Leonard Robert
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Na CORONA tunahitaji mjadala Kama huu
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Albaab
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EDITORS' PICK|May 14, 2021,04:30pm EDT|7,312 views
How The Covid-19 Vaccine Injected Billions Into Big Pharma—And Made Its Executives Very Rich
Nina Burleigh
Contributor
Forbes Digital CoversContributor Group
Business
Two Heads: Billionaire BioNTech cofounders Ozlem Tureci and Ugur Sahin.
POOL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
An exclusive excerpt from Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic by Nina Burleigh
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Big Pharma had been easing out of the vaccine business for decades. By 2019, the major vaccine makers supplying America had dwindled to a handful of large companies—Merck, Sanofi, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson. Because vaccines are only used once or twice—as opposed to medicines that people take daily—they are not profitable. The scale of vaccination programs also invites class action litigation if something goes awry.
The White House needed a whopping amount of money to coax companies to research and test and then produce hundreds of millions of doses. They initially asked for and Congress rapidly appropriated $10 billion. Ultimately, Operation Warp Speed (OWS)—the U.S. government’s Covid-19 relief program—would dole out $22 billion to Big Pharma.
The amounts of money were the kinds of sums normally seen in the smaller defense budget line items, but were massive for a public health project—$2.5 billion to Moderna, $1.2 billion to AstraZeneca, half a billion dollars to Johnson & Johnson, and $1.6 billion to a small company called Novavax. Only Pfizer opted out of ponying up to the trough at first—it didn’t want to devote resources to coordinating with the US government on its work.
In July, Pfizer signed a $1.95 billion deal to sell one hundred million doses of its two-shot vaccine to the United States, enough for fifty million people. It would be the first to reach American arms. The price per double shot—about forty dollars—is comparable to the price per shot of the flu vaccine. By February, the government had ordered three hundred million doses from Moderna, with its first shipment of one hundred million priced at thirty dollars per double-shot dose—cheaper than Pfizer partly because the United States had forked over nearly a billion dollars to Moderna research. Moderna’s CEO has said the price per dose will be higher for retail once the government contracts phase out.
Because the project worked, it may well elude financial investigation.
OWS was staffed at every level by pharmaceutical industry executives and their revolving door of allies in the government. They could, if they wished, keep their investments thanks to a special exemption. Brought on as “contractors,” they were not subject to federal conflict-of-interest regulations in place for employees. OWS advisers with connections and investments had to agree to assign some of their Covid vaccine earnings to the NIH—but they could wait to do so until after their deaths.
OWS was staffed at every level by pharmaceutical industry executives and their revolving door of allies in the government. They could, if they wished, keep their investments thanks to a special exemption. Brought on as “contractors,” they were not subject to federal conflict-of-interest regulations in place for employees. OWS advisers with connections and investments had to agree to assign some of their Covid vaccine earnings to the NIH—but they could wait to do so until after their deaths.
Former Big Pharma executive Moncef Slaoui sat on the board of Moderna. Thirteen days after the first massive infusion of taxpayer money into its coffers—which triggered a jump in the company’s stock price—Slaoui was awarded options to buy 18,270 shares in the company, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings first reviewed by Kaiser Health News. Those shares were added to 137,168 options he’d accumulated since 2018. He reaped an estimated $8 million when he resigned from the Moderna board.
Among the other known connections between OWS and Big Pharma cash: OWS advisers and Pfizer employees William Erhardt and Rachel Harrigan maintained financial stakes of unknown value in Pfizer, the recipient of a nearly $2 billion HHS contract for one hundred million doses of its vaccine. Richard Whitley, an adviser on the vaccine safety panel, is associated with Gilead, maker of the Covid antiviral agent remdesivir. Adviser Carlo de Notaristefani is connected to Teva, maker of the Trump-approved hydroxychloroquine. Former FDA commissioners Dr. Scott Gottlieb and Dr. Mark McClellan, informally advising the federal response, both have seats on the boards of Covid vaccine developers.
Even more money was raining down on company insiders trading on good-news releases. Executives at Moderna and Pfizer cashed in on the vaccine, selling shares timed precisely to clinical trial press releases.
Timing stock sales like that is neither unusual nor illegal. Columbia Law School economist Joshua Mitts has found that execs in many sectors are up to three times more likely to sell o their company stock on days when their companies announce positive news than on days when negative, neutral, or no news is released.
The Big Shot: Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer
JAMEL TOPPIN/THE FORBES COLLECTION
On November 9, the day Pfizer announced its more than 90 percent vaccine efficacy, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla sold more than half of his holdings—62 percent. It was a good day to sell—the positive news jacked stock prices 15 percent. Bourla was among seven Pfizer executives who collectively earned $14 million from stock sales in 2020, according to data provided to the Los Angeles Times by Equilar, an executive compensation and corporate governance data firm.
Not to be outdone, Moderna executives made $287 million from timed stock sales in 2020—and kept going. In just a few days in late January and February 2021, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel sold millions of dollars’ worth of his stock.
The Trump administration’s best and brightest Covid solution—throw public money at private industry with almost no oversight of the contracting procedure—will stand as one of the most audacious efforts in the administration’s free market ideological playbook. The full roster of this pharmaceutical windfall club will probably never be revealed.
The pandemic crisis offered a challenge that government might have used to restructure the shareholder model of for-profit medicine, a model that dates to the 1980s and corporate America’s turn toward putting shareholders above the public good. Instead, taxpayer money flowed to a small group of capitalists with almost no strings attached and little transparency. The contracts are redacted, although Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests are pending.
As cities across the nation started vaccinating at the end of 2020, the media sought out and hailed some of the researchers as heroes. And they are heroes. But most researchers would not cash in. The NIH’s Barney Graham, whose work on molecular protein manipulation is key to the Moderna vaccine, gets paid a government salary. Moderna execs, besides pocketing nearly a billion dollars, will still charge Americans for its vaccine.
Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian biochemist whose research was crucial in developing the BioNTech-Pfizer vaccine, doesn’t hold the patent for her discovery; the University of Pennsylvania does. BioNTech founders Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, however, have profited significantly. Today the married doctors (top) are billionaires, among Germany’s richest people. They sold their company Ganymed Pharmaceuticals in 2016 for $1.4 billion.
In 2020, the US government spent $18 billion on vaccine research, manufacturing, and logistics and approved two for use at the end of the year: the mRNA-platformed Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The eleven-month concept-to-emergency-approval process set a record in American vaccine history. Nothing else even came close.
Besides the mRNA vaccines, US taxpayers had bet billions on Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, and AstraZeneca, the British company. Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, like the Chinese and Russian vaccine efforts, were making vector vaccines—a newer vaccine model than the attenuated virus model in vogue since the days of the cowpox—using virus modified so that it can enter cells, but cannot replicate itself. The vector vaccines use viruses that the body is familiar with—usually an adenovirus that causes the common cold—to deliver genetic information about specific disease into cells.
In February 2021, Johnson & Johnson reported that its single-shot vaccine, made from an adenovirus carrying Covid spike protein DNA, had a 72 percent efficacy rate. AstraZeneca produced a vaccine also based on a manipulated adenovirus that was already in use in the United Kingdom by February, despite a series of clinical trial mishaps. Novavax, the small Maryland-based company that took $1.6 billion from the US government to produce a protein-based vaccine using material from the soap bark tree as an adjuvant, was bringing up the rear, but promised to have one hundred million doses available in the United States by summer.
By late 2020, a year after Covid showed up in Wuhan, 200 vaccines were in trials or already in use, according to the WHO—another world record in vaccine history. China’s Sinovac was first out of the gate with its inactivated Covid vaccine in June 2020. Another Chinese company, Sinopharm, started tests in the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Brazil during summer and made its first sale to the UAE, which began manufacturing it. By early 2021, the UAE was second in the world (behind Israel) in the percentage of its population that had received a vaccination.
The Chinese vaccine dominated the global market, stepping into a soft power vacuum left by US isolationism and pandemic mishaps. By early 2021, three Chinese vaccines were approved and in use, manufactured by Sinovac, Sinopharm, and CanSino—all either based on the adenovirus model or the attenuated Covid virus. In August, Sinovac announced an agreement to sell forty million doses to Indonesia. In February, Hungary became the first European Union country to approve the Sinopharm vaccine for use—after the European Union faced shortages due to the European Commission’s inability to cut a deal quickly with vaccine makers in 2020.
In February 2021, the Russian Ministry of Health reported that a vaccine called Sputnik V, based on the vector platform, had a 91.6 percent efficacy rate. Mexico immediately authorized it for use. Canada, Turkey, and South Korea were all testing their own vaccines, and even Cuba had produced a viable vaccine and was reportedly offering it to tourists. Bharat Biotech’s inactivated virus vaccine was approved for emergency use in India. Meanwhile, the Serum Institute of India—the world’s largest vaccine-producing factory—was scheduled to manufacture one billion doses of vaccine, mostly for poorer nations.
To be sure, these endeavors did not all meet the standards that Moderna and Pfizer had set. Few in the Western world fully trust official Russian and Chinese numbers about anything. In January 2021, Brazil announced Sinovac’s efficacy at 78 percent. A week later, the country revised that to “above 50 percent”—still high enough to meet WHO goals, but the swing from high to merely adequate efficacy nonetheless gives us pause.
SEVEN STORIES PRESS
Inevitably, the race to the vaccine took on a nationalistic flavor. In August, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced on national state television that Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine (named after the USSR’s landmark launching of the world’s first artificial satellite—plus a “V” for vaccine) was “quite effective,” even though it hadn’t made it to a phase three trial. The Brits took to calling the Oxford-developed AstraZeneca shot “the English one,” and in Germany,
Pfizer—which received early German funding—was called “the German one” with pride.
But the challenge also spawned some intriguing collaborations, suggesting that the virus could inspire the notion of a brotherhood of nations and corporations on the fractious planet. Russia and the United Kingdom, for example, announced they were going to pool their adenovirus vaccines into a single vac- cine, to see if the combination amplified efficacy. GSK, based in Britain, and the French company Sanofi, usually competitors, joined forces, putting their combined Big Pharma financial and manufacturing capacity behind a vaccine. And, in March 2021, the White House brokered a collaboration to manufacture vaccines between Merck and Johnson & Johnson.
The flurry of research and collaboration has even led to scientists not just talking about but being on the verge of testing a pan-coronavirus vaccine made of nanoparticles studded with corona proteins, which would be effective against all coronaviruses—even the one that causes the common cold. Imagine a world without the common cold. Can vanquishing death and taxes be far behind?
Adapted from Virus by Nina Burleigh, published by Seven Stories Press. © 2021 by the author.
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Albaab
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Top 10 vaccine manufacturers in the world
Malini T26 April 2021, 11:13 am
Coronavirus vaccines on the production line: World's largest vaccine companies
Until the coronavirus pandemic hit humanity hard, information about pharmaceutical companies and vaccine producers was not sought often. But now, more than ever, their credibility makes all the difference to the human race.
Here's a look at the 10 biggest vaccine makers in the world as of 2021:
Curevac
CureVac N.V. is a German biopharmaceutical company, legally domiciled in the Netherlands and headquartered in Tübingen, Germany, that develops therapies based on messenger RNA (mRNA). The company's focus is on developing vaccines for infectious diseases and drugs to treat cancer and rare diseases. In January 2021, CureVac announced a clinical development collaboration for its COVID-19 vaccine, named CVnCoV (active ingredient zorecimeran), with the multinational pharmaceutical company, Bayer. As of December 2020, CVnCoV was in a Phase III clinical trial of 36,500.
Total market cap: $19.153 billion
Total revenue: $19.49 million
Total assets of the company in 2019: $64.18 million
Number of employees: less than 500
Biontech
BioNTech SE (short for Biopharmaceutical New Technologies) is a German biotechnology company based in Mainz that develops and manufactures active immunotherapies for patient-specific approaches to the treatment of diseases. It develops pharmaceutical candidates based on messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) for use as individualised cancer immunotherapies, as vaccines against infectious diseases and as protein replacement therapies for rare diseases, and also engineered cell therapy, novel antibodies and small molecule immunomodulators as treatment options for cancer.
In 2020, BioNTech, in conjunction with Pfizer, developed the RNA vaccine BNT162b2 for preventing COVID-19 infections, which offers a 95% efficacy. On 2 December 2020, temporary HMR authorisation was granted by the United Kingdom government for BNT162b2 vaccinations within the UK. It was the first mRNA vaccine ever authorized. Some days later the vaccine also got an emergency approval in the United States, Canada, and Switzerland. On 21 December 2020, the European Commission approved BioNTech/Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine in accordance with the positive recommendation of the European Medicines Agency (EMA)
Total market cap: $29.26 billion
Total revenue: $131.43 million
Total assets of the company in 2019: $965.39 million
Number of employees: 1,323
Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products
Chongqing Zhifei Biological Products Co., Ltd. is a China-based organisation primarily occupied with the exploration, improvement, creation, sale, and distribution of Vaccine items. The Company's main items include bacterial vaccines, biological products for the prevision and treatment of tuberculosis, and other biological products. In 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic just broke out, the Company took initiative to donate RMB10 million to Hubei Province for pandemic control.Total market cap: $37.52 billion
Total revenue of the company: $1.657 billion
Total assets of the company in 2019: $1.278 billion
Number of employees: 2,972
Moderna
Moderna is an American pharmaceutical and biotechnology company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It focuses on drug discovery, drug development, and vaccine technologies based on messenger RNA (mRNA). Moderna's technology platform inserts synthetic nucleoside-modified mRNA (modRNA) into human cells using a coating of lipid nanoparticles. This mRNA then reprograms the cells to prompt immune responses. It is a novel technique, abandoned by other manufacturers due to concerns about the toxicity of lipid nanoparticles at high or frequent doses.
In November 2020, it was announced that the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine candidate (codenamed mRNA-1273), had shown preliminary evidence of 94% efficacy in preventing COVID-19 disease in a Phase III trial, with only minor flu-like side effects. This led to its submission for emergency use authorisation (EUA) as a COVID-19 vaccine in Europe, the United States, and Canada. On December 18, 2020, mRNA-1273 was issued an EUA in the United States. On December 23, 2020, it was authorised for use in Canada. On January 6, 2021, it was authorised for use in the European Union. On January 8, 2021, mRNA-1273 was authorised for use in the United Kingdom. On March 15, 2021, mRNA-1283 was started for the phase I clinical trial.
Total market cap: $44.616 billion
Total revenue: $94.47 million
Total assets of the company in 2019: $1.924 billion
Number of employees: 1000+
Glaxo Smith Kline
GlaxoSmithKline plc (GSK) is a British multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in London, England.[3] Established in 2000 by a merger of Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham, GSK was the world's sixth largest pharmaceutical company according to Forbes as of 2019, after Pfizer, Novartis, Roche, Sanofi, and Merck & Co. In July 2020, the UK government signed up for 60 million doses of a COVID-19 vaccine developed by GSK and Sanofi. It uses a recombinant protein-based technology from Sanofi and GSK's pandemic technology. The companies claimed to be able to produce one billion doses, subject to successful trials and regulatory approval, during the first half of 2021. The company also agreed to a $2.1 billion deal with the United States to produce 100 million doses of the vaccine.Total market cap: $96.115 billion
Total revenue of the company: $40.832 billion
Total assets of the company in 2019: $96.403 billion
Number of employees: 99,437
Sanofi
Sanofi S.A. is a French multinational pharmaceutical country settled in Paris, France, as of 2013 the world’s fifth-biggest company by sales. In February, Sanofi began working with BARDA to utilize its recombinant DNA stage to test a preclinical immunization candidate for COVID-19. Sanofi together with GSK signed a deal with US government's Operation Warp Speed to provide 100 million doses COVID-19 vaccine for up to 2.1 billion USD, if the vaccine is approved. Sanofi plans to start Phase 1 clinical testing only in September and expects emergency use approval in first half 2021.Total market cap: $121.45
Total revenue of the company: $43.70 billion
Total assets of the company in 2019: $136.377 billion
Number of employees: 100,409
AstraZeneca
AstraZeneca plc is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company. Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge, England.It has a portfolio of products for major diseases in areas including oncology , cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, infection, neuroscience, respiratory, and inflammation. It is perhaps best known for its involvement in developing the Oxford-Astrazeneca COVID-19 vaccine.Total market cap:$133.055 billion
Total revenue of the company: $23.565 billion
Total assets of the company in 2019: $61.377 billion
Number of employees: 70,600
Merck
Merck and Co., Inc., d.b.a. Merck Sharp and Dohme (MSD) outside the United States and Canada, is an American worldwide pharmaceutical company based in New Jersey. Medically significant antibodies created at Merck incorporate the first-ever mumps vaccine, the primary rubella vaccine, and the main trivalent measles, mumps, rubella (MMR vaccine).Total market cap: $210.068 billion
Total revenue of the company: $46.840 billion
Total assets of the company in 2019: 84.397 billion
Number of employees: 71000
Pfizer
Pfizer Inc. is an American worldwide pharmaceutical enterprise. It is positioned 64 on the 2020 Fortune 500 rundown of the biggest United States Corporation on basis of total revenue. Headquartered in Manhattan, Pfizer develops and produces medicines and vaccines for a wide range of medical disciplines, including immunology, oncology, cardiology, endocrinology, and neurology.
In May 2020, Pfizer began testing four different COVID-19 vaccine variations. It planned to expand human trials to thousands of test patients by September 2020. The pharma company injected doses of the potential vaccine BNT162b2, which was developed by the German biotechnology company BioNTech, into the first human participants in the U.S. in early May. Based on the results, Pfizer said they "will be able to deliver millions of doses in the October time frame" and expects to produce hundreds of millions of doses in 2021.
Total market cap: $206.383 billion
Total revenue of the company: $51.750 billion
Total assets of the company in 2019: $167.489 billion
Number of employees: 88,300
Johnson & Johnson
Johnson and Johnson (J&J) is an American global corporation established in 1886 that creates medical devices, consumer goods, and pharmaceuticals. It is viewed as a central participant in the COVID-19 vaccine race.
Total market cap: $421.312 billion
Total revenue of the company in 2019: $82.059 billion
Total assets of the company in 2019: $157.728 billion
Number of employees: 132,200
Albaab
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Kwa kimombo wanasema "it's all about the money"
The pharmaceutical industry is responsible for the research, development, production, and distribution of medications. The market has experienced significant growth during the past two decades, and pharma revenues worldwide totaled 1.25 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019.
Statista - The Statistics Portal › topics › g...
The pharmaceutical industry is responsible for the research, development, production, and distribution of medications. The market has experienced significant growth during the past two decades, and pharma revenues worldwide totaled 1.25 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019.
Statista - The Statistics Portal › topics › g...
Global pharmaceutical industry - statistics & facts | Statista
Hiv mkuu Deception bado yupo au kapotea?
Querido
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Mkuu natamani tutumie mtizamo wa miaka
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