Prior to winning any contracts, drug makers invested $4 billion in preparations for swine flu, Flynn said on Tuesday. That investment may have gone to developing and patenting new, super-fast methods to create vaccines, such as using a bio-reactor to grow viruses, said Dr. Wodarg. These patents were key to drug industry profits, since companies can charge much more for patented drugs than un-patented ones.
"If you have a patent you can monopolize...and this is what industry did: invented a fast way to produce vaccines and had it patented, which is much more expensive...The alternative is not to have vaccines patented...By decentralizing the production you could be as fast and you wouldn't have this small way you have to pass negotiating with one enterprise that has monopoly, or with four enterprises. It's the economic dimension of the problem which we have to have in mind as we consider how this all happened."
Food and Drug agencies in Canada, the UK, France, the US and elsewhere guaranteed vaccine manufacturers that they would be shielded from any lawsuits connected to the vaccines. This enabled companies to fast-track the testing process, reducing some trials to as little as 5 days.
Wodarg and others have also voiced concern that the hastily developed vaccines are not entirely safe. Adjuvanted vaccines, which contain a kind of immune booster shown to produce auto-immune responses in some children, were sold in parts of Europe and Canada, but banned in the US.
The private research group, Markets and Markets, estimated that the global, H1N1 vaccine market will be worth over $7 billion a year by 2011.
Such incredible profits have sparked a wider shift in medicine from care to profit, according to Marcia Angell, M.D., former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine and a senior lecturer at Harvard Medical School.
"Over the past two decades the pharmaceutical industry has moved very far from its original high purpose of discovering and producing useful new drugs. Now primarily a marketing machine to sell drugs of dubious benefit, this industry uses its wealth and power to co-opt every institution that might stand in its way, including the US Congress, the FDA, academic medical centers, and the medical profession itself."
Angell wrote a book called The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It. She reports that the drug industry spent around 14 percent of sales profits on research and development in 2000, while spending closer to 35 percent on "marketing and administration". How that expenditure breaks down is not public knowledge, but 35% comes out to a lot of money.
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