{"id":12371,"date":"2021-04-06T15:45:58","date_gmt":"2021-04-06T12:45:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/africasustainabilitymatters.com\/?p=12371"},"modified":"2026-01-11T05:31:27","modified_gmt":"2026-01-11T05:31:27","slug":"covid-19-vaccines-are-a-victory-for-public-research-not-greed-and-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/2021\/04\/06\/covid-19-vaccines-are-a-victory-for-public-research-not-greed-and-capitalism\/","title":{"rendered":"Covid-19 vaccines are a victory for public research, not ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, reportedly attributed the success of the COVID-19<\/a> vaccines to “capitalism” and “greed”. But he is wrong – the idea that private ingenuity and naked competition produced the vaccines is a complete fantasy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before COVID-19, the vaccine market was notoriously sluggish, taking between five<\/a> and 15 years<\/a> to develop a viable candidate. It is for this reason the current effort looks so remarkable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For pharmaceutical companies, the incentives are poor. In April 2018, long before coronavirus emerged, a report by Goldman Sachs analysts proposed<\/a> that providing a “one shot” cure for diseases could never be a “sustainable business model”.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That’s because, as Johnson rightly implies, pharmaceutical companies follow the money. In 2019, the\u00a0global vaccines market size<\/a>\u00a0was US$47bn. Meanwhile sales of just\u00a0four treatment drugs<\/a>\u00a0matched this volume of sales (Humira, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis; Keytruda, the cancer treatment; Revlimid, used to treat multiple myeloma; and Imbruvica, also a cancer drug).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Earlier coronavirus diseases, Sars and Mers,\u00a0had no vaccine<\/a>. Both had candidates\u00a0initially tested on animals<\/a>\u00a0that did not make it to\u00a0human trials<\/a>. The Ebola vaccine was\u00a0finally approved<\/a>\u00a0in 2019, 16 years after it was first patented and a full six years after the start of the epidemic in West Africa. Read more…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Boris Johnson, the UK prime minister, reportedly attributed the success of the COVID-19 vaccines to “capitalism” and “greed”. But he is wrong – the idea that private ingenuity and naked competition produced…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":12372,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":"","pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[101],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rayscohosting.best\/ASM\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}