But not so fast. Operation Warp Speed isn't even mentioned at AstraZeneca's website. And even though the NYT reported on OWS a week before DHHS posted the above announcement, the paper of record was quick to point out that even getting the vaccine to market by January 2021 was absurd, given that "the fastest a new vaccine has been developed and distributed is four years and most have taken considerably longer." The Times does not mention the more ambitious October date.
The head of OWS is Dr. Moncef Slaoui, a PhD in molecular biology and immunology. The Trump appointee was brought in because he is seen as a can-do kind of guy. His past work has included a $100m neuroscience research project in Shanghai. And he has called for more cooperation and pooling of resources among Big Pharma companies in situations, such as cancer and Covid-19, where the profit motive should be put aside for the public interest. Sounds good, but let's not forget his personal ties to Big Pharma through GlaxoSmithKline and Moderna. These are potential conflicts of interest.
In 2013 article for HuffPost, "It's Time to Further Incentivize Medical Innovation," Slaoui called for three main changes to standard procedures:
1. Incentivize pre-competitive research
2. Incentivize antibiotics [and viral] discovery and development
3. Incentivize innovation by extending market exclusivity
He writes, "We need to encourage and develop more public-private partnerships to re-stimulate interest in antibiotics research and create realistic ways of paying for it." In short, Big Pharma companies won't "waste" money on R and D for solutions, if they will lose exclusivity to what they've developed. This is thought to be one of the reasons why attempts to find a "universal" vaccine has so far failed.
Public-Private partnerships always start out as Good Ship Lollipop enterprises. Feel Good miracle-of-medicine vibes are sugarplummed out to delight our belief in Man and our forward progress through history routine. However, Americans are capitalists, too. When we aren't feeling good about our wonderfulness in the world, we like to make a buck. Ike, in his now infamous farewell speech, has duly warned us about the rise of the Military-Industrial Complex. And the public-private partnerships that could do good for humanity, often have secondary agendas, and when things go wrong with money issues, as they inevitably do, the eggheaded partners like to cook the books to cover up how they've conned us.
One of the first things likely to happen, and there already signs of it coming into play, are questions about who receives the medicine and how much it will cost -- not unrelated questions. AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly, and others, stand to make zillions of dollars for medications they come up with -- a lot of it as the result of research largely paid for by taxpayers, through, in this case, DARPA and Operation Warp Speed. There is a question of how much a dose would cost.
A Business Insider piece earlier this year considers that question. Author Zera Sherrell points out an obvious and crucial point: "In a free market, how much a pharmaceutical company charges for a vaccine is mainly determined by how much governments are willing to pay for it." And there's the rub to our dream partnership. The exclusivity that the FDA head Slaoui wants to offer could lead to price gouging underwritten by the government. (Psst, if you were clever, you might find yourself investing in Lilly and AstraZeneca stocks right now, no doubt like many a Congressperson.)
It's clear our technology is getting to that place where we can rapidly respond to pandemics, if we choose to. What Abcellera has already accomplished, without all the details, is close to miraculous -- being able to take any virus and come up with "a functionally integrated platform to deliver pandemic prevention treatments in
Certainly, Mike Davis sees this as a limitation, as he argues in The Monster Enters, "[M]ultinational capital has been the driver of disease evolution" through our continued destruction of our habitat, and "the failure of the pharmaceutical industry to find profit in mass producing lifeline antivirals, new-generation antibiotics, and universal vaccines." And yet, this is just what DARPA has set up with its P3 apparatus. Rapid response (ka-ching) rather than universal solutions (what are we commies? they might ask).
There appear to be legitimate reasons to be concerned with the Big Pharma companies involved with a solution to the Covid-19 pandemic. AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly, for instance, were caught up in the Iraqi oil-for-food bribery scandal that the UK's Serious Fraud Office's investigation was described as "one of the biggest the organisation has ever carried out." In essence, these companies primed the well to gain exclusive access to the Iraqi marketplace.
Eli Lilly probably requires closer scrutiny than the others, with respect to motivation. They are still remembered on Capitol Hill for the political manoeuvring they effected during the late night vote on the creation of national Homeland Security in December 2002, when language was inserted that removed their legal culpability for serious flaws in thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that Lilly added to children's vaccines that resulted so many cases of autism that Lilly was facing multiple class action suits. It turned out that Mitch Daniels, [George W. Bush's] White House budget director, [was] a former Lilly executive, and the company's chairman, Sidney Taurel, was appointed just a few months [before to] President Bush's Homeland Security Advisory Council. George Bush senior, the President's father, was on the Lilly board in the Seventies.
God only knows what's under the hood now, with this president in charge, but Operation Warp Speed is a bad harbinger.
One could argue that even Lilly's Prozac regime is controversial, not only because of the drug's checkered effectiveness and dangers, but also because its prescriptional distribution by Do-No-Harmers (snark) has seen some pundits and critics and parents and nurses and patients and LEE wonder aloud if kickbacks weren't behind some of the pushes of the drug. A pattern is established that suggests motives that are less than the family's reputation for philanthropic largesse -- probably well-deserved.
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