Covid-19 Opinion: Yes, Big Pharma firms have huge profits – and they deserve them

Opinion, by Michael Royster

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – (Opinion) Anti-vaccine arguments come in all sizes, shapes, and political colors. The latest species to infest (anti)social media posits both “Pfizer is earning immoral profits by selling its vaccine,” and its corollary “Pfizer is undermining governmental sovereignty.”

This writer strongly disagrees with the above-mentioned arguments, for a variety of reasons he will set out below.

[FULL DISCLOSURE: From 1974 to 1977, before he moved to Rio de Janeiro, the writer worked in New Jersey as a staff attorney in the international division of Schering-Plough Corporation, a medium-sized U.S. pharmaceutical firm.]

Preliminarily, let us admit that Pfizer/BioNTech, J&J, Moderna, and AstraZeneca (the 4 Western firms at the forefront of Covid-19 vaccine research) are indeed going to receive “windfall” profits in the billions of dollars for the next few years, as vaccinations against Covid-19 continue to be necessary.

However, let us recall that these firms are not alone – Chinese Sinovac, purveyor of CoronaVac in Brazil, is privately held; so is India’s Bharat Biotech, purveyor of Covaxin. Russia’s Gamaleya Institute is only technically government owned, as is China’s Sinopharm. All of them are reaping the benefits of creating and marketing vaccines. Even Cuba is desperately trying to develop vaccines it can export for hard currency, just as it does its doctors.

So, why pick on Pfizer/BioNTech? Why is it perfectly acceptable for the governments of China, Russia, and Cuba, to make huge profits flogging their vaccines abroad, but not acceptable for privately held firms to do the same? Does anyone really believe governments will plough back all those vaccine profits into benefits for the local citizenry?

Moving on, we should remember that the very nature of the pharmaceutical business is highly risky. Big Pharma firms invest huge amounts of money trying to find new products, or improved versions of existing products – and the likelihood of doing so is minuscule. When they are successful, they seek not only to recover their costs, but also to generate enough profit to sustain future research. High risk/high gain.

Let us also briefly consider whether Big Pharma has compromised the sovereignty of the nations of the world, by insisting on contractual provisions for vaccines that broadly prevent governments suing them for anything other than manufacturing defects.

Vaccine manufacturers all know they are in competition with other capable manufacturers for government business – there are some 8 firms with sales in the millions around the world. Governments know this, and negotiate accordingly.  Brazil, for example, managed to obtain an unusually low price from Pfizer through negotiations.

Finally, let us consider the question of morals. If you are a capitalist, and believe that profits are not inherently evil, you should ask yourself the following question: Are profits in some businesses more deserved than in others?

For instance, how do you feel about the profits of the tobacco industry, responsible for killing millions? What about the coal industry, and the oil & gas behemoths, responsible for polluting the land, water and air essential to human life? What about agribusiness giants that destroy tropical forests? Etc. Etc. Etc.

In this writer’s opinion, if there is any business in the world that deserves to make outsize profits, it is the pharmaceutical business, whose purpose is to make lives safer by preventing, reducing, or even curing disease and death.

Particularly is this true in the case of vaccines, especially Covid-19 vaccines, which have demonstrably saved millions of lives that would otherwise have been lost, as occurred during the Spanish Flu pandemic a century ago.