The COVID-19 vaccines: Whose Needs Come First, People’s or Profit’s

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By Jack Gerson

 

As the Covid-19 pandemic surges in the U.S., with hospital intensive care units already overloaded in some areas with many more fearing that they too will soon be overwhelmed, a turning point may be near. Three vaccines have been reported to be highly protective against the SARS-Cov2 coronavirus. According to Pfizer and its partner, the German biotech company BioNTech, their candidate vaccine has been 95% effective with no serious adverse effects. The U.S. biotech Moderna reports nearly identical results with its vaccine. The third vaccine, developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, reported an average effectiveness of 70%, but accidentally discovered a new dosing regimen that they report has been 90% effective. Oxford and AstraZeneca also report no serious adverse effects in those inoculated with their vaccine.

 

Although Pfizer and Moderna reported better results than did Oxford / AstraZeneca, the latter’s vaccine has some crucial advantages:

 

·      It is much cheaper: $3 to $4 per dose (compared to about $20 per dose for the Pfizer vaccine, and about $35 / dose for the Moderna vaccine.

·      It can be stored at temperatures of 36 to 46 degrees Fahrenheit; Pfizer’s must be stored in freezers at minus 103 degrees F, while Moderna’s requires freezing at minus 4-degree F.

·      It is much more stable: The Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine can be stored for up to six months, while once transferred from freezers to refrigerators Pfizer’s vaccine must be used within 5 days and Moderna’s within 30 days.

·      AstraZeneca has pledged to provide the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis at least until next July, and after that to provide it on a non-profit basis in perpetuity to low- and middle-income countries. Neither Moderna nor Pfizer has made any such commitments. AstraZeneca has pledged 300 million doses to the World Health Organization and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations for distribution to 92 developing countries. Again, no such pledges have been made by Pfizer or Moderna.

Although the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had greater effectiveness than did the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine in their clinical trials testing, those were done under ideal conditions for vaccine delivery and storage. Results would likely be far different under the conditions in which the vaccines need to be used – hundreds of millions, and soon billions of doses must be administered all around the world. Relatively few hospitals and clinics in developing countries – or, for that matter, in poor rural areas of the U.S. and other metropolitan countries – have or can provide the kind of freezer storage capacity that will be needed for the unstable Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Thus, in the real world, the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine’s average protection rate of 70% may well exceed that of either the Pfizer or the Moderna vaccines. Moreover, the 90% protectiveness from the alternate dosing regimen stumbled upon by AstraZeneca in the course of the clinical trial testing is likely to be validated in further testing.

 

Therefore, the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine is at this point the only realistic hope for much of the world’s population. Rural hospitals can’t afford the expensive freezers needed to store the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Nor can Third World countries. Indeed, the logistics of shipping those fragile vaccines alone raise enormous problems – add those storage problems and the cost of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and it’s clear that the hopes for a vaccine that treats the working and poor of the world must rest on the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine.

 

But the mass media, and much of the Big Pharma / biotech / academia / government apparatus has been making public comments highly critical of the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine – some are even saying that it will never be authorized for use in the U.S. Why this trashing?

 

AstraZeneca is being criticized for releasing partial results that have not been rigorously tested, and which in any event were not adequately tested on a large representative sample. In particular, these criticisms are being leveled at announcements of results from a dose level that was administered accidentally and mistakenly. AstraZeneca’s designed clinical trial called for each patient in its dose group receiving two inoculations of equal strength given several weeks apart. But some participants were accidentally given only half the intended dose for the first inoculation (the second inoculation was at full dose). When researchers peeked at early results, they found that the results for the group who got the half dose followed by a full dose were better than those for the group that got two full doses.

 

The Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine has been bad-mouthed in the U.S. media, and by several in the U.S. scientific community, some of whom have told the media that this vaccine should never be authorized for use in the U.S.  While AstraZeneca’s initial press release was poorly worded if not deceptive, the company (and the leading Oxford researchers who developed the vaccine) almost immediately agreed that further testing was needed to validate the half dose / full dose results, and they are in the process of testing a randomized sample with an adequate distribution across age levels.

 

Let’s ask again: Why has the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine gotten such a hammering in the U.S.?  Hey, what comes first under capitalism: people or profits? Could this possibly have something to do with the profits that Pfizer and Moderna anticipate raking in from the hundreds of millions of doses of vaccine that they’re going to sell in the U.S. and the EU? Big Pharma has enormous clout with academics, government, and the media – many are on their payroll. Here’s a case in point: one of the main experts that the media has turned to here is the chief scientist of Operation Warp Speed, Moncef Slauoi. Slauoi, a venture capitalist and former Director of Global Research for the giant pharmaceutical corporation GlaxoSmithKline, was on the Board of Directors of Moderna until Trump appointed him to oversee Warp Speed in May. Slauoi is very concerned about the Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine, but not at all concerned about the safety of the vaccines developed by Moderna and Pfizer using a technology far less established than that employed by the Oxford research group that designed the vaccine platform for AstraZeneca.

 

Moderna stock has soared over the past couple of weeks. AstraZeneca stock has stumbled. Do folks think it’s a coincidence that Slauoi is trashing the much cheaper and far easier to distribute and use Oxford / AstraZeneca vaccine? When the choice is people or profits, we know which way the biopharmaceutical industry has gone. Looks like it’s going there again.