And The Winner Is ...
Who is in the vaccine derby?
Pfizer is, bursting out of the blocks today after months of prep, shipping its entry in ultra-cold storage out into anticipated sales of $14 billion.
Moderna, with less stringent refrigeration needs and a shot at a $32 billion overall market, is definitely in.
How about darkhorse AstraZenica/Oxford University, stumbling a bit, but still looking at $6.4 billion, according to the website, FiercePharma.com.
These Big Three players are covered constantly in the U.S. media. Google News, aggregating the mainstream, has made it feel like a race for the money among known competitors for months.
Oh, right, then there’s China.
CNN or The Guardian and a few others cover China’s vaccine efforts, but not daily. When a media channel like the New York Times even mentions China in this context, it is usually to question the ethics of the development process there.
Nevertheless, even without being mentioned, we assume China is a major player. Sinopharm vaccines are in active test/use in Bahrain, Argentina and Morocco. Contracts have been signed with other Chinese pharmaceutical companies to provide the vaccine in many countries. The Chinese approach has been global from the start.
How will worldwide vaccine distribution influence the power dynamics between a massive and still-growing China and a resistant Western alliance? Will vaccine diplomacy expand China’s sphere of influence?
That makes two narratives being trumpeted:
It’s all a race to get rich
Watch out for China, they cheat and trap nations with debt
I have a third.
Cuba showing that a profit-driven Big Pharma system is not the only way to develop, test, and distribute a vaccine.
In fact, the highly-subsidized Big Pharma derby may not even be the best way and is demonstrably not the most efficient way.
So why don’t we hear ANYTHING about vaccine development in Cuba? Oh right, because it would obviously not be helpful to the maintenance of the status quo to demonstrate an alternative model that works.
Cuba started its own biotech sector back in the 1980s because the U.S. kept embargoing medical supplies. Now BioCubaFarma produces most of the vaccines needed domestically and has been a key supplier to other countries in the Global South.
BioCubaFarma has two vaccines almost ready for distribution, as they were the first in Latin America to receive WHO approval for clinical trials. They’ve done this before. Cuba has existing healthcare relationships with developing nations all over the world.
It’s inspiring what a small embargoed resource poor nation can do, but to me that’s only half the story. The other half is that despite the uniformly poor performance of U.S. institutions, people cannot think about alternatives to those failed systems that were designed to maximize shareholder value first and serve people a distant second.