch activities and identify five success factors to consider for commercial launches in the next normal.

McKinsey
Ready for launch: Reshaping pharma’s strategy in the next normal