Big Pharma is (mostly) sitting this pandemic out
The people who brought you vaccines for Ebola, dengue, and H1N1 won’t be doing the same for the novel coronavirus that has global health authorities on high alert.
Among the world’s biggest makers of vaccines, only Johnson & Johnson has committed to developing one for 2019-nCoV, which has infected more than 6,000 people. Merck, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer aren't currently investing in similar projects.
Their reluctance is perhaps understandable. Vaccine development is expensive, offers little promise of profit, and quite often gets rendered irrelevant by development outside a company’s control. As STAT reported back in 2018, the Ebola saga left major pharma companies with serious doubts about mobilizing around outbreaks.
In their stead, smaller outfits like Moderna Therapeutics and Inovio Pharmaceuticals have accepted grant funds to take on 2019-nCoV. But unlike their multinational counterparts, neither company has ever gotten a vaccine through regulatory approval, and neither has the capacity to produce the millions of doses the world would need if 2019-nCoV persists. At some point, someone’s going to have to convince pharma to come back to the table.
Among the world’s biggest makers of vaccines, only Johnson & Johnson has committed to developing one for 2019-nCoV, which has infected more than 6,000 people. Merck, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline, and Pfizer aren't currently investing in similar projects.
Their reluctance is perhaps understandable. Vaccine development is expensive, offers little promise of profit, and quite often gets rendered irrelevant by development outside a company’s control. As STAT reported back in 2018, the Ebola saga left major pharma companies with serious doubts about mobilizing around outbreaks.
In their stead, smaller outfits like Moderna Therapeutics and Inovio Pharmaceuticals have accepted grant funds to take on 2019-nCoV. But unlike their multinational counterparts, neither company has ever gotten a vaccine through regulatory approval, and neither has the capacity to produce the millions of doses the world would need if 2019-nCoV persists. At some point, someone’s going to have to convince pharma to come back to the table.
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