Bloomberg reports the historic rise of the pharma industry ever since the pandemic broke out and is now the world’s most loathed industry.
In a Gallup Poll of the public’s view of various business sectors, pharma was ranked at the bottom, behind the oil industry, advertising and public relations, and lawyers.
Pharma: the lifeline industry
Who’d have guessed that a year later pharma would be getting credit for saving the world? From cruise lines to meatpackers, the business will have plenty to answer for in their handling of the pandemic, but this part of it worked.
The Covid-19 vaccines developed by the drug industry, in partnership with governments, will almost certainly prevent hundreds of thousands of American deaths and millions more around the world.
They will also revive trillions of dollars in economic activity. In a time where almost everything else went wrong, the vaccine effort was something that went (mostly) right.
How it all started
The quest started in early January before most people in the U.S. and Europe were even thinking about a pandemic. The biotechnology company Moderna Inc. had downloaded the genetic code for the novel coronavirus from researchers in China. Within a few days, scientists there had developed a vaccine with the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the research agency led by Anthony Fauci. By mid-March, they’d started a clinical trial.
Never seen an emergency like this in 100 years
Pfizer Inc. announced its own plans around the same time. A year and a half before, it had signed a deal with a German biotech company, BioNTech SE, that has similar messenger RNA technology to Moderna’s that could, in theory, rapidly assemble and test new vaccines.
Like Moderna, the companies thought the technology could make it possible to quickly turn around a prototype vaccine. “The world hasn’t seen an emergency like this in 100 years,” says Steven Joffe, the interim chairman of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “We are lucky in the sense that science was there.”
Operation warp speed program
Those efforts would eventually be folded into what’s now known as the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed program.
Warp Speed was revealed at the end of April when the pandemic had killed close to 60,000 Americans. The goal was to develop and produce enough shots to inoculate 300 million Americans before the new year.
Some companies, including Moderna and J&J, would get direct funding for their efforts. Pfizer got an agreement from the government to buy the vaccine it produced if it worked.
Vaccines are a tricky bet
Crucially, the government was shouldering some risk, financing the advance production of the experimental vaccines while clinical trials were still going on.
“The most risk-averse people on Earth in the riskiest business on Earth” is how the U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar describes the drug industry.
“Probably the most common words said in a pharma company are, ‘How do you de-risk this?’ ” Azar, whose department helped oversee Warp Speed, says he understood how tricky a bet on vaccines can be for a business.
“These companies are looking at making the multibillion-dollar investments in R&D and manufacturing capacity,” he says.
“And they had just been through Zika, SARS, they’ve been through MERS”—viruses for which the pharmaceutical industry investigated vaccines that never saw the outside of a clinical trial before those outbreaks dissipated or were squashed.
Small players
The government’s backing let smaller players get in the game and take some riskier technologies forward.
Smaller companies such as Moderna “don’t have the resources to do this on their own,” Joffe says of large-scale clinical trials.
Pfizer, despite its corporate reputation as a rival-consuming shark, said it would offer up any excess manufacturing capacity it might have—potentially producing competitors’ vaccines.
But even a company of J&J’s size—it reported $15.1 billion in profits last year—needs incentives to rapidly start-up a costly vaccine development and testing effort, Stoffels says.
Pharma companies could reasonably predict that Covid would be bad and that a vaccine would have a market.
“But to mobilize a billion, maybe $2 billion to start manufacturing and do the R&D” is daunting, he says. “While we are big companies, nobody can free up $2 billion in their [profit-and-loss statement] overnight.”
The vaccine to reach the public soon
Big Pfizer and tiny Moderna both got their vaccines across the finish line. The shots cleared in December and have been shipped out to states and are now going into people’s arms.
Barring surprises, by spring, tens of millions of Americans will have gotten them. By summer, hundreds of millions more will have.
It’s an achievement worth celebrating—a shining example of people understanding what their job really is, then doing it. And it’s not a story with a single hero.
It’s one about government scientists and private-sector researchers, the trial volunteers who put their bodies on the line, the doctors running the trials, the FedEx and UPS workers making sure the vaccine is delivered during a pandemic winter, the nurses donning PPE to administer the shots, down to the first person being vaccinated after the FDA’s authorization.
End of 2021 goal
There are growing concerns that the U.S., after leading the development of vaccines, may not get them as fast as it had hoped. Instead of 300 million covered by the end of 2020, the U.S. is now aiming to supply vaccine for 20 million people by the end of December and getting to a total of 100 million by the end of February. Vaccinating all of America now looks more like an end-of-2021 goal.
Even if there is enough vaccine, of course, people have to be willing to take it.
“If we have a 95% effective vaccine and only 40% to 50% of the people in society get vaccinated, it’s going to take quite a while to get to that blanket of herd immunity that’s going to protect us,” Fauci said at the Harvard event.
One big challenge trial
Over the summer, Pfizer’s and Moderna’s trials went into lulls as the pandemic waned.
Then in the fall, cases exploded—millions of infections were tallied around the country and thousands of people died—and the results started pouring in on the trials.
J&J said in December it would shrink the size of its 60,000-person trial because the cases were coming in so fast.
U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn says,
“The number of cases did help expedite the performance of clinical trials, both here and abroad. That did help us get to this point. But I think none of us would have wanted it to be that way.”
Contradicting success story
That’s the contradiction of the U.S.’s vaccine success.
The government and scientists all working together came up with a shot to save the world—and then they were able to prove so quickly that it worked only because those same institutions couldn’t save us from ourselves.
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Source: Bloomberg
