Howard Dean, the former progressive champion, is calling on President Joe Biden to reject a special intellectual property waiver that would allow low-cost, generic coronavirus vaccines to be produced to meet the needs of low-income countries. Currently, a small number of companies hold the formulas for the Covid-19 vaccines, limiting distribution to many parts of the world.

“IP protections aren’t the cause of vaccination delays,” Dean claimed in a column for Barron’s last month. “Every drug manufacturing facility on the planet that’s capable of churning out Covid-19 shots is already doing so.”

“Creating a new medicine is a costly proposition,” wrote Dean. “Companies would never invest hundreds of millions in research and development if rivals could simply copy their drug formulas and create knockoffs.”

Dean’s claim that global vaccine manufacturing is already at capacity is patently false. Foreign firms have lined up to offer pharmaceutical plants to produce vaccines but have been forced to enter into lengthy negotiations under terms set by the intellectual property owners. The waiver, however, would allow generic drug producers to begin copying the vaccine without delay.

Many of the manufacturing plants prepared to mass produce low-cost vaccines are centered in India, which has committed to supplying the poorest countries in the world. But the waiver petition, Dean wrote, “is unreasonable and disingenuous; it’s a ruse to benefit India’s own industry at the expense of patients everywhere. President Biden would be wise to reject it.”

The strident opposition to the waiver, which is supported by an international coalition of human rights organizations as well as a growing cohort of congressional Democrats, may surprise Dean’s liberal supporters. But while Dean boasts a long history of support for single-payer health insurance coverage and government intervention into lowering domestic drug prices, he has reversed his positions on virtually every major progressive health policy issue since moving to work in the world of corporate influence peddling.

Dean is not a registered lobbyist, though he works in the lobbying division of Dentons, a law and lobbying firm, and his rhetoric in the column follows the firm’s recent pattern of advocacy. Dentons touts its work on drug intellectual property issues, noting on its website that it has represented Pfizer and other firms in the recent past.

His official role is as a senior advisor to its government affairs practice focused on corporate health care clients, though as The Intercept has previously reported, he engages in almost every lobbying activity imaginable. In the past, Dean has argued that he is not a lobbyist but has declined to discuss what he does at the firm or the identities of his clients. Neither Dean nor Dentons responded to a request for comment from The Intercept.

The column references a proposal led by India and South Africa — joined by Kenya, Bolivia, Pakistan, and dozens of other countries — to request a temporary waiver of intellectual property rights over the creation of Covid-19 vaccines. The waiver to the World Trade Organization would allow unfettered access to the intellectual property and formulas necessary to retool factories and ramp up production of vaccines for the developing world, much of which is currently projected not to reach significant vaccination rates until as late as 2024.

Despite publicly funded research and huge infusions of government cash for the development and delivery of vaccines, drugmakers have carefully guarded their monopoly on the intellectual property rights and signaled to investors that they plan to soon hike prices. The pharmaceutical industry, including representatives of Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson, have pushed the Biden administration to oppose the intellectual property waiver petition and go further to even impose sanctions on any country that moves to manufacture vaccines without their express permission.

Dean, as The Intercept previously reported, moved through the revolving door after his time serving as Democratic National Committee chair to work for pharmaceutical and biotech companies, advising lobbyists during the Affordable Care Act debate on how to assist pharmaceutical firms with extended exclusivity protections on biologics, which are medicines made from living organisms, such as vaccines. He also serves on the board of the health care-focused investment fund Vatera.

“He sorts of pops up whenever you argue against anything that would lower drug prices.”

In another recent column, again reflecting the interests of drugmakers, Dean wrote in favor of a last-minute regulation proposed by the Trump administration to narrow the government’s ability to lower the prices of certain pharmaceutical products financed with public money, a rule that could stifle any future attempt to rein in the costs of coronavirus vaccines.

“Without taxpayer support for early-stage research at universities,” Dean acknowledges, “drug companies would have never been in a position to create lifesaving vaccines so quickly.” But, he writes, echoing industry arguments that any form of price controls would stifle innovation, “drug companies won’t spend the billions of dollars it takes to commercialize federally funded research if there’s a risk the government will seize the fruits of their research.”

“He sorts of pops up whenever you argue against anything that would lower drug prices,” said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that works to reform intellectual property rights to expand access to medicine.

“It’s appalling because he’s introduced as a progressive; he still gets on ‘Rachel Maddow,’” said Love. “But he’s on the payroll. He’s not a registered lobbyist — he somehow finds a way not to register — but he’s sort of an influencer, he’s paid to influence the debate.”

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Pfizer, Moderna, and other coronavirus vaccine makers have said repeatedly that they intend to hike prices on vaccines as early as this year, as the potential need for additional booster shots and future demand could lead to an unprecedented financial windfall.

One estimate projects that if Pfizer raised the price of its coronavirus vaccine from $19.50 to $175 per dose, as one Pfizer executive recently suggested, and if every adult American were to take it, the cost would be $44.7 billion — nearly 10 percent of all U.S. drug spending.

But the federal government, which funded crucial biomedical research to develop the patented messenger RNA technology behind the leading Covid-19 vaccines, is on the verge of eliminating a legal mechanism to control the prices of key medical products, including vaccines. 

Next week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, will wrap up a comment period to modify the rules governing the Bayh-Dole Act, a law that regulates the transfer of federally funded inventions into commercial property. Under the current interpretation of the law, the government may “march in” and suspend the use of patents developed via government-funded inventions if it determines that the products are excessively priced.

This supposed leverage to control prices — on coronavirus medications and dozens of other drugs whose development relied heavily on government-backed research — would be gone if the rule-change proceeds. 

In the twilight weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, his administration released a NIST rule designed to undercut the Bayh-Dole Act and weaken the government’s authority to march in and seize control of a patent when drugmakers fail to make medicine “available to the public on reasonable terms.”

That phrase has long been the law’s most contentious provision. It invokes a term of art that multiple federal courts have ruled relates to pricing and market-related decisions. The legislative history of the Bayh-Dole Act includes arguments that clearly state pricing considerations as a factor in determining “reasonable terms.”

The proposed rule, however, tightens the law’s definition to remove price as a factor — a change long demanded by industry.

Joe Biden was vocal during the presidential campaign about his commitments to roll back his predecessor’s most egregious industry-serving regulations and to bring down drug prices, but his administration has so far been mum about the Bayh-Dole Act rulemaking.

“The notice of proposed rulemaking is still open for public comment,” noted Jennifer Huergo, a spokesperson for NIST, in an email to The Intercept. “Those comments will be considered and will inform subsequent steps in the rulemaking process.”

The silence has been deafening for activists who have agitated for lowering drug costs. “This is something that should have been canceled; it came out at the very last minute,” said James Love, director of Knowledge Ecology International, which lobbies for greater access to medicine. “And we’re afraid that this won’t be killed by the administration.” 

In recent weeks, thousands have submitted comments to NIST over the rule change. The concern, critics have argued, is that the rule will continue the privatization of government research without concern for the costs paid by patients. 

But industry voices have been loud too. Recent disclosure forms show that nearly every major pharmaceutical firm — including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Astella Pharma, Genentech, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Sanofi, and Merck — has lobbied on Bayh-Dole Act issues in recent months. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry’s umbrella trade group, specifically notes in its disclosure that its lobbyists are working to shape march-in rights policy.

AZBio, a trade group that represents Pfizer, Novartis, and other leading drugmakers, filed a letter to NIST in support of the rule, stating that the agency should “clearly reaffirm that march-in rights should not be exercised by an agency” to regulate pricing. It added that the current nonuse of march-in rights “has been key to this country’s global leadership in innovation.” 

Before 1980, many of the inventions funded by government research rested in the public domain. President John Kennedy issued a memorandum that the government retain the rights to all publicly funded health-related inventions. Most federally funded patents were issued through nonexclusive licenses to all applicants.

But that changed with the passage of two 1980 laws: the Bayh-Dole Act, or Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act, which granted the ability to license government patents to commercial entities on an exclusive basis, and the Stevenson-Wydler Technology Innovation Act, which made technology transfer to commercial entities a mission of government-owned laboratories.

“The law was a turning point, allowing the privatization of research, even if it was partially or entirely funded by public money,” said Achal Prabhala, coordinator for the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines.

The Bayh-Dole Act included provisions to prevent abuse by commercial patent-holders, including march-in rights for the government to retake patents and issue compulsory licenses. If a patent-holder, such as a drug company, failed to make a prescription drug developed through a public patent available or reasonably affordable to the general public, the government could revoke the license for the patent right and issue it to another firm. 

But over the last 40 years, the pharmaceutical industry has defeated every attempt to use march-in rights to control costs. The named sponsors of the law, former Sen. Birch Bayh, D-Ind., and former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., went on to work for law and lobbying firms that represented drug companies. Dole also became a pitchman for Pfizer and was seen widely in television commercials for Viagra.

After taking jobs tied to the pharmaceutical industry, the former senators advocated against using march-in rights to control costs, claiming that in writing the legislation, they had never intended for price concerns to be a factor. 

The influence peddling extends to Capitol Hill and much of the federal government, with drug industry regulators frequently facing pressure to turn down march-in rights requests. The National Institutes of Health, notably, has never granted a march-in rights petition.

There have been several recent attempts. In 2016, for example, Knowledge Ecology International filed a petition for march-in rights to control the cost of Xtandi, a prostate cancer drug that was being priced at $129,269 per year. The drug, the petition noted, was developed through a series of grants from the NIH and the Department of Defense.

NIH Director Francis Collins rejected the request, arguing that Xtandi was already “broadly available as a prescription drug.” Collins, in his letter, ignored the issue of pricing and argued that there was no evidence that the drug in question “is currently or will be in short supply.”

The Trump administration, observers note, initially resisted calls to undercut the law in order to reflect Trump’s calls to lower drug prices during the presidential campaign. But those demands faded after his failed reelection campaign, resulting in the rulemaking on January 3.

As a tool for lowering prices, the use of march-in rights represents an area of untapped potential that extends to hundreds of drugs. 

The NIH spends close to $41 billion funding basic research at universities and laboratories, science that fuels the development of commercially available pharmaceutical products. Beyond the current leading coronavirus vaccines, NIH funding has served a crucial role in the development of a range of drugs including HIV/AIDS medications like Norvir, a treatment developed by Abbott Laboratories. In 2003, Abbott increased the price of Norvir by 400 percent, prompting an attempted march-in rights petition. During the NIH hearing on the petition, Bayh, then serving as an attorney for Abbott’s law firm, argued against invoking march-in rights over the price hike.

Much of the development of mRNA vaccines — a novel technology that allowed for the quick production of multiple coronavirus vaccines, including Pfizer’s and Moderna’s — is built upon years of NIH-funded research by scientists Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. 

The patent for the synthetic coronavirus spike protein, which is used to stimulate an immune response, is currently owned by the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases division and was licensed to BioNTech, Pfizer’s partner, and Moderna, for the manufacturing of coronavirus vaccines. The use of the patent, Knowledge Ecology International argues, provides key leverage for the federal government to march in and pressure pharmaceutical companies over vaccine pricing, especially if costs are dramatically increased in the future, as many expect. 

The Biden administration, following the end of the open comment period next week, could simply revoke the Trump-era rule. That’s the hope of 35 members of Congress, who sent a letter to NIST this week to demand action. 

“We write in strong opposition to the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) proposal to revoke the federal government’s authority under the Bayh-Dole Act to protect the public from unreasonable prices on taxpayer-funded inventions,” reads the letter, which is led by Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas. “Pharmaceutical companies extract the highest prices from the sick and dying, and this proposal would embolden them.”

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In the coming months, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, President Joe Biden’s ambassador to the United Nations, will hear from a growing chorus of developing nations about the foundering efforts to distribute the coronavirus vaccine globally. The nations, many of which have not even begun vaccinating their populations, are demanding that the U.S. support proposals to temporarily waive certain patent and intellectual property rights so that generic coronavirus vaccines can be produced.

The proposals have been fiercely opposed by American drugmakers, including Pfizer, a pharmaceutical giant that Thomas-Greenfield’s former consulting firm has recently counted as a client. Thomas-Greenfield and her number two, Jeffrey DeLaurentis, previously worked for the Albright Stonebridge Group, or ASG, a consulting firm founded by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. The firm, which represents Pfizer, specializes in helping large corporations understand and influence international trade policy, including on intellectual property.

Many leading figures in Biden’s administration, including key White House advisers, State Department leaders, and health care officials have financial stake in or professional ties to  vaccine manufacturers, which are now lobbying to prevent policies that would cut into future profits over the vaccine.

ASG in particular has unusual amounts of sway in the Biden administration. State Department officials Victoria Nuland, Wendy Sherman, Uzra Zeya, and Molly Montgomery previously worked at ASG, as did Philip Gordon, Vice President Kamala Harris’s national security adviser.

But several others in Biden’s inner circle also have potential conflicts of interest:

• Anita Dunn, the leading strategist on Biden’s presidential campaign who now serves as White House adviser, is on leave from her job as managing partner at the consulting firm she co-founded, SKDK, which provides extensive public relations and advertising services to Pfizer. Dunn intends to return to the SKDK this summer. SKDK, which did not respond to a request for comment, has continued to promote Pfizer’s vaccines on social media.
• Susan Rice, the domestic policy adviser, holds up to $5 million in shares of Johnson & Johnson and up to $50,000 in shares of Pfizer, according to a disclosure made public this week.
• Eric Lander, the White House science adviser, holds up to $1 million in shares of BioNTech, Pfizer’s partner for its coronavirus vaccine.
• Secretary of State Anthony Blinken previously consulted for Gilead Science, the biotech company that produced remdesivir, the only Covid-19 treatment approved by the FDA so far.
• Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, Biden’s pick for Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, previously served as an attorney advising both Pfizer and Gilead on federal policy issues.

The White House has previously said that Lander will be recused from “any such matters related to COVID vaccines” until he divests from his holdings in BioNTech. Asked for comment about other Biden officials, a spokesperson for the administration referred The Intercept to the president’s executive order banning officials from engaging in matters related to former clients for a period of two years.

Pressure is growing for a reversal in what some are calling a “vaccine apartheid.” Roughly three-quarters of the available vaccine doses have been distributed to only 10 countries, while current projections indicate that much of the developing world will have to wait years to reach significant vaccination levels.

After coming into office, Biden reversed course from the Trump administration and committed $4 billion to COVAX, the international program backed by the World Health Organization and a number of global public health nonprofits, to buy and distribute coronavirus vaccines to countries in need. But the COVAX program, which continues to face underfunding, will not be able to vaccinate 90 percent of people in 67 low-income countries this year. Some developing nations may have to wait until 2024 to achieve adequate levels of vaccination.

That disparity has led to increasing pressure to support a proposal led by India and South Africa to temporarily waive patent protections on coronavirus medicines, including vaccines, so that manufacturers around the world quickly ramp up production of generic versions.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Sen. Elizebeth Warren, D-Mass., have pushed for the waiver, along with a growing number of public health, labor, and human rights organizations.

“It is unconscionable that amid a global health crisis, huge, multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical companies continue to prioritize profits by protecting their monopolies and driving up prices rather than prioritizing the lives of people everywhere,” said Sanders in a video released earlier this month.

The pharmaceutical industry, in a bid to shield an expected financial windfall, has pressed the Biden administration not only to oppose the waiver, but also to impose trade-related sanctions on countries that back the proposal or move to manufacture coronavirus vaccines without permission from patent holders.

Early indications suggest that the Biden administration may follow the approach of the Trump administration in opposing any waiver over patent or intellectual property rights. An unofficial readout of the World Trade Organization meeting in February noted the “U.S. reiterated that the intellectual property framework provides critical legal and commercial incentives to drive private entities to undertake the risk and make the appropriate investments.”

Still, the administration has made clear it is still reviewing the IP waiver and may consider it at the WTO meeting in April.

“The top priority of the United States is saving lives and ending the pandemic in the United States and around the world,” said Adam Hodge, a spokesperson for the U.S Trade Representative, in a statement to The Intercept. “As part of rebuilding our alliances, we are exploring every avenue to coordinate with our global partners and are evaluating the efficacy of this specific proposal by its true potential to save lives.”

James Love, the director of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit organization that addresses human rights aspects of intellectual property rights and medical innovation, said the Biden administration would soon face several critical moments to shape global vaccine policy, including its decision over the WTO waiver.

“These are going to be White House-level decisions,” said Love, noting that his group was hoping for more personnel “on the other side, with a history of being more critical of the drug companies” shaping these policies.

“In terms of this administration, knowing these personalities,” he added, “it shouldn’t be typical Washington, D.C., swamp people who immediately, when they’re out of government, go back to making big bucks at powerful corporations like Pfizer.”

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The U.S. pharmaceutical firms behind the approved coronavirus vaccines — Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, and Pfizer — have quietly touted plans to raise prices on coronavirus vaccines in the near future and to capitalize on the virus’s lasting presence.

While the companies have enjoyed a boost in goodwill from the rush to develop vaccines, drug industry executives have noted, the public is still sensitive to drug pricing and the reputational risk has, so far, curtailed their ability to reap large financial rewards.

But that environment, they hope, will change once the pandemic ends: a date that drugmakers themselves reserve the right to declare. Pharmaceutical officials, speaking at recent conferences and on calls with investors, say they expect the virus will linger, morphing from a pandemic into a perennial endemic. And as Covid-19 mutations continue to spread and booster shots may be required on a regular basis, leaders from the three companies are enthusiastic about cashing in.

“As this shifts from pandemic to endemic, we think there’s an opportunity here for us,” said Frank D’Amelio, the chief financial officer for Pfizer, at a conference. Additional factors, such as the need for booster shots, present “a significant opportunity for our vaccine from a demand perspective, from a pricing perspective, given the clinical profile of our vaccine.”

Moderna and Johnson & Johnson have also pledged affordability for their vaccines for the duration of the pandemic but have indicated to investors that they plan to return to more “commercial” pricing as early as later this year.

The vaccines are already poised to be some of the most lucrative drugs of all time. The companies are expecting to bring in billions in profit this year alone, and all the major drugmakers with approved coronavirus vaccines received investments and backorders from government agencies.

The U.S. government has fully financed the research and development of several coronavirus vaccines, including those produced by Moderna and Johnson & Johnson, to the tune of over $2 billion. The U.S. has also provided nearly $2 billion in payments to secure doses of Pfizer’s vaccine, which was developed in partnership with BioNTech, a company that received nearly $500 million in development assistance from the German government.

Pfizer, one of the early global leaders in the vaccine race, is very clear about the enormous moneymaking opportunity they see in the vaccines. D’Amelio, the company’s CFO, spoke on a Zoom call last Thursday at the Barclays Global Healthcare Conference, to discuss the issue.

Carter Lewis Gould, an analyst with Barclays Bank, noted that Pfizer faced the particular challenges with “optics” but asked when the company could “pursue higher pricing down the road.”

The current pricing, said D’Amelio, is “clearly not being driven by what I’ll call normal market conditions, normal market forces,” but rather the “pandemic state that we’ve been in and the needs of governments to really secure doses from the various vaccine suppliers.” Once the pandemic ends, he continued, there will be “significant opportunity” for Pfizer.

The comments build on a lengthy explanation of the financials of the vaccine laid out during Pfizer’s last quarterly earnings call. During the event, Pfizer executives announced that the company’s coronavirus vaccine was projected to bring in $15 billion this year alone from sales, of which $4 billion would be purely profit. The estimate would make the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine, according to observers, one of the highest-grossing pharmaceutical products of all time.

Those revenue projections are based on prices largely negotiated with governments under pandemic conditions, which could soon change. Pfizer, in its latest investor disclosures, revealed that it received advance payments for its vaccine totaling $957 million as of December 31. In the U.S., the company has agreed to a price of $19.50 per vaccine dose or $39 per patient based on a two-dose series. In the European Union, the company charges a higher rate, nearly $64 per dose. These figures, however, could increase. Pfizer’s pneumococcal vaccine, Prevnar 13, for instance, costs $200 per dose on the private market.

The company has faced calls for new price controls and to release the vaccine as a generic. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has demanded that Pfizer and other drugmakers share patents and intellectual property associated with the vaccine with the developing world in order to end the pandemic as fast as possible. The industry, through its vast network of lobbyists, has fiercely opposed the proposal, as well as similar calls for price regulations.

Pfizer Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla, during the investor call, said the company had little to worry about in terms of political opposition.

“We believe the industry has generated a great deal of goodwill with Congress and public opinion through our Covid-19 treatment and vaccine efforts,” said Bourla. He added that he looked forward to working with the Biden administration and members of Congress from both sides of the aisle.

Last year, many pharmaceutical companies pledged to temporarily suspend many ordinary pricing strategies in order to help end the coronavirus crisis. Moderna made waves last October when the company announced that it would not enforce certain intellectual property rights for its vaccine. AstraZeneca, whose vaccine has been approved abroad but not yet in the U.S., promised last year to only sell its vaccine on a nonprofit basis to the developing world “during the pandemic.”

But these promises have fallen short. Pfizer has reportedly pressed Latin American governments, including Argentina, to put up sovereign assets, such as embassy buildings and military bases, as collateral to cover the costs of lawsuits related to adverse effects of the vaccine.

AstraZeneca’s promises have been undercut by leaked agreements. In its deals with local manufacturers, AstraZeneca has stated that the company reserved the right to declare the end of the pandemic for pricing purposes. The Financial Times obtained a memorandum of understanding revealing that its promise not to profit from the vaccine during the pandemic would end as soon as July 1, 2021.

Moderna has not taken any steps to share vaccine intellectual property rights, manufacturing technology, or design and has declined to participate in the World Health Organization-backed fund to distribute low-priced vaccines to the developing world.

Moderna President Stephen Hoge, speaking at the Barclays Bank conference last week, similarly made clear that his company would remain sensitive to pricing concerns around affordability during the pandemic.

“Post-pandemic, as we get into those what I will call seasonal epidemics that you would expect to happen with a SARS-CoV-2 virus, we would expect more normal pricing based on value,” said Hoge.

Joseph Wolk, the executive vice president of Johnson & Johnson, speaking at the Raymond James Institutional Investors Conference this month, noted that investors could expect the company to reevaluate the vaccine for “pricing that’s much more in line with a commercial opportunity” when the pandemic is over.

Wolk noted that the end of the pandemic is a “fluid” question. The announcement, Wolk said, would come down to a percentage of people vaccinated, though he did not give any specific figures. The “pandemic period will be in place for the majority of this year, if not the entire piece of this year,” he continued, before making it clear that the declaration would be left to Johnson & Johnson.

“I think when we look at it, it’s not going to be something that’s dictated to us,” said Wolk.

The end of the pandemic may be declared by the World Health Organization or other international bodies. Drug firms, however, are not under a legal requirement to make prices based on the WHO’s determination.

Moderna and Johnson & Johnson did not respond to requests for comment regarding its pricing strategies and under what circumstances the firms would use to determine an end to the pandemic.

Asked for comment on when Pfizer would declare an end to the pandemic for pricing purposes, the firm instead released a statement from D’Amelio. “We are committed to the principle of equitable and affordable access for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine for people around the world,” said D’Amelio. “We have clearly stated in our public disclosures that we anticipate a pandemic phase that could last into 2022, where governments will be the primary purchasers of our vaccine.”

The vaccine makers’ vague promises around affordability, while retaining a monopoly control of vaccine technology financed by public entities, have unsettled public health watchdogs.

Achal Prabhala — coordinator for the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines — notes that the U.S. government alone, through Operation Warp Speed, has pumped $18 billion into vaccine makers, in addition to advance payments for vaccines, ensuring that the pharmaceutical industry would face no financial risk.

“You know, Americans are amazed that they’re getting vaccines for free,” said Prabhala. “And of course they’re not because they’ve already paid for them once and now they’re amazed that they’re not paying for them twice.”

The pharmaceutical industry has faced declining public approval over the last decade. But the pandemic has presented a golden opportunity, noted Prabhala.

“Even though companies like Pfizer, which has not made the vaccine available to 85 percent of the world’s population, are enjoying immense popularity in the U.S. and Europe because of the fact that they got the vaccines done fast, and they seem to work well. That’s an unusually good position for pharma, they’re not used to being thought of as saviors,” he added.

But the companies have held out on drastic or even slight price increases on the vaccines, Prabhala continued, because they are managing the potential for reputational risk. “It’s pretty interesting that they are now waiting for the opportune time to raise prices once enough people have been vaccinated,” he added.

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Last June, Noel Williams, the chief operations officer of Iowa Select Farms, a powerful pork company and the largest in Iowa, pulled into the parking lot of an empty housing complex typically used for the firm’s immigrant workforce.

He was there to transport Lucas Walker, a former truck driver for Iowa Select, to a meeting with Nick Potratz, an FBI agent from the Des Moines office of the bureau. That’s according to Walker, who had recently tried to report Iowa Select, his former employer, for mistreating animals. After The Intercept published leaked video of pigs being killed off en masse, Walker came under scrutiny.

Now, the FBI had a favor to ask: Would Walker become an informant? More specifically, they wanted him to help in an effort to investigate and undermine an activist group that had become a thorn in Iowa Select’s side. They even asked if he’d be willing to sell drugs.

The saga that brought him into contact with the FBI began when the 26-year-old grew frustrated with his former employer, Iowa Select, which is headquartered in his hometown of Iowa Falls. Walker thought the company was blatantly disregarding state “double stocking” rules, which limit the size and number of pigs that are held in an intensive animal feeding facility, letting overweight pigs crowd into pens far too small to hold them.

He was tired of what he saw as frequent rule-breaking and disregard for the well-being of the tens of thousands of hogs raised by Iowa Select. The company, in his view, seemed hellbent on expansion and profits, leading to rampant overcrowding and water pollution. That rapid expansion led to the annual production of 1.5 billion pounds of pork a year, a global leader before the pandemic. The novel coronavirus, however, closed regional slaughterhouses, creating a glut of pigs.

He decided to speak out and called state regulators.

Walker doesn’t fit the profile of an animal rights activist. The central Iowa-raised truck driver, who jokingly refers to himself as corn-fed with beer running through his veins, is a fervent Trump and NRA supporter who has spent years working in the state’s maze of hog production facilities. He describes himself as independent-minded with libertarian instincts, with a bit of a contrarian side suspicious of organized power.

“I’m not necessarily animal rights by any means,” said Walker in an interview with The Intercept. “I have a cattle herd — small calf herd — and my wife and myself have some free-range pigs ourselves.”

“It was a moral issue at the heart of it. … I’m the kind of person who knows right from wrong. It was a principled thing.”

The company, in Walker’s view, seemed hellbent on expansion and profits, leading to rampant overcrowding and water pollution.

Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources, the local farm regulator, Walker felt, did not seem to care about his concerns over the phone or show any interest in enforcement on a company like Iowa Select. Iowa, followed by North Carolina and Minnesota, is the largest pork-producing state in the country and infamously deferential to industry. Iowa officials have faced criticism for failing to regulate concentrated pork facilities for water pollution and poor animal welfare standards.

Jeff Hansen, the founder of Iowa Select, built the pork powerhouse first as a salesman, helping distribute modern farrowing crates, automatic feeders, and other livestock equipment to other pig farmers in the state. He built two companies at once: a turnkey construction firm known as Modern Hog Concepts, which helped farmers upgrade their barns into modern factory farms, and Iowa Select, which raised pigs for slaughter.

Along the way, as he grew his business empire, Hansen built close connections with Iowa’s political elite. In 1994, during a cycle in which Hansen was one of the largest campaign contributors to then-Gov. Terry Branstad, he had set aside employee money for campaign contributions to local Republicans. The resulting scandal forced lawmakers to return campaign funds to Iowa Select, but the company continued to grow.

The owners of Iowa Select, Jeff and his wife Debra Hansen, are still among the largest campaign contributors in the state, and close to Gov. Kim Reynolds. A recent donation of $50,000 brought the total the couple has donated to the governor to nearly $300,000.

The governor has maintained cozy ties to Iowa Select. Shortly after her election in 2018, Reynolds volunteered to auction off her time as a gift to the Hansen family foundation. In the early days of the pandemic, her administration arranged a Covid-19 testing site at a corporate office used by white-collar Iowa Select employees and foundation employees, raising concerns with one Polk County supervisor of special treatment for the campaign donor.

And Kayla Lyon, who Reynolds appointed to run the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, which inspects hog farms for compliance with animal welfare and environmental rules, is a former dairy industry official and agribusiness lobbyist. Lyon, in her previous capacity as an influence peddler in Des Moines, had worked to pass the 2012 “ag gag” law that criminalized recording at farm facilities, according to lobbyist disclosures. Lyon lobbied at a time when Iowa Select’s lobbyists in Des Moines pushed for the bill, records show.

The impetus for that bill, which was designed to criminally prosecute whistleblowers at factory farming operations, also started in part with Iowa Select. The year before the bill was signed into law, an animal rights activist group, Mercy for Animals, released an undercover video that showed Iowa Select workers ripping the testicles from conscious piglets, removing tails with dull clippers, and scores of sows in small confinement cages, appearing to suffer from untreated sores and other wounds.

The law, though later overturned by a federal court, was the first of its kind and rapidly inspired copycat legislation across the country.

Walker’s failed attempts to reach regulators, to report overcrowding in Iowa Select facilities, didn’t surprise him. “The DNR wasn’t very interested in talking about it,” said Walker. “They’re too big to be regulated.”

“There have been no recent enforcement actions against Iowa Select Farms. Nor are we aware of any complaints or allegations made to the DNR,” Alex Murphy, a spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, said in an email to The Intercept.

Walker, aware that he had few outlets for help, turned to the internet to research whistleblowing resources for factory farms. That’s how he found Direct Action Everywhere, the Berkeley, California-based group that has worked to expose the shocking treatment of animals in factory farms.

Soon after he came into contact with DxE, the novel coronavirus reached global pandemic status, shutting down slaughterhouses across the region. The glut of hogs, which suddenly became unprofitable, quickly ran up costs for the company. Iowa Select decided to mass slaughter thousands of pigs in a particularly brutal process called “ventilation shutdown,” or VSD. Workers sealed off airways while pumping steam into the barns, intensifying the heat — over the course of many hours — to the point at which the pigs die from suffocation and/or hyperthermia.

The process further horrified Walker, cementing his belief that Iowa Select had no concern for the animals they raised. The company, he argued, had the resources to mitigate the killing of healthy pigs. Iowa Select could have offered “some pigs to our neighbors to care for and raise.” But instead, the firm opted to gas thousands — a clear indication that they viewed animal life as disposable.

Walker decided to expose the VSD process to DxE and the media, leading to an investigation by The Intercept, which published a video of the process showing young pigs squealing as they slowly roasted to death.

The widely covered video set off a fury of controversy, bringing international attention to the gruesome mass slaughter. Following the news, DxE activists also picketed the home of Iowa Select’s founder and protested outside of company facilities. Several were arrested and charged after chaining themselves to the fence surrounding the Iowa Select facility in Grundy County that had used the VSD method to kill off its hogs.

Following the controversy, a group of members of Congress filed a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture criticizing the animal agriculture industry for using VSD methods during the pandemic. “The process is inhumane, distressing, and painful for the animals who can take many hours to die,” the letter noted. “Under no circumstances should producers be utilizing ventilation shutdown.”

It sparked an ethical debate within the animal agriculture and veterinary community. “The corporation spent over a month planning this tragedy, retrofitting the barn to close off the ventilation, and preparing workers for this gruesome task — who may suffer mental health consequences for having to partake in this practice,” charged an open letter by prominent veterinarians denouncing the actions of Iowa Select.

The publicity came as a shock to Iowa Select. Emails obtained through a public records request show that Iowa Select collaborated with trade groups to manage the fallout. Animal Agriculture Alliance, an industry group that provides crisis communications support to factory farming interests under scrutiny, flagged The Intercept story about the VSD mass killing of pigs. In response, alerts and social media posts about the story were sent to the National Pork Producers Council, a lobby group currently led by Jen Sorenson, the spokesperson for Iowa Select.

“As we know they have targeted Iowa Select,” noted Dallas Hockman, the vice president of industry relations at the National Pork Producers Council, referring to DxE. “I know they have been doing mass mailing, I have received number [sic] of calls from channel partners inquiring about it as well as questions on ventilation shutdown.” Hannah Thompson-Weeman, vice president of strategic engagement at Animal Agriculture Alliance, responded to note that her group was in the process of “contacting our FBI and DHS contacts to raise our concerns.”

They also zeroed in on the role of Walker.

Activists offer drinks and vegetarian sandwiches to workers finishing their shift as groups such as LA Animal Save, Slaughter Free Los Angeles, and Direct Action Everywhere demonstrate outside the Farmer John Slaughterhouse/Packing plant in Vernon, an industrial city five miles south of downtown Los Angeles, on Sept. 14, 2020.

Photo: Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

In June, Walker, who had been terminated following a trucking accident earlier that summer, was asked to return to the company to help fill out paperwork. When he arrived at the meeting, he says, he was asked to take his phone out and place it on the table. A private investigator hired by Iowa Select said that local police had obtained the phones of arrested DxE members, searched through their messages, and found Walker’s number. The investigator called his number, and his phone rang. He had been caught.

The discussion then went back and forth, Walker recounts, with Walker answering questions about his involvement with DxE. Satisfied with his answers, Walker was left with a few Subway sandwiches and asked if he could attend a meeting in a few days with an FBI agent.

The following week, Noel Williams, one of the Iowa Select executives who had been in the previous meeting, picked Walker up from his home and drove him to the meeting with the FBI agent, according to Walker.

The FBI agent, Nick Potratz, then started asking a series of questions about DxE: How are they funded? Do they run drugs or sell guns to finance their animal welfare activism?

Potratz then turned the conversation again to Walker. “Would you go to a protest and report back on if these are good people or bad people?” Walker remembers the agent asking. “Would you be willing to buy drugs, buy dope for the FBI?”

The FBI asked a series of questions about DxE: How are they funded? Do they run drugs or sell guns to finance their animal welfare activism?

During the conversation, Walker says, the men in the room quizzed Walker over what types of services he could provide to undermine the animal rights group. The FBI agent asked Walker if he would be comfortable engaging in recorded conversations with DxE’s spokesperson, Matt Johnson, who had been arrested and charged with a felony earlier that summer while demonstrating outside of one of Iowa Select’s pork production facilities — though the trespass charges were abruptly dropped last month. They asked Walker how well he could keep secrets, told him what rights he might have as an official FBI informant, and read him the agency’s guidelines for human sources — what the agent described as the “Ten Commandments” for becoming an informant.

Toward the end of the meeting, Williams said he had to leave, ironically to deal with an electrical malfunction that killed 15,000 sows. Without a ride, Walker took a lift home from the FBI agent at the meeting, who continued talking to him about how he could help the agency. He asked if Walker knew about any illegal bribes by farming interests to safety inspectors or other issues like that. The FBI agent also asked if Walker could attend a follow-up meeting with another agent who was in training. Walker agreed.

Mike German, a former FBI special agent who now serves as a fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, noted that the FBI may have been hoping to use a drug prosecution to build a network of more informants.

“That may be more in line with the assessment type of activity where they’re not trying to solve a drug distribution problem, but rather trying to find something they can use to coerce the next person to become an informant,” said German. “A buy-bust for some small amount of drugs to justify a local prosecution that can be used to leverage their participation in a bigger operation.”

“The FBI Omaha field office declines to comment,” wrote Amy Adams, an FBI spokesperson, in an email to The Intercept. Iowa Select spokesperson Jen Sorenson responded to multiple requests for comment with a statement that the company “will not be engaging in this story.”

Williams, the Iowa Select executive who brought Walker to the meeting with the FBI, declined over the phone to comment. Potratz, the FBI agent, referred questions to the FBI’s media office.

“The federal government knows that criminalizing peaceful speech activity is a sham, and that the general public is on our side,” said Matt Johnson, DxE’s spokesperson. “But they’re also beholden to the undue influence of companies like Iowa Select Farms. It’s telling to see the roundabout lengths they’ll resort to in trying to undermine our work — and keep the public from knowing the truth.”

The follow-up meeting, in an unmarked van at the local Hy-Vee grocery store, was another opportunity for the FBI to make a pitch. Walker described being brought to an FBI van in the Hy-Vee parking lot for another discussion over whether he would help surveil and engage DxE. Potraz was now joined by a colleague, and the two FBI agents went over the same set of questions, asking Walker if he was comfortable keeping his involvement secret and spying on DxE. Would he be willing to testify if an investigation came to that? He was again read the Department of Justice’s guidelines for informants.

Walker was not offered money, and the FBI did not explicitly coerce him, but the tenor of the meetings left him rattled.

During one phone call with an FBI agent from the meeting, Walker recalled asking whether he was under investigation or some other law enforcement inquiry. “He said he couldn’t confirm or deny,” Walker later said. It may have been a perfunctory response, but that uncertainty loomed over him like a dark shadow.

Direct Action Everywhere activists outside Iowa Select Farm’s rural Aplington, Iowa, facility on March 31, 2020.

Photo: Direct Action Everywhere

The FBI has long considered animal rights and environmental groups among the agency’s “highest domestic terrorism priorities,” a focus that has been shaped by industry pressure. In the past, FBI informants have been involved in campaigns to goad environmental activists into acts of terror and violence.

It’s part of a longer history of the FBI targeting nonviolent activist groups, including protesters affiliated with the anti-war movement and left-wing individuals who were planning to demonstrate the 2004 presidential conventions. In more recent years, the FBI, including agents from the Des Moines field office, worked closely with TigerSwan, a private security firm retained by Energy Transfer Partners, which sought to undermine support for demonstrators opposed to the Dakota Access pipeline.

DxE was already on the FBI’s radar. In 2017, agents from the FBI took extraordinary steps to pursue DxE over an action in which dying pigs were taken from a Smithfield Foods-owned facility and brought to an animal shelter. A six-car fleet of FBI agents in bulletproof vests obtained a warrant to raid animal sanctuaries in Utah and Colorado in search of piglets allegedly liberated by DxE’s volunteer activists.

The bureau has faced criticism over the years for lax oversight of its network of more than 15,000 informants, a figure that outnumbers agents in the field. Although FBI agents require probable cause before directly infiltrating organizations, those rules do not apply to informants. This loophole effectively incentivizes the FBI to use informants to infiltrate political or activist groups.

Ramzi Kassem, a professor at CUNY School of Law, where he directs CLEAR, a clinic that focuses on issues arising from the U.S. security state, also raised concerns about attempted recruitment.

“It’s one thing for the FBI to seed informants within suspected criminal organizations like the Mafia to act as the FBI’s eyes and ear,” said Kassem. “It’s an altogether different matter for the FBI to treat activist groups as though they were crime syndicates and to send in informants to not only be the FBI’s eyes and ears, but also its hands and wallet, too, instigating crimes that probably would not have taken place without FBI involvement. That is a highly questionable use of public funds.”

“It’s an altogether different matter for the FBI to treat activist groups as though they were crime syndicates.”

For the most part, the FBI has targeted left-leaning activism, including the infamous COINTELPRO initiative that involved the harassment of anti-Vietnam War leaders, civil rights organizers, and other supposedly subversive political organizations. But the agency has also, at times, targeted conservative-leaning groups, including efforts to use informants to infiltrate libertarian activist circles. The FBI also took the unusual step of planting an informant with then-candidate Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016 to investigate accusations of collusion with the Russian government.

Despite bipartisan criticism of the agency’s conduct, Congress has done little to impose new rules limiting the FBI’s power or its use of informants.

“Once they’ve recruited somebody, they can, with minimal oversight, deploy people in pretty dangerous situations,” said Diala Shamas, a staff attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “The recruitment process is a big black hole with little information and so much coercion.”

Many informants, said Shamas, face the threat of prosecution or are immigrants living in fear of deportation. The FBI uses legal vulnerabilities as leverage to coerce participation in the informant program.

But they had no such luck with Walker.

Walker eventually declined their offer. He found it odd that his former employer drove him to the meeting with the FBI, and that the FBI had sought to use its vast resources to go after a band of nonviolent activists.

The FBI agent, Walker said, seemed to have a chummy relationship with Iowa Select’s private investigator, who identified himself as a former law enforcement official. The entire arrangement appeared to be a show of deference to Iowa Select, a company that already had far too much power in Walker’s eyes.

Walker had gone to state regulators about other animal safety violations he believed Iowa Select had committed. He knew the company’s founders were among the biggest campaign contributors in the state. Now it seemed to Walker that even federal law enforcement officials were effectively in their pocket.

Months passed and Walker, after discussions with his wife, decided that he wanted to talk to the press a second time, this time using his name. The fact that Iowa Select could wield this power not only over its animals but also the political process and law enforcement agencies was too much.

Shortly after The Intercept reached out to the FBI for comment, Walker says, he suddenly received a call from one of the agents he had met. The call came from an unlisted number. The bureau no longer needed him as an informant, the agent said. Then the person hung up.

The post After Pork Giant Was Exposed for Cruel Killings, the FBI Pursued Its Critics appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.

Amazon, one of the largest corporations in the world, supplies state-of-the-art facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, provides the military with a range of technology services, and is now building out its security operation with over a dozen former FBI agents.

The tech conglomerate, which began as an online bookseller, is rapidly hiring for its global security center in Arizona. As the firm expands and faces new challenges, including increased antitrust scrutiny, counterfeiting issues, and pressure from worker activism, the company is staffing up with former FBI agents, with a focus on security and intelligence-gathering ability. From 2017 to 2020, the $1.6 trillion technology behemoth hired 20 former FBI agents, at least two of whom appear to be responsible for monitoring the labor-organizing activity of its workers to keep unions out.

Cindy Wetzstein, a former FBI agent brought onto Amazon’s security operations facility in Arizona last October, notes in her LinkedIn biography that she is an expert in “both tactical and strategic intelligence production.” Brian Brooks, now a senior official at Amazon’s national security division, previously served as a deputy assistant director at the FBI, where he specialized in the “deployment of advanced electronic surveillance tools.”

At least 26 ex-FBI agents and employees currently work at Amazon, holding positions in the security division, software development, human resources, and board of advisers, according to a review of LinkedIn. The company’s earliest hires were in 2007 and 2008 — for “Deputy Chief Information Security Officer and VP of Security Engineering” and “Chief Information Security Officer,” respectively — but hiring really started ramping up in 2019, when eight former law enforcement specialists were brought on board in security roles.

A wide variety of jobs fall under the umbrella of security. The company, whose cloud computing service, Amazon Web Services, is one of the largest web hosts in the world, has to ward off potential cyberattacks on its servers and work to prevent the theft of its array of merchandise. Hiring in the security division also includes monitoring employees, according to several job descriptions, and, in the past, has included tracking union activism. And the company’s embrace of former law enforcement officials follows a familiar path among other industries that have faced labor and activist pressure.

Reached for comment, an Amazon spokesperson noted in an email that the company routinely hires from a range of backgrounds. “Like most companies, we have a longstanding team that helps prepare for and manage matters such as natural disasters, inclement weather, power outages, and events like concerts or parades that could disrupt traffic or affect the safety and security of our buildings and our employees who work in them,” the spokesperson said.

Last year, after Amazon was caught trying to hire two “intelligence analysts” tasked with tracking “labor organizing threats” within and outside the company, it quietly filled those positions with two former FBI agents and hired four others.

The company had posted job listings seeking an “Intelligence Analyst” and “Sr Intelligence Analyst,” both based in Phoenix, to monitor and collect information on organized labor, activist groups, “hostile political leaders,” and other sensitive topics. Amazon deleted the job listings after fierce backlash from labor groups and the public.

The deleted listings, accessible on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, described the job duties and listed previous experience in “intelligence analysis and or watch officer skill set in the intelligence community, the military, law enforcement, or a related global security role in the private sector” among their preferred qualifications.

A company spokesperson told CNBC at the time that the job listing “was not an accurate description of the role — it was made in error and has since been corrected.” They did not say what was inaccurate about the listings, which had been up since early January.

Amazon filled jobs with identical titles later that year, hiring the former FBI special agent and supervisory intelligence analyst for its Arizona site. The company also hired former FBI officials for roles as a security engineer, two program managers, and a director for “Worldwide Compliance Operations.” The FBI official hired for the latter was previously an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force executive board member.

Amazon is still posting similar job listings for roles in its security division, but the language used to describe what these jobs actually entail is now much more ambiguous. As recently as last month, Amazon put up listings for security jobs at its Goodyear, Arizona, site requiring several years of military experience.

Amazon took down one listing for a “Program Manager” in their Global Security Operations Center after The Intercept reached out for comment. The job description involved monitoring employees’ work performance to ensure that they’re meeting the company’s goals, identifying “methods of addressing human performance through learning and advising appropriately when training is not the answer” and improving “training and delivery methods.”

Corporations seeking to monitor and disrupt perceived opponents have long drawn upon the expertise of former FBI agents. Major financial firms, casinos, and oil and gas companies have tapped a revolving door of retired FBI personnel, who offer ties to their former colleagues and services to track and undermine perceived corporate threats, including journalists and labor organizers.

In 2012, fearing a wave of labor activism, Walmart reportedly developed a centralized surveillance system headed by a former FBI officer named Ken Senser to track employees’ activities, sentiment, and political sympathies. When the company’s security analysts received word that Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were contemplating a protest of Walmart, it swiftly engaged the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and local police agencies.

The FBI’s early roots focused on suppressing labor activism on behalf of business interests. In 1919, the agency established its “General Intelligence Division” that mobilized “Red Squads” focused on disrupting labor organizing. The most famous of these is the Palmer Raids of 1919 and 1920, during which around 10,000 people were arrested over suspected ties to communist and labor radical groups. The raids, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolt in Russia, were targeted at the Industrial Workers of the World. At least 1,000 IWW members were later convicted under dubious charges under the Espionage Act that the union’s industrial organizing work was somehow part of a conspiracy to assist Germany during World War I.

Amazon has fended off unionization through a range of tactics, using common union-busting strategies while keeping its more aggressive investments under wraps. Leaked documents have revealed aspects of the company’s internal surveillance apparatus, showing how analysts keep close tabs on its own workforce, including by hiring operatives from Pinkerton, a spy agency known for being hostile to unions, to spy on workers in Europe, as Vice previously reported.

The company is now facing its biggest union push since 2014. On February 8, the National Labor Relations Board began mailing ballots to nearly 6,000 Amazon workers at the facility near Birmingham, Alabama, who will begin voting on whether to join the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. If enough of the workers vote in favor, they will become the first Amazon warehouse in the United States to unionize.

During the pandemic, Amazon workers in several warehouses across the country (and abroad) have ramped up their organizing, staging walk-offs and other labor actions to protest the firm’s abusive work practices: forcing grueling hours with little to no pay increase at a time of record profits.

The post Former FBI Officials Tapped for Amazon’s Growing Security Apparatus appeared first on The Intercept.

This post was originally published on The Intercept.