Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen's Peter Maybarduk about global vaccination for the April 2, 2021, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: The availability of Covid vaccines at corner drugstores, here in New York City and elsewhere, reports that nursing homes in the US are seeing steep declines in new Covid cases after being prioritized for vaccines, and maybe just the arrival of spring, have many folks hopeful that we're nearing the end of the worst of the coronavirus pandemic. But, as ever, we have to ask, who’s “we,”exactly?
UN Secretary General António Guterres was among those complaining in February that 10 countries have monopolized 75% of the world's Covid-19 vaccines; meanwhile, people in more than 130 countries were yet to receive a single dose.
For many people, the pandemic was undeniable evidence of what is always true: that we are interdependent, physically as well as societally; that while problems can be global, protections are not; and that when profit making and public health collide, you need to pick a side.
What stands in the way of our using that awareness to shape global access to vaccines? Joining us now by phone is Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Global Access to Medicines Program. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Peter Maybarduk.
JJ: Let's talk about what's possible, and compare it with what's happening. You produced research showing how the US could basically get everyone on the planet vaccinated with targeted investment. And, obviously, doing that now is better than any time other than now. It wasn't a moral appeal, though that's entirely appropriate; it was a plan of how this could actually happen, right?
PM: Absolutely. So we think an investment of $25 billion would be sufficient to produce 8 billion doses of mRNA Covid vaccine in a little more than a year's time, which is timely to shorten the pandemic, because many people in low- and middle-income countries are potentially going to be waiting until 2024 for a vaccine. And it's actually not entirely clear that we're on track to vaccinate everyone in the world, ever, as opposed to just run into a long-term problem of boosters with endemic Covid.
So we think that there is a need to inject ambition, and set up new production lines with a small capital investment--we think about $2 billion to do that--and for the Biden administration to call on drug makers and other world leaders, and say: We can do this. We can actually produce more than we currently have planned to produce, if we share vaccine recipes, if we pool the available facilities, if we put what really is a very modest amount of money in, compared to the economic cost of the pandemic.
JJ: Yeah, $25 billion—I'll just note: the 2020 military budget was $721 billion. And then, we're talking about something that would pay for itself. And we're not talking about charity, you know?
Let me just draw you out: What are the global dynamics, or relationships, in play? We have wealthy countries sitting on vaccines, or the recipe for vaccines? And then, that “wealthy versus less wealthy countries” is also interlaced with a tension between private profit and public health. What's going on there?
Peter Maybarduk: "If we don't ramp up manufacturing quickly, with some new investments and some high-level political leadership now, a million more people will die."
PM: It's true that wealthy countries are sitting both on doses and on recipes. Donations are going to become a very big issue in the United States shortly, because we're actually, amazingly, going to have a surplus of vaccines in the United States at some point over the summer, and there will be a discussion of what to do with those excess doses.
And we think they should be equitably allocated to people in low- and middle-income countries in the COVAX initiative. However, it's very important to note that that, on its own, will not be anywhere near enough to meet the scale of global need. And if we don't ramp up manufacturing quickly, with some new investments and some high-level political leadership now, a million more people will die than would otherwise be the case, and trillions of dollars will be lost. So it's critically important.
One of the greatest public health/private profit tensions in this story is the value of “vaccine recipes” and vaccine technology. A company like Moderna isn't thinking only about the value of its mRNA vaccine—which is actually an NIH, a publicly developed vaccine, in partnership with Moderna, paid for by taxpayers over many years already. But they're thinking about the value of future products: They're thinking that their recipes and their techniques, their production techniques, the specifics of their platform technologies—that's the long-term value plan for the company, and so they don't want to share with the world, openly, how that is done.
But there are solutions to that, including paying the companies appropriate compensation for disclosure of that technology, essentially buying out the know-how. We can afford, at this moment in time, collectively, to pay some appropriate amount to companies and investors that are truly making innovation happen. But what we can't afford is commercial secrecy, fragmenting of a supply ecosystem, limiting how far we can scale up vaccine access—and that's what's happening today.
JJ: I would refer folks to Lee Fang’s reporting for the Intercept, where he has Pfizer CFO Frank D’Amelio saying, “As this shifts from pandemic to endemic, we think there’s an opportunity here for us,” and the Johnson & Johnson executive VP Joseph Wolk is telling investors that they'll “reevaluate the vaccine for ‘pricing that's much more in line with a commercial opportunity’ when the pandemic is over.” It's important to note that they think they're in charge of saying when the pandemic is over.
When we talked last, I think, we were talking about Donald Trump; he’s a sociopath, straight-up saying, "to heck with COVAX; us for us!" That's not the tone or the message, certainly, in the new White House, but do you think that in terms of actions, that Biden might still be thinking too small, too domestic?
PM: So far, that's a concern. Let me put it a little differently: We do think we need to see some signs of greater ambition from the White House. To be clear, I think we, and a great many people, are very grateful to see the turnaround from the White House in dealing with the pandemic in the United States, and grateful to see the renewed support for multilateralism, and recognizing that the world is in this together.
JJ: Absolutely.
PM: But we need a lot more ambition and upfront investment on the global problem now, recognizing the unique capabilities of the United States government to organize production for the world, and to set standards for other world leaders, and for drug companies, and say here's how we're going to get this done. If the US government doesn't step into that role, we're just going to lose a lot of lives needlessly, because there isn't another player to fill that void.
And right now, there's production happening, but we are letting the companies dictate far too much of it. And there isn't a pooling of resources, or scale, to make up the difference in those billions of doses that are needed to vaccinate everyone.
JJ: Let me just pull you back to the science of it. I think sometimes—and this comes through in the media—it's as though we can make this a political issue, we can enforce a political template onto what is not, inherently, political. If we wait too long to get vaccines to people, then isn't it true that those vaccines might no longer be effective if the virus mutates? So it’s not just immoral; it's not just uneconomic; it's also kind of stupid to wait too long, and to enforce a kind of unequal immunity on the globe?
PM: We definitely think it's in the interest of everyone living in the United States to vaccinate the world as quickly as possible, and take some of the wind out of the sails of the variants of the mutations. If the world is not going to do a good job of getting the pandemic under control, then we'll have a worse problem of variant spreading; it'll be something that we all have to worry about quite a bit more in the future.
Notably, it's also going to be harder to restart the global economy. We've got global supply chains; we're going to have parts of the world shut down, communities devastated for the foreseeable future, unless we get it under control. So an investment now, in order to protect the future, seems quite sound to us.
JJ: We've been speaking with Peter Maybarduk, director of the Global Access to Medicines Program at Public Citizen, online at Citizen.org. Peter Maybarduk, thanks once again for joining us this week on CounterSpin.