“Vaccines for people” or “free market vaccines”?

If it goes to the highest bidder, then the highest value activities, that benefit most from reduction in social distancing, come back faster. I don’t know what those are, but pretty much by definition, the economy recovers faster. That brings back jobs a lot faster than stimulus checks. Heck tax it and transfer the money to people who choose to stay home.

I’ll stretch free market nirvana this far: If the government wants to hand out vaccines to whoever it thinks should go first, ok, let it buy the vaccine on the free market, on budget, paid by visible taxes, and hand it out. But it should not forbid anyone who wants it from paying for it, nor forbid vaccine makers from selling to whoever wants it, to artificially keep the price down and hide the immense transfer in its actions.

But, going on the current assumptions that these made in a weekend vaccines work, we would not have had a pandemic at all. Every job lost, every business closed, all 284 thousand US deaths, $5 trillion of federal spending, the biggest (though mercifully short) recession in US history, would not have happened. All of this cost stems from one thing — the ban on using any medicine before the FDA approves it.

Most of the leading vaccine candidates prime the immune system’s defences against the viral ‘spike protein’, an approach made possible through years of research at the United States National Institutes of Health. […] But for technological advances to translate into Health for All, innovations that are created collectively should be governed in the public interest, not for private profit.

The first step toward a people’s vaccine is to ensure full transparency of the clinical-trial results, which would enable independent and timely assessments of safety and efficacy. The publication of scanty, preliminary data through corporate press releases is meant for financial markets, not the public-health community.

Beyond national interest lurks the problem of even narrower private interests, which stem from an over-financialised biopharmaceutical innovation model. The business model for future vaccine development is already being sized up, now that the pandemic has revealed the potential windfall for investors. But while they benefit from sky-rocketing stock prices, soaring capital gains and dumping a company’s shares the same day it announces promising preliminary results in a clinical trial, delivering a people’s vaccine has become an afterthought.