'Like every other scientist, Heeney spends part of his days worrying about funding. All these vaccine projects hurtling towards trials may yet be drawn to a screeching halt by a lack of money. Trials are expensive; so is the outlay on manufacturing and marketing vaccines. “If you’re going to make enough doses for the whole world, you’re going to need billions and billions of dollars,” Heeney said. Earlier this week, the Wellcome Trust put an exact number on it: a further $3bn, across the industry, to fund and produce enough vaccines to beat the pandemic.
'Most of this money will go towards trials and production, the costs of which are now frequently borne by drug companies. After the 80s, when a series of mergers left the pharma industry in the hands of a few behemoth companies, vaccines fell thoroughly under the sway of market forces, subject to the kind of logic that prompted Goldman Sachs, in a 2018 report, to wonder: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” (It isn’t, the analysts concluded.)
'Diseases that are borne out of poverty, and that require cheap vaccines, such as cholera, are largely ignored, says Peter Jay Hotez, the dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. So are diseases that are uncommon, or diseases that have come and gone. Taxpayers fund most vaccine research, but the pharma titans that can make them at scale are reluctant to commit to a vaccine if the likelihood of profit is meagre. “We have a broken ecosystem for making vaccines,” Hotez told me.'
Read here (The Guardian, March 27, 2020)
Read here (The Guardian, March 27, 2020)
