The U.S. govt signed a $2B deal to secure 100M doses of Pfizer’s #COVID19 vaccine candidate. This deal is extremely troubling and I’ll tell you why...
At the end of the day, our market-based drug dev system is built around the requirement to deliver shareholder value and profit. Despite what their PR teams tell us, drugmakers are not intrinsically motivated to ensure equitable access to a vaccine.
Drugmakers are controlled by a system that they themselves designed, which mandates they prioritize ROI over equitable access.
The most efficient way to deliver this ROI? Prioritize wealthy countries with deep coffers of billions in taxpayer dollars to spend.
So while $40 a treatment for Americans sounds like something to rejoice, let’s hold our celebration until we learn how the other 80% of the global population (6.4 billion people) in low- and middle-income countries will also get access to that same vaccine.
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