received<\/a> $456 million for vaccine development last March, and then an additional $1 billion in August in exchange for providing one hundred million doses to the federal government. The company expects to have the US doses ready by April.<\/p>\nPfizer received an advance purchase commitment from the federal government in July of about $2 billion for one hundred million doses, and signed an agreement to provide an additional one hundred million doses for the same amount in December.<\/p>\n
Trinity Health, which filed the Pfizer resolution on behalf of the ICCR, wrote in an accompanying letter: “Although advance purchase commitments do not directly fund vaccine development, they reduce the risk associated with it.”<\/p>\n
BioNTech, the company Pfizer worked with to develop its COVID-19 vaccine, also received funding from the German government.<\/p>\n
Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer additionally argued in their no-action request that they have already “substantially implemented” the shareholder proposals by posting information on their websites about vaccine pricing.<\/p>\n
That information isn’t sufficient, says Jones-Monteiro. “What they’re missing is the answer to the question we’ve asked, which is, how do you take government funding into account?” she said.<\/p>\n\n \n \n
\n Intellectual Property Rights<\/h2>\n \n
While the government funded research and development of COVID-19 vaccines and minimized risks with advance purchase commitments, the vaccines also contain wholly publicly developed technologies, raising questions about intellectual property rights.<\/p>\n
In November, Public Citizen issued a report finding that the Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson vaccines were developed using a spike protein technology that had been discovered by scientists at the National Institutes of Health. “Years of public investment have fueled the rapid advancement of COVID-19 vaccine candidates,” the watchdog group wrote.<\/p>\n
“Already, Janssen’s agreements with [US health officials] have been criticized for limiting the government’s intellectual property rights,” Oxfam wrote in its Johnson & Johnson letter, which it said “could place a chokehold on mass production commensurate with global need \u2014 increasing price, decreasing overall supply and preventing universal access.”<\/p>\n
Wealthy countries comprising 16 percent of the global population currently have over 60 percent of the world’s vaccine doses. Sharing or suspending intellectual property rights would allow increased production of the vaccine and make it easier for poorer countries to vaccinate their populations.<\/p>\n
Under the current arrangement, countries whose populations participated in vaccine trials are facing vastly inadequate vaccine supplies. And the world’s richest countries have been blocking a proposal at the World Trade Organization by India and South Africa to waive vaccine patents in order to allow more widespread production of the vaccine.<\/p>\n
“You need enough doses to create global herd immunity, and right now, we don’t have enough doses, and they are controlled by rich countries, which creates this situation of vaccine imperialism,” Lusiani, the Oxfam adviser, said.<\/p>\n
Lusiani said the vaccine pricing issues pose potential risks to investors. “You can imagine the reputational risk of Johnson & Johnson receiving over a billion dollars in public money, and then raising the price once the pandemic is over to astronomical levels,” he said, arguing it could lead investors to pull out of the company.<\/p>\n
Then, there are larger risks to the economy created by limited vaccine access. “Investors want everybody to get the vaccine so that the economy can rebound as people go back to work,” he said. The White House Council of Economic Advisers estimates that accelerating vaccination is worth $10 billion to the economy every day.<\/p>\n
Jones-Monteiro expects the SEC to make a decision on the no-action requests this month.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n
\n You can subscribe to David Sirota\u2019s investigative journalism project, the\u00a0Daily Poster<\/em>,\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThis post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the US government awarded over $10 billion in contracts and advance purchase commitments to drug companies working on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, it did not require the recipients of government money to agree to offer their products at fair prices or share intellectual property rights to enable faster production. Now, two of the companies [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1641,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22090"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1641"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22091,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22090\/revisions\/22091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}