Gangsters hoarding vaccines. COVID-19 patients in US hospitals surpasses 100,000 for the first time

COVID-19 patients in American hospitals has surpassed 100,000 for the first time as supply networks will be attacked by gangsters hijacking supplies, and there will inevitably be the problems of guaranteed purity and authenticity. Distribution will get compromised and regulation will be stressed.

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CNN: The United States reported at least 2,658 coronavirus deaths on Wednesday, the highest number of new deaths in a single day since the pandemic began.

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Interpol is warning countries to be on high alert for organized crime networks attempting to get their hands on the coronavirus vaccine https://t.co/KnnRaivfp1— BuzzFeed News (@BuzzFeedNews) December 2, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic has inspired a great deal of scientific research into developing a COVID-19 vaccine. Developing a vaccine is one thing, but making it widely available is another issue—one that involves thorny questions of ethics, intellectual property rights, global trade and recouping research costs.

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📣 BREAKING: INTERPOL has issued a global alert to law enforcement across its 194 member countries warning them to prepare for organized crime networks targeting #COVID19 vaccines, both physically and online.

Details: https://t.co/okGpgNJpIy pic.twitter.com/LSKoEb2LHC

— INTERPOL (@INTERPOL_HQ) December 2, 2020

(April 2020)

As COVID-19 has revealed, even some of the wealthiest countries in the world were totally unprepared to deal with a pandemic. One prominent issue has been national shortages of vital medical products and technologies, coupled in many countries with a lack of domestic production capacity. Dependent on global supply chains at a time of unprecedented demand, governments have tried to persuade (or even require) domestic manufacturers to increase production or to begin manufacturing everything from medical ventilators right down to disposable gloves and gowns, with mixed results. At the same time, many producing countries have imposed export restrictions to prevent domestically-manufactured products being sold abroad.

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Vaccine development has long been characterised by profound market failure (or, more accurately, the failures that happen when markets behave as we would expect). Amongst other things, reliance on the market has resulted in vaccine development for emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases (ERIDs) not being prioritised.

One reason is the high costs involved in the development of new vaccines, with estimates of the cost of a single vaccine being up to $1.1 billion once the costs of unsuccessful R&D efforts is factored in. Pharmaceutical companies can generate a much greater return on investments by focussing on other markets.

A second problem is perhaps even more acute: the problem of ‘missing markets’. Most ERIDS primarily afflict lower income countries, whose governments and populations are simply too poor to provide the ‘effective demand’ that would make it economically rational for pharmaceutical companies to focus on diseases such as Lassa fever, Nipah virus, Chikungunya or – until recently – Ebola virus. COVID-19 is relatively unusual for an ERID in having had a major impact on rich countries too. But even so, there will be enormous political pressure for a vaccine to be patent free, and some countries may impose compulsory licensing. Significant profits are certainly not guaranteed.

Third, vaccine production (even more so than other pharma markets) is dominated by an oligopoly of four firms: GSK, Sanofi, Merck and Pfizer. These firms sit atop a pyramid of smaller public and private research enterprises, including universities and small biotech firms. Although there has been a gradual growth of smaller producers around the world, these four are the only forms with the real capacity to bring new vaccines to market and produce them at huge scale. This commercial dominance has had significant downstream effects on who is researching what, and where.

Finally, for new diseases like COVID-19, we cannot by definition have a vaccine ready in advance. The race to rapidly create one requires the rapid and open sharing of information and data, the command of platform technologies and production facilities, and the type of coordination that market competition between firms does not engender.

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