As USA Today and other news sources reported last Thursday,
“Governments have poured billions of dollars into helping drug companies develop vaccines and are spending billions extra to purchase doses. However, the particulars of these offers largely stay secret, with governments and public well-being organizations acquiescing to drug firm calls for secrecy.”
Also, the government signed contracts offering Big Pharma “liability shields” that protect the drug manufacturers in case their vaccines turn out to cause severe health consequences. The contracts also give drug companies favorable ownership rights through lucrative patents and provide language stating a commitment to keep the details secret.
The USA Today report stated, “In some situations, nations are prohibited from donating or re-selling doses, a ban that would hamper efforts to get vaccines to poor nations.”
Drug Lords Reap Billions
Going back to 30 March, when it became clear the U.S. had the most confirmed coronavirus cases in the world, Forbes reported, “The Trump administration is spending nearly half a billion dollars on one company in the race to find a coronavirus vaccine.” The company, Johnson & Johnson’s Pharmaceuticals, hadn’t even started any clinical trials at the time.
By 22 July, CNN published the headline:
The U.S. government and Pfizer reach $1.95 billion deal to produce millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses
The article quoted Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla: “We’ve been committed to making the impossible possible by working tirelessly to develop and produce in record time a safe and effective vaccine to help bring an end to this global health crisis.”
As for making a profit, Bourla said last summer at a conference, “I think that the price of the vaccine was something that I never thought [about] because as I said we never put calculations – this is how much it will cost us, this is how much we are going to make. We only put calculations that we may save the world.”
Just four days later, the Pfizer CEO reacted angrily in a Barron’s interview to the notion that his company shouldn’t profit handsomely for creating a vaccine:
“I think it’s very wrong. You need to be very fanatic and radical to say something like that right now… Who is finding the solution? The private sector found the solution for diagnostics, and the private sector found the solution for therapeutics and is along [the] way to find more solutions for therapeutics and vaccines. So how can you say something like that? Doesn’t make sense.”
TRENDPOST: Dr. Bourla failed to mention the free government money vaccine producers receive and the secret agreements to overcharge that the government ignores.
According to Pfizer’s website, the CEO of the vaccine producer, Dr. Albert Bourla, quoted above, is a doctor of veterinary medicine who “began his role at Pfizer in 1993 in the Animal Health Division… He held positions of increasing responsibility within Animal Health across Europe before moving to Pfizer’s New York Global Headquarters in 2001.”
According to an article published in The Guardian on 10 November, “The US drug maker Pfizer and the German biotech firm BioNTech stand to bring in nearly $13 billion in global sales from their coronavirus vaccine next year, which will be evenly split between the two companies, according to analysts at the US investment bank Morgan Stanley.”